19 July 2010

by Jan Lundberg

19 July 2010 Our Posting is in effect an amalgam of Jan Lundberg’s article at Culture Change http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/666/68/ and an older version that reached us earlier. We all want to really make it right in the Gulf. Will BP and the government handle it well enough? That’s in doubt. It’s actually up to us all. We need urgent environmental action especially involving energy consumption: let us cut oil use. – The grassroots coalition World Oil Reduction for the Gulf (WORG) has as its initial objective the promulgation and propagation of a powerful Resolution for immediate global remediation of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. –

We all want to really make it right in the Gulf. Will BP and the government handle it well enough? That’s in doubt. It’s actually up to us all. We need urgent environmental action especially involving energy consumption: let us cut oil use.The grassroots coalition World Oil Reduction for the Gulf (WORG) has as its initial objective the promulgation and propagation of a powerful Resolution for immediate global remediation of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. A sensible approach is to go after the low-hanging fruit, which WORG and many other advocates have identified. World Oil Reduction for the Gulf’s first purpose is to ecologically and numerically counteract the unprcedented millions of barrels of toxic oil and methane spewing into the Gulf waters and the atmosphere. The crisis may seem to abate, but it may not be possible to fully describe the long-term ecological and economic consequences with words, numbers and images. To act you need not go further than to read and distribute the WORG Resolution. See the document on our new webpage at www.WorldOilReduction.org. As specified, relatively simple measures can begin to bring U.S. oil consumption under control, if we move toward achieving a reduction commensurate with the near hundreds of millions of gallons of oil and unknown number of cubic feet of methane released by the Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) gusher. We cannot stop there. The Gulf disaster has opened the eyes of millions of people to the threat that oil poses to all aspects of life on our small planet. The crisis in the Gulf cannot “go away” any time soon, but some citizens may want to believe it — will they miss the opportunity to do something about the overall problem? Will ecological degradation reach the killing point world-wide, to finally wake people up when it is too late? If enough people begin to push their city councils to act — ordinances to follow the Resolution — we can achieve action also on the State level, finally causing the federal government to act in confirmation of a national movement. It seems obvious that for first states, Louisiana and Florida should be logical candidates, despite any anti-oil green tinge from cutting oil consumption: the “pain” of reducing oil use across the board would be distributed mainly beyond the Gulf. For a progressive proposal such as WORG to fly, it may have to be that a state like Vermont takes the plunge first. We invite you to join us in our attempt to have the U.S. finally address its oil and energy gluttony. This can affect positively other nations and the global economy. The standing of the U.S. today as most wasteful consumer can improve by offsetting the Gulf disaster on a barrel-to-barrel basis, by cutting petroleum use. The U.S. uses twice the energy of affluent West European countries per capita, largely due to massive pro-oil subsidies in the U.S. It is high time that the profligate U.S. cuts back now, when the planet is taking a big hit from greedy BP and from those tied to its fortunes (you and me?). WORG offers a choice of various kinds of cutbacks in oil use for communities to undertake. These cutbacks, requiring “sacrifice,” would in the aggregate potentially make up for the entire Gulf oil gusher — past, present and future — in a short time if they were even modestly implemented. They will be clearly set out: a Washington, D.C. think tank is preparing for WORG a special graph of U.S. oil consumption that shows some of the many ways to reduce oil consumption. They won’t all be on the pie chart, but these ways include: lessening car dependence through enhancing mass transit, bicycling, and car-pooling; purchasing less food shipped from thousands of miles away; banning some disposable plastics; adjusting thermostats; banning leaf blowers and discouraging power mowers; shutting BP’s unsafe refineries, and — last but not least — ending the wars for oil. Plugging the damaged well and cleanup are only the first step. President Obama has offered no leadership towards slashing oil use – except for calling for a clean energy future. We need action now, rather than waiting for results from long-term investment and faith in the free market and government. As an independent oil industry analyst I have been trying to do everything possible to bring culture change to the forefront. We stand a good chance now to do that through WORG. I hope you share our goals and will get involved. We have the WORG coalition counts as its members: Center for Biological Diversity RealitySandwich.com Population Press Hope Dance Culture Change and Dr. Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of Friends of the Earth – U.S. ——————————————– To join WORG (no membership fee), consider the Resolution that we hope your city council and state will adopt. It is at www.WorldOilReduction.org. Let us know if you and your organization can be listed as a member or endorser of WORG. Your involvement in this cause as a WORG coalition member is most welcome. Very soon the website will be further developed for maximum participation and speedy actions for WORG participants. Besides signing up more groups and individuals, the task at hand requires networking, research, travel, and publicity. The present WORG coalition members will do their part. Meanwhile, prior to rapid deployment for our first city-council Resolution for world oil reduction for the Gulf, Culture Change is now the organization making the big initial push. So your generous donation to Culture Change today will support the early, rapid development of WORG. Please go to our donation page at culturechange.org/donate.html Thank you, Jan Lundberg independent oil industry analyst Publisher, Editor and Founder, Culture Change P.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518  http://www.culturechange.org Committee Against Oil Exploration (CAOE, pronounced K-O). www.WorldOilReduction.org jan “at” culturechange.org Further reading: On oil subsidies and more: “New thinking on BP spill: Declare a holiday!” by Brent Blackwelder,The Daly News: Energy Bulletin

We extricated these lines from a review article in The New York Times of July 15, 2010 and reworked them as follows:

The basis for direct talks is likely to be Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s carefully shaped formula of last November. She said she believed that:

the two sides, through negotiations, could reconcile “the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.”

Mrs. Clinton’s statement came soon after Mr. Netanyahu announced a partial, 10-month moratorium in new Israeli residential building in the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu has been generally cagey about whether he will ask his government to extend the moratorium beyond its Sept. 26 deadline. Officials said that Mr. Netanyahu discussed other confidence-building measures with Mr. Obama, to be carried out either in the prelude to, or during, direct talks.

Mr. Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, made a far-reaching proposal in late 2008 to the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas whose government rules over the West Bank only.  It included an Israeli withdrawal from 93.5 percent of the West Bank, with land swaps and a safe route for Palestinian travel between Gaza and the West Bank making up the other 6.5 percent of the land area that Israel won in 1967.

Those talks ended with Israel’s military campaign against the militant Hamas dominated Gaza strip.

Mr. Olmert says he never heard back from Mr. Abbas. Mr. Erekat, honored spokesman for the West Bank, disputes that version, insisting that Mr. Abbas made a counteroffer. Addressing an Israeli audience at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in May 2010, Mr. Erekat produced a map that he said Mr. Olmert received, allowing for Israeli annexation of 1.9 percent of the West Bank in return for an equitable land exchange.

Seemingly, the real issue now is that after 16 years of an intermittent peace process, the sides do not yet agree on which settlement blocs Israel would retain. We think that the novel approach by Secretary Clinton is in the words “reflect subsequent development” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which could be a formula for achieving a full agreement now with the Palestinian Authority in the name of Palestine, that freezes the situation of Gaza to the point that it is allowed to subscribe, according to its present outline, to the agreement later – as part of Palestine. That is what our website was calling the Three State Solution that is really a Two States Solution in two stages – the only way to move the cart from its dead point.

Where will limits of G20 policy leave debt-strewn Japan?

THIS was FOR US A FIRST – WE ADVERTISEd HERE A FAREED ZAKARIA PROGRAM BEFORE IT HAPPENS – PLEASE WATCH IT ON JULY 11, 10 am or 13 pm – on CNN. The latter time is just prior to the World Cup Final. Usually we just try to write up what we learn by watching his program. This time we realize that the issue he brings up has high anticipatory value for US policy as well.

