Ihsanoglu calls for direct relations between the OIC General Secretariat and OIC Funds

The Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu expressed his satisfaction over the OIC Funds’ oriented action, which has made a tangible impact, and hoped for direct relations between the Funds and the OIC General Secretariat at the level of the Islamic Conference Humanitarian Affairs Department (ICHAD) and other related departments. Ihsanoglu, in his statement at the 3rd meeting of the OIC Funds in Doha, Qatar, on 9 March 2010, urged the Funds to work under the supervision of the OIC General Secretariat’s Finance and Administration Department using the new “financial system under which the Funds will operate in line with the OIC Financial rules and regulations, hence, rendering more transparency to their operations, which will also benefit the Funds.” Taking into consideration the various constraints the Funds may have faced, he assured them of mobilizing all OIC resources to launch a “strong campaign to secure more financial resources for the Funds’ activities.” The Secretary General concluded his statement by thanking His Highness Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Thani, Chairman of the Council of Funds, and the various donors, especially the State of Qatar for the tremendous efforts and dedication to convene the meeting.

OIC Chief commends the results of the Third Conference of Humanitarian Organizations

OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu stated that the positive results of the Third Conference of Humanitarian Organizations held in Doha, Qatar, on 8 March 2010, will have a clear effect on the promotion of cooperative relations between the OIC and humanitarian organizations in the OIC Member States. This will help elaborate clear policies to address disasters and development issues in the Islamic world. Ihsanoglu made this statement at the closing session of the two-day Conference attended by over seventy relief organizations from around the Islamic world. The Secretary General emphasized that these results testify to the importance of the resolution adopted by the Third Extraordinary Islamic Summit Conference held in Makkah Al-Mukarramah at the initiative of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, which called for the promotion of cooperation and coordination relations between the General Secretariat and NGOs as a central development partner. Ihsanoglu added that over forty OIC Member States suffer today from different disasters and conflicts, especially with the aggravation of climate change and its various negative implications. He maintained that these phenomena led to the defragmentation of societies and to the deterioration of relief services and development infrastructures in many parts of the Islamic world. The Secretary General called for a new approach to address development and humanitarian assistance issues based on the coordination of efforts among governments, NGOs and the private sector. He highlighted the fact that supporting this tripartite process is a necessity at this critical stage in order to build peace and accelerate the development movement in our countries. The Secretary General concluded his address stating that work in this field will be carried out in close coordination and cooperation with all international organizations and institutions working in the field of humanitarian development, in particular UN institutions which are doing an important work in the Islamic world.

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“Giving Iran Seat on U.N. Rights Council Would Legitimize Its Brutality,” Says Boyfriend of Killed Protest Icon

Patrick Goodenough
March 10, 2010

An Iranian whose fiancée’s death by gunfire became a symbol of opposition to the regime during post-election protests last year made an impassioned appeal Tuesday for Tehran to be denied a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council in elections this spring.

Caspian Makan addresses the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, co-organized by UN Watch and 24 other human rights NGOs, Tuesday, March 9, 2010. Click here for full transcript of his remarks Click here to watch video

Addressing a gathering of dissidents and human rights advocates in Geneva, Caspian Makan, a photojournalist who fled Iran late last year after being detained for more than 60 days, said Iranian membership in the U.N.’s top human rights body would be a “slap in the face” of other members.

It would encourage other countries that have a tendency to flout human rights and undermine the credibility of the U.N. and the council, he said, according to a translation provided by event organizers.

“I feel furthermore that if the Iranian regime became a member, that would legitimize the inhuman and cruel acts the regime has perpetuated against its population,” Makan added. “Giving it legitimacy would encourage them to go further still.”

The U.N. has confirmed that Iran has submitted in writing its candidacy to become a member of the HRC.

On May 13, the General Assembly will vote by secret ballot to fill 14 of the Geneva-based council’s 47 seats. Iran and four other countries – Thailand, Qatar, Malaysia and the Maldives – will compete to fill four available seats set aside for the Asian regional group.

Makan was speaking Tuesday at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, a two-day event that brought together some 500 people from more than 60 countries, to discuss issues organizers say are mostly neglected by the HRC.

He told the gathering about Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year old “deep thinker” and “artist at heart” with whom he had fallen in love after meeting her on a trip.

Makan, 38, said they had tended in the past not to vote in elections because they were seen as a charade, and taking part would be seen as “participating in the regime to some extent.”

But the 2009 election had seemed to offer in the shape of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi a “lesser evil” for young Iranians who “above all else wanted to get rid of Mr. [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.”

Once it became clear that the election was rigged in favor of the incumbent, he said, Soltan had joined the protests.

Makan said that while trying to do his job he was an eyewitness to the violent clampdown by “the mercenaries of the regime” and “saw firsthand that the army of the revolution was shooting and killing the demonstrators from a helicopter.”

Four days before she died, he had urged Soltan to keep away from the demonstrations. “She said, ‘You know Caspian, I love you, I love being with you, but what is most important to me is the freedom of our people.”