Britain’s brave, bold and risky experiment.

CNN Editor’s note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET and CNN International at 2 and 10 p.m. Central European Time / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. Hong Kong.

London, England (CNN) — Britain’s new coalition government has embarked on a budget-deficit cutting strategy that is bold, brave and potentially very risky, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

It could turn out to be a model for the United States to follow — or a prime example of what not to do in the wake of a severe recession.

After forming a government in the wake of the May election, the ruling coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats announced plans last month to cut spending and raise taxes in an effort to reduce the budget deficit.

Zakaria, the author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” spoke to CNN on Wednesday from London. Here is an edited transcript:

Video: IMF forecast for global economy

Video: The global economy’s future

CNN: The new coalition government in Britain has announced major steps to cut the budget deficit. What has the impact been?

Fareed Zakaria: In general, I’d say the government is benefiting from having announced these cuts. There’s a sense that they’re being bold, they’re being brave, they’re taking on a big challenge. It particularly helps them that you have this coalition government, so the fact that the Liberal Democrats, who are really quite a left-wing party, are supporting the budget has given Conservatives more cover. …

It’s important to remember that it’s not just budget cuts, it’s also tax raises. You have to give them credit for being serious about this. It is not pure ideology as with the right in the United States. They understand that if you’re going to do something serious about the budget deficit, you’ve got to do both spending cuts and tax increases .There’s simply no way for the math to work without doing that.

Now, on the political side though, these changes have not come into effect yet. So there are two big questions, what happens economically when these budget cuts start going into effect and what happens politically — how popular does the government remain at that point? But the biggest question is what happens economically.

CNN: Is it too soon to take these steps as the world is coming out of a big recession, and government spending is seen as a way to speed the recovery from a recession?

Zakaria: The crucial question here is about timing, and very few people would disagree that Britain had to get its public finances in order. There’s a universal sense that the last Labour government spent too much money and borrowed too much money. But in the midst of a very weak economic recovery, does it make sense to slash spending, raise taxes, all of which will have the effect of putting some people out of work and reducing people’s spending power.

Here’s the debate — one side says that will reassure markets, that will bring interest rates on things like mortgages even lower, and that will give businesses confidence to invest, and the other side says once you inflict that much pain on the economy, people are going to spend less as people lose jobs or are taxed more heavily, which will cause an even more severe downturn.

CNN: What does this mean for the rest of the world?

Zakaria: Britain is the guinea pig here. We’re all going to watch the outcome very closely because President Obama has taken a position in this debate.

He told the G-20 countries, which includes Britain of course, that it is too soon to start withdrawing the stimulus measures. Britain is going further than withdrawing the stimulus measures, it’s actually cutting spending.

The big debate is over what will restore business confidence and what will make businesses start spending again. Because everyone agrees that government spending is only a bridge to business spending. At some point business has to start spending again.

I’m pretty persuaded that the timing on this is bad. I think it would have made more sense to wait at least six months, if not nine to 12 months before beginning these measures.

CNN: If you’re going to have to do it eventually, why wait?

Zakaria: It’s really quite brave of the Conservatives to take on the fiscal problem but there is definitely a danger that they are doing it too soon and will put the economy into a lower growth mode. This is something that you have to remember for the United States as well. If you have lower growth, you also have a worse deficit because the biggest contributor to deficits is a decline in tax revenue. So the slower the economy grows, the fewer people who are employed, the lower the taxes going to the government treasury, the bigger and bigger the deficit becomes.

So, in a strange sense, even to help the deficit in the short term, you need a little bit of government spending to get the economy going, to get people spending, to get them paying taxes.

CNN: Does David Cameron’s victory in the U.K. election tell us something about the future of conservatives in America?

Zakaria: Outside Britain, people are struck by David Cameron, the fact that he’s become prime minister, that he’s fairly popular and he seems to be taking big, bold measures. But here people are still struck by how limited was the Tory victory, if you could call it a victory.

After 13 years of Labour rule, when it would be only natural for the Conservatives to be given power for just cyclical reasons, after a very unpopular Labour prime minister and the worst economic crisis since the great depression, the conservatives still were not able to muster a majority and had to go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

CNN: Why couldn’t the Conservatives put together a majority in the election?

Zakaria: What thoughtful observers say was that the Conservatives still made no inroads in Scotland, did not make many inroads with working women — which is a growing part of the population — and they did not make many inroads with nonwhite minorities, people from India, and Pakistan and the Caribbean. As somebody put it to me, the Conservative brand is still a tarnished brand.

To me, that was a very interesting lesson for the right in America. You can have the small government argument David Cameron was making. It did have a lot of appeal — but to England, not Scotland and not to the nonwhites in England either.

It made me wonder about the Republican Party in the United States, which of course has broader appeal, but still faces some of these same challenges.

The midterm election looks like it’s going to go very well for the Republicans because there is a lot of anti-incumbency sentiment and some anger at the Democratic Party. But to seal the deal, Republicans need to close the gap with nonwhites and working women, and there, the Republican Party, like the Conservatives, still faces some challenges.

CNN: What other lessons are there for conservatives in the United States?

Zakaria: The Republicans should really watch the British Conservatives. What David Cameron is trying to do is to modernize the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party was seen in Britain as too right wing, too extreme and too intolerant in many ways and what he’s been trying to do is to broaden its appeal.

David Cameron is more green, more environmentally active, than Gordon Brown. He’s come out very strongly in favor of gay rights, he’s come out in favor of the National Health Service.

All of this is a signal that he’s not a Conservative who’s going to completely destroy England’s welfare state. In a sense, working with the Liberal Democrats has been a godsend for David Cameron. The fact that he’s in coalition with them means that when the far right of his party asks him to do something, he can say, I’m sorry guys, I just can’t do it because we’re in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and to keep the coalition together I have to moderate my stance.

Now there’s an interesting debate in Britain about whether he’s modernizing the Conservative Party because he is himself a great moderate or because he just wants to win and he knows the center is where the electability is.

In a sense it doesn’t matter for Republicans watching it. You still need to be attractive to the center, to the younger generation, to working women and to ethnic minorities.

Of course it will all depend on how this economic experiment goes. If these cuts put Britain in a double-dip, you’ll see great strains on the coalition itself, and the Liberal Democrats will find it difficult to stay in this coalition. Then this whole thing spins out of control.

Brian Stelter knows something about TWITTER – he is running his own, but he also had a Thursday article in the New York Times in which he analyzed the transgressions of another Journalist – a CNN senior editor – that went beyond what is allowed in journalism and ended up being fired by CNN. Her obvious transgression was on Twitter.

Brian Stelter (brianstelter) on Twitter

– 2:04pm Get short, timely messages from Brian Stelter. Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on an incredibly wide …
twitter.com/brianstelter

His article on-line was

CNN Fires Middle East Affairs Editor.

By BRIAN STELTER, Published: July 7, 2010

The title as in NYT print July 8, 2010 was: “A TWITTER POST THAT ENDED A 2-YEAR CAREER AT CNN.”

Octavia Nasr

Parisa Khosravi, the senior vice president of international newsgathering for CNN Worldwide, said in an internal memorandum that she “had a conversation” with Ms. Nasr on Wednesday morning and that “we have decided that she will be leaving the company.”

For her coverage of events like last year’s protests in Iran, CNN had previously called Ms. Nasr a “leader” in integrating social media Web sites like Twitter within its newsgathering process.

Ms. Nasr, a 20-year veteran of the network, wrote on Twitter after the cleric died on Sunday, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”
The ayatollah routinely denounced the United States and supported suicide bombings against Israel.

Some supporters of Israel seized on the Twitter message as an indication of bias. A CNN spokesman said Tuesday that Ms. Nasr had made an “error of judgment” that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.”

In an explanatory blog post on CNN.com Tuesday evening, Ms. Nasr said she was sorry about the message “because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all.”

She said she used the words “respect” and “sad” because “to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. She continued, “This does not mean I respected him for what else he did or said. Far from it.”

Despite her senior editor title, Ms. Nasr did not run CNN’s Middle East coverage, a spokesman said. She reported and provided analysis about the region for CNN’s networks.

Her explanation of the Twitter message was apparently not enough for her CNN bosses. Ms. Khosravi wrote in the memo, “at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

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The problem with this is not Ms. Nasr – she would be clearly entitled to say what she wants to her tweeter – that is guaranteed by the First Amendment, but CNN has more at stake here. It is the credibility of CNN that she undermined and provided clear proof to the Israelis that when CNN covered the Lebanon war it might not have been impartial. With people like Octavia Nasr, partisans to a cause, the credibility of the media is being destroyed.

We post this because we think CNN is the best there is on US TV. We watch religiously the Fareed Zakaria weekly program – the only consistently intelligent program we know on US TV – so we do not want to see CNN downgraded to the level of a FOX. Granted, Ms. Nasr was not a columnist anchor of the network, but she was in charge of media gathering – and if the news are faked by partisanship – the whole system is “kaput.”

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FRIDAY, JULY 09, 2010
CNN’s Objectivity Questioned in Sacking of Mideast Reporter.
Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON, Jul 8 (IPS) – CNN’s firing of Octavia Nasr, the editor responsible for the network’s Middle East coverage, over a Twitter post in which she expressed her sadness over the death of a Lebanese cleric has set off a firestorm of debate about what the decision says about CNN’s fairness in reporting on the region. On Sunday, Nasr wrote, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot,” on her Twitter account, which is followed by over 7,000 readers.

Fadlallah was an inspirational figure for Lebanese Shiites and an early supporter of Hezbollah. Fadlallah, who initially supported the use of suicide bombings as a means of resistance against the occupation of Lebanon and Palestine, later criticised Hezbollah for its close ties to Iran, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini’s velayet- e faqih “rule of the clerics”, which Khomeini imposed in Iran in 1979.

Critics of Fadlallah have charged that he was staunchly anti-U.S., and had been linked to bombings that killed more than 260 U.S. citizens, but others have pointed to the cleric’s support for women’s rights and fatwas against female circumcision and honour killings as evidence of his comparatively progressive position. After the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a number of right-wing news outlets and blogs took issue with her expression of regret over Fadlallah’s death, on Tuesday, Nasr wrote another Twitter post in which she attempted to clarify her earlier comment and emphasised her admiration of Fadlallah’s defence of women’s rights.

“Fadlallah, designated by the U.S. Department of Treasury as a specially designated terrorist, disseminated numerous fatawa’ supporting terrorist operations and was a vocal supporter of terrorism against Israeli targets,” read a statement from the ADL on Tuesday.

“It is clearly an impropriety for a CNN journalist/editor to express such a partisan viewpoint as Ms. Nasr did in her tweet,” the statement continued.

“How did CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs Octavia Nasr celebrate July 4? By mourning the passing of Hezbollah’s Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah,” blogged Daniel Halper at the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

But other journalists and watchdog groups expressed concern over the speed with which CNN fired Nasr and the emergence of a double-standard when reporting on Middle Eastern affairs.

“The network – which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years – justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s ‘credibility’ had been ‘compromised,’” wrote Salon’s Glenn Greenwald in an article in which he went on to argue that Nasr was fired for offending the “neocon Right” by expressing regret over the death of a “profoundly complex figure, with some legitimate grievances, some entrenched hatreds and ugly viewpoints, and a substantial capacity for good.”

Peter Hart, activism director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group, told IPS that, “If there was some suggestion that she had been producing questionable journalism over all these years you’d think this would have been an issue before this, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. So it’s a decision which is disconnected from any sensible policy. The real problem is that she said something which offended very powerful people and that was her mistake.”

Nasr had worked for the Atlanta-based CNN for 20 years and rarely appeared on-air except for occasional appearances as an analyst in discussions on Middle East news. She had no history of an anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian bias and, according to Greenwald, “blended perfectly into the American corporate media woodwork”.

“Octavia Nasr got fired for the one smart thing she ever said,” quipped journalist Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, in a Twitter post.

“[P]lenty of American journalists and politicians have shown ‘respect’ (and in some cases, fawning admiration) for various world figures with hands far bloodier than Ayatollah Fadlallah – including Mao Zedong, Ariel Sharon, the Shah of Iran, or even Kim il Sung – but it didn’t cost them their jobs,” wrote Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Questions have been raised over why Nasr, known as an uncontroversial reporter of Middle East affairs, was fired so quickly for an off-the-cuff Twitter post.

According to some observers, her unwillingness to conform to the narrative depicted by a number of right-wing news outlets and U.S. Jewish groups that Fadlallah was a terrorist, anti-US and anti-Semitic resulted in CNN receiving pressure to fire her.

“Nasr’s comment was enough to spark fierce outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman,” blogged Matt Duss, a National Security Researcher at the liberal Center For American Progress.

While right-wing news outlets, such as the Weekly Standard and the conservative WorldNetDaily gleefully reported on Nasr’s departure from CNN, others expressed concern for the double standard which has emerged when discussing Middle East affairs in the US mainstream media.

“The standard here is based on nothing that Nasr reported for CNN. [Her Twitter post] was barely a one sentence expression of sympathy. Firing her was a decision that was completely disconnected from her work so it’s a decision that’s very troubling. Lou Dobbs’s thoughts about immigrants were on CNN every night and CNN stood by him as the criticism mounted and the factual inaccuracies piled up,” said Hart.

“In this case, a stray comment is enough to terminate someone’s role at CNN almost overnight,” he said. “The discrepancy is rather revealing and CNN would have a very hard time revealing precisely what their policy is on this. It’s hard to find precedent for this. She has a history of covering the region and that is not easily replaced.”

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We do not approve of the Lou Dobbs diatribe on CNN on US immigration, and we think he should have been chastised by the network, but this is the only point the above article makes that we can agree with.

Otherwise, the article is in itself proof of how split and detrimental to the surfacing of the truth on matters of the Middle East the whole public policy arena is for years. There are plenty of Jewish groups that think Wolf Blitzer is biased against the Israeli government. We have met the man at the time he worked at the UN and are convinced he is a true journalist. Most others mentioned belong either to the left or to the right and as we know well both sides have other goals then a two State solution for the Middle East morass. Our website neither accepts the demise of Israel, nor the lack of a Palestinian State, so we clearly can say that someone who believes that Allah calls for suicide bombers to achieve his goal of eradicating Israel, is no better then Ahmedi-Nejad – the true follower of Hitler.

Yes, Ms. Nasr had to go not because ADL wanted her to go. It is because CNN needed her to go- and yes, CNN might look also at who else has to go in order to build back its own credibility.

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The continuing problem Ayatollah with Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah’s followers is in today’s news – so a credible press coverage is imperative – niceties and partisanship aside – just see in -

UN DAILY NEWS DIGEST – 9 July, 2010:

LEBANON: SECURITY COUNCIL CALLS FOR FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT OF UN PEACEKEEPERS .

Strongly deploring recent incidents directed at United Nations blue helmets in Lebanon, the Security Council today called for ensuring the safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers serving there.

Members of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have recently been the target of protests and attacks by villagers in the south of the country in response to routine military exercises carried out by the mission.