On June 20, Soltan was shot in the chest on a Tehran street, apparently by a Basij militia sniper. Amateur video footage capturing the moments after the shooting was posted online and seen around the world.

“We have seen many people who have been wounded and killed, but this struck the world particularly hard,” Makan said of his fiancee’s death.

“We were able to see in the footage how good and kind she was and admire her attitude when faced with death, to admire her courage as a symbol of liberty, as she died hoping for a better life for the millions of Iranians who remained behind.”

Human rights researchers say at least 40 Iranians died during June and that the number more than doubled in the months that followed. The official figure stands at 44.

Last month, Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini, director-general of Iran’s Interior Ministry – whose functions including policing and overseeing elections – told the HRC that the June 2009 presidential election had been “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom.”

We picked up some ideas from Katie McCaskey of an aol blog – http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/02/19/kill-your-lawn-earn-some-green/

Katie pointed out that Southern California residents have  now further good financial reasons for doing sane things and rip out their water-wasting turf – did you hear that they will get even a check in the mail?

These programs were instituted by Southern California utilities because of water shortage and above triggered my memory of things past that occured when I tried to do sane things in New York State and found that one must bow to the conventional narrow minds running the system.

In Southern California homeowners are now required to replace grass with drought-tolerant, native plant species or install permeable surfaces which filter water back into the ground. Common permeable surfaces that are allowed include:  flagstone, brick, and gravel. The rebate is $1 per square foot, up to a maximum of 2,000 feet.

Cyberhomes blogger Marcie Geffner writes:
The rebate might not be enough to persuade homeowners who really love their lawns. But for me, the offer was a no-brainer as I wanted to replace my big boring lawns with flagstone walkways, cactus and other plants that are more natural to the climate, if not necessarily native.

Other water-saving rebates available through LADWP include incentives to replace toilets and clothes washers with high-efficiency models, timer controlled irrigation, and pressure-reduced sprinkler nozzles. If you’re willing, there is even a rebate for installing synthetic turf.

Kathie McCaskey suggests – “Check with your local utility company or DSIRE.org to see what environmentally-conscious rebates are available in your area.”

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 5, 2010 (IPS) – The frozen cap trapping billions of tonnes of methane under the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean is leaking and venting the powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, new research shows. It is not known if this may be one of the first indicators of a feedback loop accelerating global warming. Researchers estimate that eight million tonnes in annual methane emissions are being released from the shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which is equivalent to all the methane released from the world’s oceans, covering 71 percent of the planet. On a global scale of methane emissions from the land-based sources – animals, rice paddies, rotting vegetation – the newly measured emissions from the Siberian seabed are less than two percent. “That’s still very significant,” Natalia Shakhova, a researcher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, told IPS. “Before, it was assumed that this region had zero emissions.” Methane concentrations measured over the oceans are currently about 0.6 to 0.7 parts per million (ppm), but they are now 1.85 in the Arctic Ocean generally, and between 2.6 and 8.2 ppm in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, an area roughly two million square kilometres in size, said Shakhova. Shakhova, and her University of Alaska colleague Igor Semiletov, led eight international expeditions to one of the world’s most remote and desolate regions and published their results in the Mar. 5 edition of the journal Science. Global methane levels have risen each year since 2007 after being constant for a decade, reports Ed Dlugokencky of the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, which is run by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “We saw an increase in CH4 (methane) growth rate in 2007 in the Arctic… but it did not increase in 2008,” Dlugokencky, an expert on atmospheric methane told IPS via email. He suspects Siberia’s subsea emissions are not new but have been underway for some time, and he also says Shakhova’s estimate of eight million tonnes needs to be verified by other means. However, he acknowledges this study represents the first direct measurements ever done in the region and stresses the urgency for more investigation. In the last few years, researchers have been shocked to see Arctic Ocean “on the boil” in places as gases from deep below come bubbling to the surface. Large parts of the Arctic Ocean floor along coastal areas is actually permafrost that was flooded thousands of years ago after the big melt from the last ice age. Permafrost is frozen soil and contains very large amounts of carbon and methane. The extremely cold waters of the Arctic and its ice cover kept the subsea permafrost cold enough so it has been melting extremely slowly. Until now. Surface temperatures over much of the Arctic landscape and the Siberian landscape, particularly in summer, have jumped six to 10 degrees C above normal in recent years. That has lead to a massive increase in the flows of the many rivers that terminate in the Arctic Ocean. Shakhova and colleagues believe this substantial increase of warmer water into the shallow East Siberian Shelf has accelerated the melting of the subsea permafrost, in effect fracturing the frozen cap and allowing methane to escape into the atmosphere. “Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilisation already,” she said in a release. “If it further destabilises, the methane emissions may not be teragrammes, it would be significantly larger,” she said. A teragramme is a trillion grammes, or one million tonnes. Methane – a greenhouse gas approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide – is commonly called methane hydrates when it is frozen in permafrost or under the sea. The total volumes are unknown. “The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to three to four times,” Shakhova said in a release. “The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict,” she said. Shakhova’s study is just one of at least a dozen others that clearly show the Arctic region is not only melting but also emitting more carbon and methane. Permafrost spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe. A new Canadian study documented that the southernmost permafrost limit has retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years ago in Quebec’s James Bay region. Another Canadian study released last year showed that the region was getting darker and absorbing more heat in the summer because of a significant shift in plant growth from grasses and lichen to larger shrubs over the past 30 years due to warmer temperatures. A permafrost “retreat” has been observed over much of the southern fringe of the permafrost zone and could result in emissions a billion tonnes of carbon per year – human emissions are seven to eight billion tonnes – by mid-century, a University of Florida study estimated. Without major reductions in those human emissions, mainly burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the top two to three metres of permafrost across the entire Arctic region could thaw by the end of this century, warned a major report, “Arctic Climate Feedbacks: Global Implications”, released by the World Wildlife Fund last September. Should that happen, the volumes of carbon and methane released could be many times higher than what is presently in the atmosphere, driving up the global average temperatures by six, eight, or even 10 degrees C. The consequences are unimaginable. “The changes we are (currently) seeing are not entirely unexpected, they are just happening far sooner,” said Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in the U.S. state of Colorado and co-author of Arctic Climate Feedbacks report. If the methane hydrates start to melt or large areas of permafrost “that will be very bad news for humanity”, Serreze told IPS in September. “The world is a very small place and we have not been good stewards. Climate change is symptom of this poor stewardship,” he said. “The way we’re going right now, I’m not optimistic that we will avoid some kind of tipping point.”