“The members of the Security Council strongly deplore the recent incidents involving UNIFIL peacekeepers which took place in southern Lebanon on June 29th, July 3rd and July 4th in the UNIFIL area of operation,” Ambassador U. Joy Ogwu of Nigeria, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency for July, said in a statement read out to the press following closed-door talks.

They also emphasized the importance of not impairing UNIFIL’s ability to fulfil its mandate under Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah.

The resolution also calls for respect of the so-called Blue Line separating the Israeli and Lebanese sides, the disarming of all militias operating in Lebanon and an end to arms smuggling in the area.

“They call on all parties to ensure that the freedom of movement of UNIFIL remains respected in conformity with its mandate and its rules of engagement,” the statement added.

In addition to monitoring the 2006 ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, UNIFIL is also tasked with accompanying and supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as they deploy throughout the south, and extending its assistance to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons.

Also today, Michael Williams, the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, discussed the recent incidents involving UNIFIL with Lebanese Foreign Minister Ali Shami.

“We all hope that the situation has now calmed down and that there will be no recurrence of such incidents,” he in a statement following the meeting in Beirut.

Mr. Williams asserted that UNIFIL’s freedom of movement is a critical element for it to discharge its mandate and it must be fully respected.

“I think that we all agree that the excellent cooperation between UNIFIL and LAF has been the backbone of the stability that has prevailed in the south, and we must do all we can to maintain and to enhance it,” he added.

It happened last night, June 29, 2010, and the venue was the delightful Museum of American Finance – right there at 48 Wall Street, and our host was the delightful 1988 Founder, and Chairman Emeritus, John E. Herzog.

The Spring Issue of Financial History, the Museum’s Magazine is very up-to-date. It has on the cover Charles Ponzi and articles like “why We Love Scandals,” “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,” “James Bowie’s Louisiana Purchase Fraud,” and Monclova Speculations,” “How to Make a Dead Ma” on the life insurance business.

The first thing I learned at the Museum was that Warren Buffet, now billionaire investor of the  was the only student at the Columbia University School of Business, who ever got an A+ from his Professor Benjamin Graham who in the early 1930s, taught his students Value Investing. Today’s Ben Graham Center for Value Investment at the Richard Ivey School of Business, in London, Western Ontario, Canada,  teaches: “First, we think of stocks in the same way that a business person would think of a business. Second, we do not follow but instead try to take advantage of the manic depressive Mr. Market. Third, we always look for a margin of safety.” Did you note – A MARGIN OF SAFETY!” Do you need to study the Manic Depressive side of Washington?

Anyway, Warren Buffet went on to sell pinball machines in bars, and with his first $1,000 he earned he bought land which he rented to farmers. The rest is history, and ask Berkshire Hathaway investors about safe investing.

I learned much more in this excellent museum and recommend it to our readers. I even learned that in the Napoleon – Thomas Jefferson Louisiana deal – the Louisiana purchase that doubled the size of the US for $15 million in US Treasuries subscribed by two European banks, the US acquired the land at 3 cents/acre.

But, it was not the museum and the catered treats we got at the end that brought me there: it was a Sierra Club e-mail about a panel: “EVERYBODY WINS: INVESTING IN ENERGY EFFICIENCY.”

The  moderator was Michael Richter – partner with Environmental Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm affiliated with New York Private Bank & Trust that provides long-term capital and management support to leading middle-market companies in the environmental industry. (Before doing that, and before business school,  he was three time National Hockey League All-Star.)

His panel included:

Rebecca Craft, Director of Energy Efficiency Programs at Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. A regulated utility that whatever happens – must make a profit.

Christopher J. Lord, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Hannon Armstrong Capital. They specialized in the last 30 years in investment in new technologies.

Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, America’s largest grassroots environmental organization and as the paper proudly states - “The Aspen Institute, after surveying every member of Congress and key federal officials, named the Sierra Club as the most influential organization in Washington DC.” I was appalled reading this self description which in my eyes looked rather like the reason of disqualification from claiming representation on environmentalism’s board.

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After the statements by the panelists, with major participation of Con Edison that turned it all into a rather energy for the home sort of an event, there were many intelligent questions from the audience, and I am sorry to say that again I found it quite disquieting as I realized that with this sort of discussion we will really not get out of the hole we find that we dug ourselves with the  help of exactly this sort of thinking – how to make a buck by skirting the real issues and trying somehow to improve at the margin.

I did not raise any question – rather slumbered through it all – then went over to a chat with Carl Pope.

Now this is a work in progress and I will get back to it – but want to post mow because of another event I picked up and want our readers that can make it – go over if they can.

Today, Wednesday, June 30, 2010,  12:30 – 01:30, at the Museum – 48 Wall Street, New York NY, 10005
tel: 1-212-908-4110

There will be a  discussion on past, present, and future of energy trading.

Participants are: Howard Hopkins, Director Energy Products CME Group.

and Paul Huges. Senior Analyst within Business Development for CME Group.

They will provide an overview of pre-electronic energy trading, speak about the current status of the markets, and discuss the globalization of futures markets and CME Group.

—————

We just received our electricity bill and it had an attachment for the sake of “ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE FOR CON ED”
It gave “The Fuel Souces and Air Emissions to Generate Your Electricity for the year 2006.” Is it not amazing? July 2010 we get information for 2006 – and they are partners of a panel with Sierra Club Chief?

So how did they produce our electricity in 2006?

Gas          – 50%

Nuclear   – 35%

Coal         -    8%

Hydro     -     3%

Oil           -     2%

Biomass, Solar, Solid Waste, Wind – each one of them says Less then 1% – and if we total them all up – we find that their total is 2% at best.

Now, do not think that the Con Edison list was according to resources used as I did it. It was rather by alphabet – so it is less obvious to the eye.

A blog about all things green, from conservation to Capitol Hill.

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/07/06/report-card-on-renewables-europes-getting-as/#ixzz0t4OJ8DiL

Don’t Let Goldman Sachs Off The Hook.

When the nation’s most prestigious investment banks found themselves on the verge of total annihilation in the fall of 2008, the most radical and effective government response was not the infamous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The wildest salvation scheme for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the securities system at large was a plan from the Federal Reserve to give these speculative institutions access to cheap loans from the central bank. It worked.

With access to unlimited cheap funding from the Fed, the Wall Street titans survived. Hurrah.

Here’s the catch. Cheap Fed funding is a subsidy during good times, and a bailout during bad times.

These subsidies are supposed to spur productive activity.

We want Fed money to be fueling business and consumer lending—we don’t want it to be encouraging gambling in the securities and derivatives casinos.

Those businesses are risky, they create big horrible asset bubbles and then put taxpayers on the hook for losses when the Fed backs them.

That’s why securities houses like Goldman and Morgan were never, ever granted Fed funding until the fall of 2008.

——————-

And Goldman has leveraged that Fed funding for all it’s worth. Goldman had to create a commercial bank unit in order to borrow from the Fed, and Goldman chose to house its riskiest businesses in that unit in order to make sure that they would benefit from both cheap Fed funding and the better credit ratings that funding creates.

Goldman has about $40 trillion in derivatives operations functioning under its commercial bank unit, which does nothing else but accept money from the Fed.

The Fed is funding Goldman’s casino, and the economy is getting nothing of value in return.

So what should we do now that Goldman and Morgan are getting access to all of the perks of being a commercial bank without any of the regulatory hurdles?

According to William Cohan’s latest, disastrous column for The New York Times, Goldman should cut its ties with the Fed and just be a securities firm again.

When it inevitably gets into trouble at some point in the future, nobody should bail it out.

That all sounds very nice. Who could oppose ending bailouts?

——————–

The trouble is, it has absolutely no teeth.

Once the Fed steps in to bail you out, everybody in the market knows it will step in again, regardless of how your business is structured.

Every aspect of Goldman’s business currently benefits from taxpayer perks, and the greatest perk of all is the fact that Goldman still has businesses. They would be totally and completely gone without massive government aid, and their destruction would be of their own making— they ran a business that operated with massive and unnecessary counterparty risks which was completely dependent on capital markets confidence for its functionality.

There can be no un-ringing of the bailout bell.

Goldman absolutely must be aggressively regulated as a commercial bank to make sure that its subsidies are not destructive. That’s the minimum reform.

Still better would be to cut off the subsidies, claw-back the bonuses earned over the past two years, and break the bank up into smaller institutions that the Fed would not feel compelled to step in and save.

But to pretend the bailout never happened and promise not to do it again is simply not credible.

Even if we could make the entire world forget that the bailouts happened, do we really want companies like Goldman to go back to the same business that got them into big trouble? If Goldman can put the entire financial system in jeopardy—or at least convince policymakers that its failure would do so—why do we want them to return to business as usual?

We’d want them to be more rigorously regulated and structurally reformatted to prevent future disasters.

Cohan’s argument is actually a bit worse than what I’ve presented above says Zach Carter.

There’s always a tension in Cohan’s writings between the broad public interest and the narrow interests of whatever firm he’s writing about. He can never quite sort out whether he thinks a bunch of rapacious bastards are praiseworthy for enriching their shareholders by juicing the public, or whether the public has a right to be upset with the rapacious bastards who juiced them.

But it appears that Cohan doesn’t want to see Goldman to cut its ties with the Fed because those ties create problems for the broader economy.

Instead, he wants them to spurn Fed money because he’s worried that new regulations will make Goldman less profitable.

As it happens, I think Cohan has this profitability issue completely wrong. The two serious rules cracking down on banks with access to Fed funding were basically gutted at the final stage of the reform negotiations.

Banks that deal derivatives will have to put up more capital for a small fraction of their derivatives businesses, and banks will only be able to gamble 3 percent of their capital in proprietary hedge funds.

There’s quite a bit of controversy as to how much of Goldman’s business is straight prop trading disguised as client business, but the new rules do not seem likely to seriously curb those operations. But that cheap funding will always be there, and they’d be fools to give it up for such a paltry set of restrictions.

The important question about the Wall Street reform legislation is not whether the new rules will be good for Goldman profits and bonuses.

The important question is whether Wall Street profits and bonuses are derived from activities that benefit the public good.

Very little in the legislation that Congress is likely to soon approve will actually address that latter issue.

And as a result, there’s very little reason to believe that companies like Goldman Sachs will change their ways and stop screwing over the public for money.

That doesn’t mean the reform bill is a failure. It means it’s a first step, and we need another, better bill after this one is approved.

—————

Please don’t forget – in the US economy at large all high positions are taken by Goldman Sachs graduates, and this might indeed help explain profitability in the blow-out and bail-out seesaws.

 http://stuartjeffery.blogspot.com/2010/0…

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

UN report on climate change was ‘one sided’ says right wing press

UN report on climate change was ‘one sided’ was the front page headline in today’s The Times (no longer available online without subscription) which struck me as strange as the equivalent Guardian headline reported: “Review of questioned IPCC report says conclusions ‘well-founded’”.

As the Guardian talks about the serious consequences of climate change that the review has suggested,The Times focused on positive benefits that were ignored.

The Guardian talks about these too :”ignored positive impacts such as the ability to grow new crops in some parts of the world, or opening of shorter Arctic sea routes” but I have to question whether a reduction in arctic sea ice is really a benefit or whether it is a tipping point and feedback loop!

The difference in spin and emphasis between left and right wing press never fails to amaze me.

Sadly the majority of our press is right wing.

Sadly the public never get a balanced view of the world around us.

News from post-Independence (July 5th) on what to expect July 6th.

Consider these recent environmental news events:

The US Attorney General’s office is still looking into “possible” criminal activity at Massey’s Energy Upper Big Branch coal mine, despite hundreds of serious regulatory violations and 29 deaths. And despite a preliminary Congressional investigation that concluded BP oil intentionally sought to subvert industry guidelines and regulations, the Justice Department is still in the early stages of maybe pursuing a criminal investigation of the oil giant’s criminal activity.

———-

Two weeks before the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the huge, trouble-plagued BP refinery, in the coastal town of Texas City, spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies.

The release from the BP facility here began April 6 and lasted 40 days. It stemmed from the company’s decision to keep producing and selling gasoline while it attempted repairs on a key piece of equipment, according to BP officials and Texas regulators.

BP says it failed to detect the extent of the emissions for several weeks. It discovered the scope of the problem only after analyzing data from a monitor that measures emissions from a flare 300 feet above the ground that was supposed to incinerate the toxic chemicals.

The company now estimates that 538,000 pounds of chemicals escaped from the refinery while it was replacing the equipment. These included 17,000 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen; 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which contribute to respiratory problems; and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide.

It is unclear whether the pollutants harmed the health of Texas City residents, but the amount of chemicals far exceeds the limits set by Texas and other states.

———–

Look on – All publications dated July 5, 2010 plus

Green Jobs Advocate Faces Prison for Banner, While BP and Massey Go Free.

The climate change and clean energy debates might have reached a new low–just ask the US Attorney General’s office.

Ted Glick, a legendary nonviolent advocate, who dropped a “Green Jobs Now” banner down the hallway of the Hart Senate Office Building last fall, goes to trial on Tuesday, July 6th, at the Superior Court in Washington, DC. He faces up to three years in prison.

Three years for dropping a banner that reminds Congress to pursue green jobs and clean energy?

——–

Yes, even a local Fox News station is flummoxed by the ridiculous news:

Let’s put this bizarre situation in its proper context. Consider these recent environmental news events: The US Attorney General’s office is still looking into “possible” criminal activity at Massey’s Energy Upper Big Branch coal mine, despite hundreds of serious regulatory violations and 29 deaths. And despite a preliminary Congressional investigation that concluded BP oil intentionally sought to subvert industry guidelines and regulations, the Justice Department is still in the early stages of maybe pursuing a criminal investigation of the oil giant’s criminal activity.

And then there’s Glick, who simply wants Congress to move along in a time of crisis.

He’s facing prison?

————

You find these in the two following “Speakeasies:”

(1) Texas BP Refinery Released 538,000 Pounds of Chemicals Into Atmosphere
Tana Ganeva
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/05/texas-bp-refinery-released-538000-pounds-of-chemicals-into-atmosphere/

(2) Green Jobs Advocate Faces Prison for Banner, While BP and Massey Go Free
jeffbiggers
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/05/green-jobs-advocate-faces-prison-for-banner-while-bp-and-massey-go-free/

Fareed mentioned that on this day, nine years ago, he took the Oath of Naturalization and became a US citizen – clearly a tremendous gain for the US.

He mentioned this while showing 57 military personnel serving with the US forces in Afghanistan who took today their oath of Naturalization right there in Afghanistan swearing that they will be ready to take up arms in the defense of the United States – this please note while they are already fighting on behalf of US Government even though they were not yet US citizens.

This might have been an expressive thing that caught my eye on the CNN/GPS  program – sort of corollary to the main meat of the program that dealt with the G-20 meeting on the World Economy and the US position on the conclusions of the meeting.

Our clear decision watching the program is that the US is far from being united and one. In effect it is divided in two, and it was Fareed Zakaria – the newest American – who tried to bind the two parts into one. But what is even worse, the two opposing parts – both of them – are not purely American – but rather still beholden to the British outreach – this after all of these 234 years.