The United Arab Emirates, led by Abu Dhabi, is the first member of OPEC to associate itself with the so called Copenhagen Note by a Valentine’s day Association message to the World Community – we are with you – we take responsibility for action. This from Mari Luomi’s blog for the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

From:  Jones Andrew <Andrew.Jones@upi-fiia.fi>
date:    Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 4:17 AM
subject:  New UPI-FIIA publication – The EU and the global climate regime: Getting back in the game.

We are pleased to announce the release of a new publication by the International Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment Research Programme at The Finnish Institute of International Affairs (UPI-FIIA):

** – The EU and the global climate regime: Getting back in the game
 http://www.upi-fiia.fi/en/publication/10… Published 25.2.2010
by Thomas Spencer, Kristian Tangen, Anna Korppoo of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

The Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
 http://www.upi-fiia.fi/en/blog/269/ by  andrew.jones at upi-fiia.fi
web: http://www.upi-fiia.fi/
Tel: +358 206 111 734            GSM: +358 40 480 1655
Address: Kruunuvuorenkatu 4, 00160 Helsinki, Finland

** – and the Latest blog: The Opec state that clears its own, greener pat.

The Opec state that clears its own, greener path.
by Mari Luomi

ResearcherInternational Politics of Natural Resources and the Environment research programme. Published 26.2.2010

The United Arab Emirates, led by its wealthiest emirate Abu Dhabi, is finally taking the steps necessary to align its domestic and international policies in the field of climate change. Who would have thought just three years ago that the UAE would stand out as the only Opec state to associate itself to a controversial climate change accord, have a Climate Change Envoy, dub nuclear as clean energy, and, most importantly, set international climate change mitigation ahead of oil industry interests.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently became the first Opec member state to associate itself with the disputed Copenhagen Accord. It is also establishing a Directorate of Energy and Climate Change and has flirted with the possibility of announcing emission cuts in comparison to business-as-usual levels. What are the implications of these simultaneous moves for the country and, most interestingly, for the Opec bloc?

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The Association Letter:

The UAE’s association letter, sent to the UN Climate Convention (UNFCCC) on Valentine’s day, was designed to be a clear message to the international community that the UAE is concerned about the negative impacts of climate change and is willing to do its fair share in mitigating climate change. This comes despite the fact that the UNFCCC places no commitments on the country to cut its emissions. The UAE is exempt from emission cuts because, despite its GDP per capita rank placing it in the global top-15, it is classified under the Convention as a developing country.

The association letter notes that the UAE has initiated ‘numerous domestic programmes’ that would reduce the UAE’s emissions to below business-as-usual levels. It also promises a more detailed follow-up on the issue. One would hope that this means that the UAE is planning to set a similar goal as, for example, Singapore, a high-income developing country, which has pledged to cut emissions by 16% in relation to BAU emissions by 2020.

Three issues are highlighted in the letter:
- The common but differentiated responsibilities principle;
- The economic impacts of climate change and its mitigation on oil exporting states and
- The importance of promoting carbon capture and storage, as well as nuclear energy technologies, under the international climate negotiating regime.

The importance of countries associating with the Copenhagen Accord is still contingent on the form and direction that the currently disarrayed international negotiations take over the coming months. Also, the content of the UAE letter has only a few surprises, including the potential emission target and the mention of nuclear energy.

What is significant, however, is that no other Opec state has so far associated itself with the Accord. Kuwait has explicitly rejected it. Saudi Arabia, which took part in the group of 25-30 countries that drafted the Copenhagen Accord, informally representing the voice and interests of the OPEC group, has not associated itself so far. Rather, in a submission to the UNFCCC in mid-February, the country states that the Accord ‘has no legal status within the UNFCCC, and thus can’t be used as basis or reference for further negotiations’.