So, as Fareed would say – “let us see:”

The G-20 decided (that is except for Japan) that we must start decreasing debt because otherwise the cost of borrowing money increases prohibitively. Today is Greece – tomorrow it’s us.

The stakes are the future of US and Global Prosperity and the two opposing points of view are:

(A) As presented by Paul Krugman – an American steeped in Keynesian (English) economics – said that our reaction today is like it was in the 30s and we will face similar consequences – a similar large depression which he calls The Coming Third Depression.

We need increased stimulus now – a la Keynes – and he told us so earlier that the $800 Billion were just not enough. He does not want to see unemployment keeping  workers out of a job for 3-4 years as it becomes harder for them to return ever to a job. They will be lost into a structured unemployment reality.

Also, people will be afraid to spend enough to keep the economy going. In uncertainty they will hold on to their money as this will seem the right thing to do, but it will cause drop in prices and deflation.

So, if we do not increase spending now – in the next 1-2 years – in the short term – we drift into The Third Depression.

A trillion dollars spending now will cause $26 Billion in interest per year but this is not so much.

(B) On the other side was Niall Ferguson, himself British of Glasgow, and we do not know if he ever started steps to become American.

He points a finger at the US debt and says the US must start to decrease spending and have also some increase in taxes if it wants to get back some credibility in the world. He said the financial crisis is already happening – right now – and we will not have a Keynesian answer of stimulus in the future.

The US Treasuries are safe heaven like Pearl Harbor was until something happened. Imagine something happening – then what?

Ferguson talks of a rationalized new tax structure that is a serious option. He was reminded by Fareed that this is the Republican approach that was presented by Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, and was told that in the Meeting with him, there were two more Congressmen present. So, what we are talking here is a Policy Change but Fareed is skeptical. If we cannot even raise the retiremment age by one year, how will we achieve radical change?

The answer was that when an international Bond market crisis hits – there wil be a radical restructure of policy. It seems that the Republican answer to Keynes is to create first a total collapse that will radicalize the wealth divide before readiness to do anything at all. That smells of the 30s all-right.

Fareed added that American companies have a lot of cash at hand from earnings that they do not spend – to which Ferguson reacted that confidence is low. if you look at China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, growing very fast and you sit on money at a US company, so what are you to do?

The Chinese had it very well when keeping out of a Western Crisis, but they over-heated and have wage unrest as a consequence. If we do the right thing – they will do the right thing – he said.

(C) The Fareed Zakaria Unifier Proposal:
That seems easy – Go for a second stimulus coupled with an announced 10 year program or what we say all the time – do now what should have been done then – Give money to companies only so that they work with you on betterment and problem solving – not as giveaway and bailouts.

Clearly he says – the US never had a problem borrowing money – this until we will!

Further – the issue is not Small Government or Big Government – But Smart Government.

———————–

Back to Afghanistan, Fareed Zakaria noted that having been told that the number of Al Qaeda men in Afghanistan is 100, and the yearly expenditure on the war by the US is $100 Billion – this comes to $1 Billion/Al Qaeda man/year. At the same time -  legally, at Afghan airports, $2.7 Million declared money leaves daily, and this is by far much more then all the taxes that the Afghan Government collects. The illegal exit of money is obviously much much higher – so what is the US doing there?

———————-

Also, today, July 4, 2010 is DAY 76 of the BP oil-spill and the TV showed a huge ship called “A WHALE” that was refitted specifically for the purpose of collecting water and oil mixtures in order to retrieve the oil from the water. This does not yet make the US independent of its oil industry strongmen.

VENICE, La., July 4 (UPI) — The world’s largest skimming vessel, A Whale, could play a crucial role in oil cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico if tests succeed, maritime experts say.

The tanker, which can skim about 21 million gallons of oil a day by taking in water with oil and separating it, was conducting tests in a 5-square-mile area north of the underwater spill Sunday, CNN reported.

The ship is capable of skimming at least 250 times the amount of oil that modified fishing vessels now in the gulf are able to contain, said Taiwanese shipping company TMT, the ship’s owner.

Initial test results could be available Monday, TMT spokesman Bob Grantham said. A Whale arrived in the gulf Wednesday and was waiting approval to join in cleanup operations.

A Whale is a Liberian flagged oil tanker built in 2010 by Hyundai Heavy Industries, Ulsan, South Korea. She was refitted and converted in Portugal into a so-called “super skimmer” to assist in the clean up of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A Whale arrived in the Gulf of Mexico on 30 June 2010, while financial agreements were yet pending.

The “WHALE” is thus capable to retrieve some of the oil – clearly a financial gain for BP.

 http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/…

—————–

Yvo de Boer officially steps down today from his post as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), making way for incoming UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres.

Mr. de Boer took over the position in September of 2006, shepherding the unwieldy international climate negotiating process through several landmark sessions, including Bali in 2007 and Copenhagen last year. Everyone, including de Boer, was disappointed by the outcome of COP15, yet he defends the work of his UNFCCC colleagues in the face of near insurmountable odds and relentless international acrimony throughout COP15.

And it was at the feet of the international community that de Boer laid some of his harshest criticism before stepping down from the UNFCCC.

The one thing that has appalled me most is to witness the degree to which the international community is cutting off its nose to spite its face,” de Boer said at a Hong Kong business conference last week.

“(The world) is behaving as though climate change is somebody else’s problem… This is in the collective interest and it’s a collective challenge” he said, adding that ”Unless we deal with that challenge … we really are in big trouble.”

Yvo de Boer’s final round of international negotiations ended last month with the conclusion of two weeks of talks in Bonn, Germany in preparation for CO16 in Cancun, Mexico. Despite  de Boer’s cautious optimism for progress as the outcome of the Bonn talks, few hold out the kind of expectations for a “fair and binding” climate deal at COP16 that haunted COP15.

Upon handing the reigns to Figueres, who shocked some last month with her assessment that a “final, all-ecompassing” international climate treaty would likely take decades to achieve, de Boer will take up a climate advisory job at consulting firm KPMG.

New Aussie PM Called On to Tackle Climate Change.
 http://ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, June 29 (IPS/TerraViva) – Australia’s newly appointed prime minister, Julia Gillard, has hardly warmed her seat, yet she has already been urged to take action on climate change. “We call on Prime Minister-elect Gillard to make good on her party’s promise to take the threat posed by climate change seriously,” said Dr Linda Selvey, chief executive officer of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, last week after Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Australia’s prime minister.

Gilliard, who was sworn in Australia’s 27th prime minister on Jun. 24, is the first woman to hold this country’s highest political office. The parliamentary members of the governing Australian Labor Party (ALP) last week lost confidence in Rudd’s ability to lead the ALP to consecutive election wins after a disastrous few months and elevated 48-year-old Gillard, Rudd’s former deputy, to the top job.

Despite riding high in opinion polls conducted in the first two years of his term, Rudd’s popularity had shrunk considerably in recent months. While part of this slide can be attributed to policy blunders, including the failure to counter the conservative Opposition’s claims that the Rudd government was soft on border security and the recent battle with mining companies over increased taxation,

Rudd’s perceived inability to match action with his own rhetoric on climate change was a decisive factor in his downfall.

Rudd, who famously dubbed climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation,” led the ALP to victory in the 2007 election partly as a result of perceptions that he had better policies on climate change and the environment than the then incumbent John Howard.

But while Rudd was widely applauded for immediately taking steps to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – under which countries committed to reductions in greenhouse gases (GhG) and which Howard had refused to back – his government was heavily criticised when it announced in December 2008 that its target for 2020 was just a five to 15 percent reduction in GhG emissions on 2000 levels.

This was even less than the cut of between 10 and 25 percent that had earlier been recommended by Prof Ross Garnaut, the Rudd government’s chief climate change advisor, and which had also been slammed.

But things went from bad to worse for Rudd, who had been banking on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to deliver the 2020 reduction target.

Also known as a cap-and-trade system, an ETS puts a price on carbon emissions to encourage major polluters to reduce their emissions.

The ETS legislation failed on three occasions to make it through parliament, with the Opposition and the minor Australian Greens Party both against the scheme, albeit for quite different reasons.

The Opposition was divided over climate change policies while the Greens regarded the ETS as too weak to be effective.

This led Rudd to delay the ETS, which he did in April, declaring that his government would not seek to implement the scheme again until after the current Kyoto commitment period concludes at the end of 2012.

“By the end of that period the governments around the world will be required to make clear their commitments for the post-2012 period. And that will provide, therefore, the Australian Government with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change prior to the implementation of [an ETS],” said Rudd at the time.

For a prime minister who promoted himself as a genuine leader and who, last November, slammed suggestions that Australia should wait until after the Copenhagen climate conference before acting to reduce its GhG emissions as “absolute political cowardice” and a “failure of leadership,” such weak policies undermined his own image and added to growing disquiet among voters.

“The electorate felt betrayed by Kevin Rudd when he walked away from such a fundamental commitment. It is clear the government vastly underestimated the desire in the community for real action on climate change,” said Selvey.

That desire does seem genuine. According to a poll conducted in March and released earlier this month by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank, 72 percent of respondents wanted Australia, among the world’s biggest carbon polluters per capita, to take action to reduce its GhG emissions even without a post-Kyoto global agreement in place.

And that is what the new prime minister, aiming to get a mandate on action from an election likely to be held within months, is now being implored to do.

“I congratulate Ms Gillard and urge her to lead an Australian shift from a pollution-dependent economy to a clean economy and a healthy environment,” said Don Henry, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a non-governmental community-based organisation.

Others, including representatives from the Investor Group on Climate Change, which represents investors concerned with the impact of global warming, and the Climate Institute, an independent research organisation, have also called on her to act.

For her part, Gillard has labelled climate change as a top priority of her government in a nationally broadcast media conference last week, along with refugees and reaching an agreement on the mining tax.

“If elected as prime minister [at the next election], I will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad,” said Gillard, who has also raised the possibility of introducing a carbon tax to promote renewable energy sources to reduce GhG emissions if no broad-based support for an ETS exists.

Whatever policies she makes on climate change, failure to match her words with action is likely to be as politically fatal to Gillard as it was to Rudd.

———————-

A Rudd-erless Australia

Spills in Nigeria Dwarf Gulf Oil Spill Almost Every Year.

 http://www.globalwhisperer.com/2010/06/s…

More than 1,000 spill lawsuits have been filed against Shell alone.

Appetit auf Sardinen ?????

Once more – the problem is not BP – it is us! It is us having gotten addicted to oil and having allowed the industry to enslave the whole country in support of our worst egoistic pursuits. Even the Sierra Club leadership has thrown in the towel.

——————————————————————-

http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/06/bp-chamber-commerce-louisiana

 http://www.offshorevaluation.org/

The Offshore Valuation is the first full economic valuation of Britain’s offshore renewable resource.

• • David King
  • The Observer, Sunday 13 June 2010

How much should we worry about running out of oil? Of late, there have been disparate predictions for our oil reserves, with some claiming that oil will last us for decades. In fact, the question is not so much: “When will there be no more oil left for us to take?” but, rather: “When will demand outstrip production?” And that could happen sooner than most people realise. This is an issue that governments around the world, including our own, are ignoring despite the potential risk to our economies.

Conventional oil production has a limited capacity. Most additional demand must be met by unconventional sources, which are abundant. But the capacity for production depends on the effective management of environmental, social and technical challenges that unconventional sources pose. The current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a clear indicator of how these boundaries are being pushed.

The most significant concern is transport; while there are many other ways to provide heat, light and electricity, liquid transportation fuels would be hard to come by if oil supply dried up.

The International Energy Authority (IEA) predicts that over the next 20 years there will be a steady increase in demand for liquid fuels, most of which will come from China and India. It also predicts that the supply of oil from fields that are currently in production will plummet over the same time frame.

There will be additional sources of oil to help fill this gap – from fields that have been found but not yet exploited, from those yet to be found, and from unconventional sources such as Canada’s tar sands (though this is costly and particularly damaging from the point of view of climate). There is also the possibility of converting natural gas to liquid fuels. However, even adding all these into the mix, the IEA notes that there will still be a significant shortfall between demand and supply.

Moreover, some of the estimates of future supply look overly optimistic. Analysis from my institute, the Smith School, suggests that by taking the Opec figures at face value, the IEA is overestimating the reserves in fields yet to be developed by some 30%, making the shortfall even worse.

The bottom line is that demand for liquid fuels is virtually certain to outstrip production by a considerable margin over the next two decades, regardless of how much oil remains in the ground.

Knowing this, can’t oil companies simply boost their production rates or find other options? Shell recently built a plant to convert natural gas to liquid fuels in Qatar, but at some $20bn, the capital costs were enormous. Such plants can only hope to provide a sensible return on investment in the few places in the world where natural gas is plentiful. As for biofuels, although the US is likely to hit 10% of biofuels for cars later this year, globally these fuels are still only a tiny percentage of the total.

Thus, as the world emerges from the current economic downturn, all the evidence is that oil prices will take a substantial hike. Our analysis predicts that prices will soon be considerably more than $100 a barrel, peaking at around $130 by 2015. This in itself is likely to stall the global economic recovery following the financial debt crisis.

In principle, that’s good news for oil-rich countries such as Norway and the Gulf states, where higher prices mean higher GDP. But most countries in the world are oil importers and as prices rise their economies will suffer. Developing countries will be especially vulnerable, as their economies depend heavily on manufacturing and distribution, which are, in turn, dependent on transport fuels. Take Rwanda, an ambitious country whose economy is currently growing by 8% to 9% per year. We estimate that rises in oil prices over the next two decades will cumulatively cost Rwanda some 30% of its GDP.

That’s a large number. As scientific adviser to the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, I have recommended that the country should do everything in its power to decouple its economy from oil. But Rwanda is by no means atypical. In the face of rising oil prices, most net importers of oil around the world will face further recession if they have not found other ways to move themselves and their goods around. The coming supply crisis provides a clear imperative to all who are dependent on oil imports to find ways to kick the habit.

What, then, should we do? There is no silver bullet. To achieve this necessary change, we will need every weapon at our disposal. Improving the energy efficiency of our transportation will be crucial – by reducing air friction, improving engines and running smaller, lighter vehicles. Alternative fuels will also be important, moving from petrol to new generations of biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles.

But we will also need to go beyond the designs of the vehicles and fuels themselves and look at changing urban design, building and improving mass transportation systems and changing the ways that people drive.

This, of course, is independent of the additional, but pressing imperative to reduce carbon emissions and prevent dangerous climate change. Put the two together and the case for change becomes overwhelming.

There’s a final reason to wean ourselves off our current dependency on oil. In these difficult economic times, we need to stop bleeding our economies by pouring money into the handful of countries that hold most of the oil.

Today, the rest of the world pours more than $2 trillion a year into the Gulf states, which is $6bn per day. This money would surely be better spent developing energy resources that are much closer to home?

Sir David King, director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford, was chief scientific adviser to the government from 2000 to 2007

Fareed Zakaria’s Dream-Team of Sunday, June 27, 2010 looks at the Obama Administration on issues ranging from the BP oil-spill back to the bailouts of conventional business that was done without providing for change and roads to progress.