If any Opec country should back the document, it is Saudi Arabia, given that it participated in negotiating the text, especially since the issue of the impacts of the so-called response measures (policies and measures taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions) and the need to assist countries vulnerable to them, which is one of the key demands of Saudi Arabia and the OPEC group, is included in the Accord.

—————

Climate Change Directorate:

Abu Dhabi’s major English newspaper The National reported today on the setting up of a new Directorate of Energy and Climate Change under the UAE’s Foreign Ministry. To understand the significance of this move, one must take a quick dive into the national context.

Abu Dhabi, owner of over 7% of the world’s proven oil reserves and nine tenths of the total oil reserves of the seven-emirate federation it presides over, has for roughly three years now been building itself an image of a ‘future energy giant’. It has declared itself to be the ‘green energy leader of the region’ and, to earn the title, it has built up an impressive list of alternative energy initiatives, most of which converge under the umbrella of the Masdar Initiative, an alternative energy and technology venture by the Mubadala Development Company. What is best, international media and governments have bought the brand: from the President of Maldives to Ban Ki Moon, the world is praising Masdar and Abu Dhabi for their efforts.

The reality is of course not so green and rosy. The United Arab Emirates still ranks near bottom in several international rankings of environmental sustainability: world’s largest ecological footprint and high per capita CO2 emissions, to mention just two examples. When it comes to development, economic sustainability still trumps environmental sustainability. However, there are a number of important individuals in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, who would like to see this change, at least to some extent. As a sign of this, Abu Dhabi announced in January last year a 7% renewables target for 2020.

Interestingly, it is Masdar’s CEO, Sultan Al Jaber, who has become the main voice in Abu Dhabi in promoting climate change mitigation during the past couple of years, that will be leading the Directorate with the titles of Assistant Foreign Minister and Special Envoy on Energy and Climate Change, according to The National.

With potentially wide implications for the UAE’s international climate policy positioning, the establishment of the Climate Change Directorate is a tour de force from those elite members in Abu Dhabi who have been pushing for the emirate (and with it the federation) to promote development that takes account of environmental sustainability in addition to the usual economic sustainability.

These two moves – the association with the Accord and the new Envoy – might mainly have been taken for branding purposes, but what is important is that they will potentially have far-reaching implications for Opec’s negotiating dynamics that have so far been dominated by a very different tone. They are also finally bringing the ambitious national projects of Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s international climate policy closer to each other.

W. W. Norton & Company / By Joseph Stiglitz
The Great American Bank Robbery:How did the big banks nearly take down the entire economy and still continue to profit? Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains.
February 27, 2010  |

The following is Part I of a two-part excerpt from Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Joseph Stiglitz ( W.W. Norton & Co., 2010). Read AlterNet’s recent interview with Stiglitz by Zach Carter.

Bankruptcy is a key feature of capitalism. Firms sometimes are unable to repay what they owe creditors. Financial reorganization has become a fact of life in many industries. The United States is lucky in having a particularly effective way of giving firms a fresh start—Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, which has been used repeatedly, for example, by the airlines. Airplanes keep flying; jobs and assets are preserved. Shareholders typically lose everything, and bondholders become the new shareholders. Under new management, and without the burden of debt, the airline can go on. The government plays a limited role in these restructurings: bankruptcy courts make sure that all creditors are treated fairly and that management doesn’t steal the assets of the firm for its own benefits.

Banks differ in one respect: the government has a stake because it insures deposits….The reason the government insures deposits is to preserve the stability of the financial system, which is important to preserving the stability of the economy. But if a bank gets into trouble, the basic procedure should be the same: shareholders lose everything; bondholders become the new shareholders. Often, the value of the bonds is sufficiently great that that is all that needs to be done. For instance, at the time of the bailout, Citibank, the largest American bank, with assets of $2 trillion, had some $350 billion of long-term bonds. Because there are no obligatory payments with equity, if there had been a debt-to-equity conversion, the bank wouldn’t have had to pay the billions and billions of dollars of interest on these bonds. Not having to pay out the billions of dollars of interest puts the bank in much better stead. In such an instance, the role of the government is little different from the oversight role the government plays in the bankruptcy of an ordinary firm.

Sometimes, though, the bank has been so badly managed that what is owed to depositors is greater than the assets of the bank. (This was the case for many of the banks in the savings and loan debacle in the late 1980s and in the current crisis.) Then the government has to come in to honor its commitments to depositors. The government becomes, in effect, the (possibly partial) owner, though typically it tries to sell the bank as soon as it can or find someone to take it over. Because the bankrupt bank has liabilities greater than its assets, the government typically has to pay the acquiring bank to do this, in effect filling the hole in the balance sheet. This process is called conservatorship. Usually the switch in ownership is so seamless that depositors and other customers wouldn’t even know that something had happened unless they read about it in the press. Occasionally, when an appropriate suitor can’t be found quickly, the government runs the bank for a while. (The opponents of conservatorship tried to tarnish this traditional approach by calling it nationalization. Obama suggested that this wasn’t the American way. But he was wrong: conservatorship, including the possibility of temporary government ownership when all else failed, was the traditional approach; the massive government gifts to banks were what was unprecedented. Since even the banks that were taken over by the government were always eventually sold, some suggested that the process be called preprivatization.)

Long experience has taught that when banks are at risk of failure, their managers engage in behaviors that risk taxpayers losing even more money. The banks may, for instance, undertake big bets: if they win, they keep the proceeds; if they lose, so what? They would have died anyway. That’s why there are laws saying that when a bank’s capital is low, it should be shut down or put under conservatorship. Bank regulators don’t wait until all of the money is gone. They want to be sure that when a depositor puts his debit card into the ATM and it says, “insufficient funds,” it’s because there are insufficient funds in the account, not insufficient funds in the bank. When the regulators see that a bank has too little money, they put the bank on notice to get more capital, and if it can’t, they take further action of the kind just described.

As the crisis of 2008 gained momentum, the government should have played by the rules of capitalism and forced a financial reorganization. Financial reorganizations—giving a fresh start—are not the end of the world. Indeed, they might represent the beginning of a new world, one in which incentives are better aligned and in which lending is rekindled. Had the government forced a financial restructuring of the banks in the way just described, there would have been little need for taxpayer money, or even further government involvement. Such a conversion increases the overall value of the firm because it reduces the likelihood of bankruptcy, thereby not only saving the high transaction costs of going through bankruptcy but also preserving the value of the ongoing concern. That means that if the shareholders are wiped out and the bondholders become the new “owners,” the bondholders’ long-term prospects are better than they were while the bank remained in limbo, when they were not sure whether it would survive and not sure of either the size or the terms of any government handout.

The bondholders involved in a restructuring would have gotten another gift, at least according to the banks own logic. The bankers claimed that the market was underestimating the true value of the mortgages on their books (and other bank assets). That may have been the case—or it may not have been. If it is not, it is totally unreasonable to make taxpayers bear the cost of the banks’ mistake, but if the assets were really worth as much as the bankers said, then the bondholders would get the upside.

The Obama administration has argued that the big banks are not only too big to fail but also too big to be financially restructured (or, as I refer to it later, “too big to be resolved”), too big to play by the ordinary rules of capitalism. Being too big to be financially restructured means that if the bank is on the brink of failure, there is but one source of money: the taxpayer. And under this novel and unproven doctrine, hundreds of billions have been poured into the financial system.

If it is true that America’s biggest banks are too big to be “resolved,” this has profound implications for our banking system going forward—implications the administration so far has refused to own up to. If, for instance, bondholders are in effect guaranteed because these institutions are too big to be financially restructured, then the market economy can exert no effective discipline on the banks. They get access to cheaper capital than they should, because those providing the capital know that the taxpayers will pick up any losses. If the government is providing a guarantee, whether explicit or implicit, the banks aren’t bearing all the risks associated with each decision they make—the risks borne by markets (shareholders, bondholders) are less than those borne by society as a whole, and so resources will go in the wrong place. Because too-big-to-be-restructured banks have access to funds at lower interest rates than they should, the whole capital market is distorted. They grow at the expense of their smaller rivals, who do not have this guarantee. They can easily come to dominate the financial system, not through greater prowess and ingenuity but because of the tacit government support. It should be clear: these too-big-to-be-restructured banks cannot operate as ordinary market-based banks.

I actually think that all of this discussion about too-big-to-restructured banks was just a ruse. It was a ploy that worked, based on fear-mongering. Just as Bush used 9/11 and the fears of terrorism to justify so much of what he did, the Treasury under both Bush and Obama used 9/15—the day that Lehman collapsed—and the fears of another meltdown as a tool to extract as much as possible for the banks and the bankers that had brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.

The argument is that, if only the Fed and Treasury had rescued Lehman Brothers, the whole crisis would have been avoided. The implication—seemingly taken on board by the Obama administration—is, when in doubt, bail out, and massively so. To skimp is to be penny wise and pound foolish.

But that is the wrong lesson to learn from the Lehman episode. The notion that if only Lehman Brothers had been rescued all would have been fine is sheer nonsense. Lehman Brothers was a consequence, not a cause: it was the consequence of flawed lending practices and inadequate oversight by regulators. Whether Lehman Brothers had or had not been bailed out, the global economy was headed for difficulties. Prior to the crisis, as I have noted, the global economy had been supported by the bubble and excessive borrowing. That game is over—and was already over well before Lehman’s collapse. The collapse almost surely accelerated the whole process of deleveraging; it brought out into the open the long-festering problems, the fact that the banks didn’t know their net worth and knew that accordingly they couldn’t know that of any other firm to whom they might lend. A more orderly process would have imposed fewer costs in the short run, but “counterfactual history” is always problematic.