Latest results for Fareed Zakaria are coming in – our readers can pick them up on the great internet:
BrandonF?- Tom Friedman to Fareed Zakaria: “Why do the Afghans need military training? They fought the U.S. to a draw, right?”
Twitter – 3 minutes ago
josieO?: Thomas Friedman you are no expert period. Listening to Fareed Zakaria.
Twitter – 4 minutes ago
dolphingroup?: Arianna Discusses Sarah Palin And The Tea Party On ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’: Arianna appeared as a guest on CNN’s “Fa…
HuffPost TV: Arianna Discusses Sarah Palin And The Tea Party On …? - huffingtonpost.com
Twitter – 5 minutes ago
a4ashu?: Fareed zakaria Huff spitzer tom friedman woow star cast on fareed’s GPS 2day
Twitter – 7 minutes ago

No, we are not negative on Obama yet – we know he has moved US policy and has created a new feeling towards the US in the world.

Yes, we appreciated tremendously the new team Fareed had on his CNN/GPS today – and we join in when it comes to much of their criticism.

—————-

The members of team were:

Eliot Spitzer, 54th Governor of New York from January 2007 until his resignation on March 17, 2008 in the wake of the exposure of his involvement as a client in a high-priced prostitution ring. Prior to being elected governor, Spitzer served as New York State Attorney General.former Governor of New York State. He has had many achievements in his life until that act of personal indiscretion, and is trying a public come-back. He is needed in today’s attempt to go after the Wall Street much more serious indiscretions, and we appreciate Fareed not shying away from putting him on his program. As Governor, sandwiched in between Pataki and Paterson, he was the only light in Albany in recent years.

Arianna Huffington, creator, owner, publisher. etc. of http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ – probably one of the best on-line media today.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor, publisher, and part-owner of the magazine The Nation. She has been the magazine’s editor since 1995. She is a frequent guest on numerous television programs. Vanden Heuvel is a self-described liberal and a progressive.

Ross Douthat, with The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for www.theatlantic.com. On this panel he was the person most to the right.

Others pulled into the discussion were Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Martin Wolff of The Financial Times and

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This discussion was in the second half of the program. The first half was dedicated to the burning issue of the change in leadership of the US in Afghanistan from General Stanley McChrystal, to General David Petraeus – with Thomas Friedman, David Kilcullen and Fareed Zakaria pretty much concurring that this was an act of leadership on the part of the President, and this was not merely an issue of insubordination, but rather that the man in place was the wrong man for the job. David Kilcullen the author of a book “Counterinsurgency” said that the US can be the anvil in Afghanistan if Pakistan agrees to be the hummer – but this “if” is very large. The problem that the afghans know the Americans will leave in 9 months – so they are not cooperating – and what can you do in 9 months? Perfect is not on the menu in Afghanistan, he said. Half of the population in Afghanistan are Pashtuns and 100% of the insurgency is Pashtun, with 80% of the Pashtun involved in the insurgency. He also stressed that an insurgency ends when insurgents trade weapons for power. Is Karzai trying to go this way? Yes, Petraeus wrote the US manual on the insurgency in Iraq, but Afghanistan is very different from Iraq. Will he adjust to the new grounds?

We like to add here a comment describing the Walt Handelsman cartoon in Newsday that shows President Obama sitting at his table reading an article “McChrystal Finished” and saying – “Well …! I plugged One Leak.”

Then, Fareed Zakaria had a lengthy discussion on with Thomas Friedman on the Middle East Israel-Palestinians issue. Again, the agreement was that the situation is complicated and that the Netanyahu government does not act in the best interest of the Israeli people. US pressure is needed to bring about change right now – as there is an opportunity that should not be missed. finally the Yasser Arafat kleptocracy has been removed and the Salam Fayyad government on the West Bank behaves as if he learned government from the Israelis. The fact that wars with Hezbollah and Hamas in the past gave the Israelis time-out in which they made progress for the Israeli economy. Now things have changed because the fight against Hamas calls for more civilian casualties then in the past and the world gets rather reluctant to back the Israelis under these conditions. The Israelis thus need the help to start real negotiations with the Fayyad government which is ready to do serious negotiations with them.

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Now we arrived to the main meat of the hour – “the new dream team.”

Spitzer made it clear that Obama was handed a very bad set of cards and he trusted people too much – this goes for Wall Street – an area Spitzer knows very well, and the BP corporation. Obama believed he can bring people to work with him at what was against their interests.

Huffigton added to this – “Obama has always reverence for authority.” He did this on the bail-out stimulus, on health-care, and now with BP – the liberal model is flawed – she said – and The Wall Street.

Vanden Heufel just put it as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the Supreme Court gives Supreme Power to Corporate Money.

Spitzer volunteered at this point that “the President has to embrace genuine reform – instead we said that we saw continuity.”

Douthat, was somewhat more forgiving – he said that the House is Democrat and the Senate more balanced, but the Administration was able to push through conservative programs – he said.

The discussion changed to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Huffington mentioned the Stimulus packages that did not create jobs and they agreed that the loss to Scott Brown in Massachusetts is good news to the Democrats as Douthat put it. Alll agreed that too much is establishment in both parties.

Huffington: Mayor Bloomberg gets together with Fox News on immigration. All over we have the right getting organized.

Fareed’s question to Huffington: Sarah Palin – is that the right answer to Obama? She answered by pointing out the sense of unfairness felt by the American people. NO MATTER WHAT THEIR FIRST ISSUE IS – THE SECOND ISSUE FOR ALL OF THEM IS THE BAIL-OUT – THE RECAPITALIZATION OF THE BANKS.

Spitzer: Something had to be done. The problem that nothing was asked from the banks to be done in return.
AGREED – PALIN WAS THE ONLY BENEFICIARY OF THE BAILOUT.

Vanden Heuvel: The issue is the role of Government.

Douthat: There is a real shift to the right since last elections.

Conclusion – The Tea Party has an Inner Core doctrinaire Republican, but the second ring is the sympathizers. There you have the cost of clunckers, the GM bailout – the use of funds for people that made the bad bets. We got the jobs to China, Vietnam. Brazil …

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Our own conclusion from this panel is that what is needed is a show of government power – like in the removal of McChrystal. The failure of Obama was that he did not clean house from the bureaucracy staff he inherited from the Cheney/Bush Administration – the likes of the non-professional lady that was running the MMS and made thus possible the high level of risk in deep-water drilling. Obama removed McChrystal who was his own appointee, just think how much more he would have been in his right to send off all those Cheney/Bush appointees they made in their full two terms – some even in the last days of the second term. There are many more of these around then the few mistakes Obama managed to do in his own first-half of his first-term.

Then obviously – Obama throwing money at the establishment – to save Wall Street in its past form, aging corporations like General Motors or money-making machines of the financial institutions kind like AIG, or the labor unions that have no interest in the quality of jobs, but only in retaining their old jobs, all of these have undermined his performance so that his natural allies are sneering at him now.

Does that mean that he has to be punished and turned into a one-term President? NO and NO! He has only to be admonished and told frankly by bright people – like the above Fareed Zakaria “dream team,” that he has to shape up and stand straight against the push of the Washington interests – from the industry, from the military, from labor ,etc. and by doing the right things, following an honest policy line that creates green jobs and lets go off the jobs that the global economy will be phasing out anyway, that is when he will get back the attention of the “PALIN SYMPATHIZERS” that joined Sarah Palin not out of volition, but out of conviction that Washington does not listen to their concerns.

Mr. President – these ideas were cooked up, not by any sworn right wingers or enemies of yours, but by the brightest that consider themselves of the progressive left.