There are those who believe that it is better to take one’s medicine and be done with it, that a slow unwinding of the excesses would last years longer, with even greater costs. Perhaps, on the other hand, the slow recapitalization of the banks would have occurred faster than the losses would have become apparent. In this view, papering over the losses with dishonest accounting (as in this crisis, as well as in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s) would be doing more than just providing symptomatic relief. Lowering the fever may actually help in the recovery. A third view holds that Lehman’s collapse actually saved the entire financial system: without it, it would have been difficult to galvanize the political support required to bail out the banks. (It was hard enough to do so after its collapse.)

Even if one agrees that letting Lehman Brothers fail was a mistake, there are many choices between the blank-check approach to saving the banks pursued by the Bush and Obama administrations after September 15 and the approach of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner of simply shutting down Lehman Brothers and praying that everything will work out in the end.

The government was obligated to save depositors, but that didn’t mean it had to provide taxpayer money to also save bondholders and shareholders. As noted earlier, standard procedures would have meant that the institution be saved and the shareholders wiped out, with the bondholders becoming the new shareholders. Lehman had no insured depositors; it was an investment bank. But it had something almost equivalent—it borrowed short-term money from the “market” through commercial paper held by money market funds, which acted much like banks. (One can even write checks on these accounts.) That’s why the part of the financial system involving money markets and investment banks is often called the shadow banking system. It arose, in part, to circumvent the regulations imposed on the real banking system—to ensure its safety and stability. Lehman’s collapse induced a run on the shadow banking system, much as there used to be runs on the real banking system before deposit insurance was provided; to stop the run, the government provided insurance to the shadow banking system.

Those opposed to financial restructuring (conservatorship) for the banks that are in trouble say that if the bondholders are not fully protected, a bank’s remaining creditors—those providing short-term funds without a government guarantee—will flee if a restructuring appears imminent. But such a conclusion defies economic logic. If these creditors are rational, they would realize that they benefit enormously from the greater stability of the firm provided by conservatorship and the debt-to-equity conversion. If they were willing to keep their funds in the bank before, they should be even more willing to do so now. And if the government has no confidence in the rationality of these supposedly smart financiers, they could provide a guarantee, though they should charge a premium for it. In the end, the Bush and Obama administrations not only bailed out the shareholders but also provided guarantees. The guarantees effectively eviscerated the argument for the generous treatment of shareholders and long-term bondholders.

Under financial restructuring, there are two big losers. The executives of the banks will almost surely go, and they will be unhappy. The shareholders too will be unhappy, because they will have lost everything. But that is the nature of risk-taking in capitalism—the only justification for the above-normal returns that they enjoyed during the boom is the risk of a loss.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, is a professor of economics at Columbia University.

from: www.Tomdispatch.com -  By Bill McKibben
February 27, 2010  |

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal.  It was a mixed and judicious appraisal.  “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.”  And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet.  Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome” on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin.  If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet.  At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment:

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it.  The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collectiveKatoKaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: it was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning.  So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?  That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life.

Uri Avnery

27.2.10

White Lie

THIS COMING Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Israel will consider an application by a group of Israeli citizens to compel the Interior Ministry to register them as belonging to the “Israeli nation”.

Odd? Indeed.

The Israeli Interior Ministry recognizes 126 nations, but not the Israeli nation. An Israeli citizen can be registered as belonging to the Assyrian, the Tatar or the Circassian nation. But the Israeli nation? Sorry, no such thing.
According to the official doctrine, the State of Israel cannot recognize an “Israeli” nation because it is the state of the “Jewish” nation. In other words, it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.
Messy? Indeed.

THIS MESS started 113 years ago, when the Viennese Journalist Theodor Herzl wrote his book “The State of the Jews”. (That’s the true translation. The generally used name “The Jewish State” is false and means something else.) For this purpose he had to perform an acrobatic exercise. One can say that he used a white lie.

Modern Zionism was born as a direct response to modern anti-Semitism. Not by accident, the term “Zionismus” came into being some 20 years after the term “Antisemitismus” was invented in Germany. They are twins.
In Europe and the Americas another modern term was flourishing: Nationalism. Peoples which had been living together for centuries under dynasties of Emperors and Kings wanted to belong to nation-states of their own. In Argentina, the USA, France and other countries, “national” revolutions took place. The idea infected almost all peoples, big, small and tiny, from Peru to Lithuania, from Colombia to Serbia. They felt a need to belong to the place and the people where they lived and died.

All these national movements were necessarily anti-Semitic, some more, some less, because the very existence of the Jewish Diaspora ran counter to their basic perceptions. A Diaspora without a homeland, dispersed over dozens of countries, could not be reconciled with the idea of a homeland-rooted nation seeking uniformity.
Herzl understood that the new reality was inherently dangerous for the Jews. In the beginning he cherished the idea of complete assimilation: all the Jews would be baptized and disappear in the new nations. As a professional writer for the theater, he even devised the scenario: all Viennese Jews would march together to St. Stephen’s cathedral and be baptized en masse.

When he realized that this scenario was a bit far-fetched, Herzl passed from the idea of individual assimilation to what may be called collective assimilation: if there is no place for the Jews in the new nations, then they should define themselves as a nation like all the others, rooted in a homeland of their own and living in a state of their own. This idea was called Zionism.

BUT THERE was a problem: a Jewish nation did not exist. The Jews were not a nation but a religious-ethnic community.

A nation exists on one level of human society, a religious-ethnic community on another. A “nation” is an entity living together in one country with a common political will. A “community” is a religious entity based on a common faith, which can live in different countries. A German, for example, can be Catholic or Protestant; a Catholic can be German or French.
These two types of entity have two different means of survival, much as different species in nature. When a lion is in danger, it fights, it attacks. For that purpose, nature has equipped it with teeth and claws. When a gazelle is in danger, it runs. Nature has given it quick legs. Every method is good, if it is effective. (If it were not effective, the species would not have survived to this day.)

When a nation is in danger, it stands and fights. When a religious community is in danger, it moves elsewhere. The Jews, more than any others, have perfected the art of escape. Even after the horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish Diaspora has survived and now, two generations later, it is again flourishing.

IN ORDER to invent a Jewish nation, Herzl had to ignore this difference. He pretended that the Jewish ethnic-religious community was also a Jewish nation. In other words: contrary to all other peoples, the Jews were both a nation and a religious community; as far as Jews were concerned, the two were the same. The nation was a religion, the religion was a nation.

This was the “white lie”. There was no other way: without it, Zionism could not have come into being. The new movement took the Star of David from the synagogue, the candlestick from the Temple, the blue-and-white flag from the prayer shawl. The holy land became a homeland. Zionism filled the religious symbols with secular, national content.
The first to detect the falsification were the Orthodox Rabbis. Almost all of them damned Herzl and his Zionism in no uncertain terms. The most extreme was the Rabbi of Lubavitch, who accused Herzl of destroying Judaism. The Jews, he wrote, are united by their adherence to God’s commandments. Doctor Herzl wants to supplant this God-given bond with secular nationalism.

When Herzl originated the Zionist idea, he did not intend to found the “State of the Jews” in Palestine, but in Argentina. Even when writing his book, he devoted to the country only a few lines, under the headline “Palestine or Argentina?” However, the movement he created compelled him to divert his endeavors to the Land of Israel, and so the state came into being here.
When the State of Israel was founded and the Zionist dream realized, there was no further need for the “white lie”. After the building was finished, the scaffolding should have been removed. A real Israeli nation had come into being, there was no further need for an imaginary one.

THESE DAYS Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, is running a TV ad showing selected past issues. The day the State of Israel was founded, the giant headline announced: “Hebrew State!”

“Hebrew”, not “Jewish”. And not by accident: at that time, the term “Jewish state” sounded decidedly strange. In the preceding years, people in this country had got used to making a clear distinction between “Jewish” and “Hebrew”, between matters that belonged to the Diaspora and those belonging to this country: Jewish Diaspora, Jewish language (Yiddish), Jewish Stetl, Jewish religion, Jewish tradition – but Hebrew language, Hebrew agriculture, Hebrew industries, Hebrew underground organizations, Hebrew policemen.

If so, why do the words “Jewish state” appear in our Declaration of Independence? There was a simple reason for that: the UN had adopted a resolution to partition the country between an “Arab state” and a “Jewish state”. That was the legal basis of the new state. The declaration, which was drafted in haste, said therefore that we were establishing “the Jewish state (according to the UN resolution), namely the State of Israel”.

The building was finished, but the scaffolding was not taken down. On the contrary: it became the most important part of the building and dominates its facade.

LIKE MOST of us at the time, David Ben-Gurion believed that Zionism had supplanted religion and that religion had become redundant. He was quite sure that it would shrivel and disappear by itself in the new secular state. He decided that we could afford to dispense with the military service of Yeshiva bochers (Talmud school students), believing that their number would dwindle from a few hundred to almost none. The same thought caused him to allow religious schools to continue in existence. Like Herzl, who promised to “keep our Rabbis in the synagogues and our army officers in the barracks”, Ben-Gurion was certain that the state would be entirely secular.

When Herzl wrote of the “state of the Jews” he did not dream that the Jewish Diaspora would continue to exist. In his view, only the citizens of the new state would henceforth be called “Jews”, all other Jews in the world would assimilate in their various nations and disappear from view.

BUT THE “white lie” of Herzl had results he did not dream of, as did the compromises of Ben-Gurion. Religion did not wither away in Israel, but on the contrary: it is gaining control of the state. The government of Israel does not speak of the nation-state of the Israelis who live here, but of the “nation-state of the Jews” – a state that belongs to the Jews all over the world, most of whom belong to other nations.

The religious schools are eating up the general education system and are going to overpower it, if we don’t become aware of the danger and assert our Israeli essence. Voting rights are about to be accorded to Israelis residing abroad, and this is a step towards giving the vote to all Jews around the world. And, most important: the ugly weeds growing in the national-religious field – the fanatical settlers – are pushing the state in a direction that may lead to its destruction.

TO SAFEGUARD the future of Israel one has to start by removing the scaffolding from the building. In other words: burying the “white lie” of religion-equals-nation. The Israeli nation has to be recognized as the basis of the state.
If this principle is accepted, what will the future shape of Israel – within the Green Line – be like?
There are two possible models, and many variations between them.

Model A: the multi-national one. Almost all the citizens of Israel belong to one of two nations: the majority belongs to the Hebrew nation and a minority to the Palestinian-Arab nation. Each nation will enjoy autonomy in certain areas, such as culture, education and religion. Autonomy will not be territorial, but cultural (as Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky proposed a hundred years ago for Czarist Russia). All will be united by Israeli citizenship and loyalty to the state. The inbuilt discrimination of the Arab minority will become a thing of the past, as well as the “demographic demon”.

Model B: the American one. The American nation is composed of all US citizens, and all US citizens constitute the American nation. An immigrant from Jamaica who acquires US citizenship automatically becomes a member of the American nation, an heir to George Washington and Abe Lincoln. All learn at school the same core program and the same history.

Which of the two models is preferable? In my view, Model B is much better. But it would depend on a dialogue between the Hebrew majority and the Arab minority. In the end, the Arab citizens will have to decide whether they prefer the status of equal partners in a general Israeli nation, or the status of a recognized, autonomous national minority in a state that acknowledges and cherishes their separate culture, side by side with the culture of the majority.

In four days, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is prepared to take the first step in this historic march.

Cash for Leaving Oil Underground?

The start of the International Year of Biodiversity has also brought to a head the three-year-long debate on Ecuador’s Yasuni ITT initiative. The initiative centres around the Yasuni national park, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. It is home to indigenous peoples who have so far been isolated from the outside world—and also to an estimated 800 million barrels of oil. Ecuador is proposing that it will refrain from extracting this oil if the international community pays for half the foregone economic benefits (about 350 million dollars a year). The advantages of the unprecedented initiative are obvious. For one, Ecuador will be able to avoid massive environmental damages and social tensions that have so far resulted from oil exploitation and the unequal distribution of its revenues. And for another, climate-unfriendly oil would remain underground and the forest and its rich biodiversity would be preserved, thereby avoiding about 410 million tons of CO2 emissions. The reasoning behind this idea is that saving the region from economic exploitation is also in the global interest and should correspondingly be compensated for by the international community.

So far Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium have declared that they would be prepared to contribute about half of the stipulated amount. The negotiations on the payment conditions, however, proved to be difficult: disputes include the time frame and the application of the funds. At the beginning of the year President Rafael Correa lost his patience: “We will not submit. Let them know that this country is nobody’s colony. We won’t accept shameful conditions. Keep your money.” As a consequence, his chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Fander Falconi, resigned from office. Correa has now set a deadline for June 2010. If no deal is reached by then, the oil fields will be made available for drilling. Were this to happen, a significant opportunity for greater shared global responsibility and environmental justice would have been frittered away. (Christiane Roettger)

For more information on this topic see http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk… and http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Natu…

An interview with Ivonne Yanez of Acción Ecológica, an Ecuadorian environmental organization and co-founder of the initiative, is available at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/11/e…

It is funny how the Chinese cannot take responsibility when they do something right, and the Americans cannot take responsibility when they do something wrong.

Washington bailed out GM rather then making sure first they change products and Beijing stopped companies from buying into the GM misfits but find ways to explain this without harming the feelings of GM. Good riddance to the Hummer monster – specially to the yellow one that used to cruise the New York Mid-town East Side and driven by some chief from the Department of Sanitation.

CHINA INSISTS A FLAWED APPROACH HURT GM DEAL
By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai 2010-02-26, The Financial Times.

The collapse of General Motors’ plan to sell Hummer to a Chinese buyer reflects flaws in the deal rather than any reluctance by Beijing to sanction cross-border transactions, say Chinese government officials.

GM announced late on Wednesday that it had given up on efforts to sell its troubled Hummer operations to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, after nearly nine months of trying.

The Detroit carmaker said it would now wind down production of the heavy sports utility vehicle.

The collapse marks another difficult sales process for GM since it began to downsize its operations more than a year ago. The carmaker backed out of plans to sell its Opel business last year, while a deal to offload its Saturn brand fell apart.

But it this week succeeded in selling Saab, its Swedish marque, to Spyker, the Dutch boutique sports car maker.

Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which had never produced a passenger car, said the deal collapsed because it was “unable to obtain clearance [for] the transaction from the Chinese regulators within the proposed deal timeframe”.

The deal’s deadline had already been extended by a month while Tengzhong made a last-ditch effort to obtain Beijing’s blessing.

Analysts said yesterday that Beijing’s refusal to sanction the deal was scarcely surprising, given the central government’s recent strong emphasis on encouraging Chinese consumers to buy smaller, fuel-efficient cars.

To produce the hulking Hummer, with its image of wasteful excess, could hardly be less consistent with Beijing’s pro-green automotive policies, said Mike Dunne of Dunne & Co, an Asia-based automotive consultancy: “For them to approve the Hummer deal would be a big contradiction.”

A ministry of commerce spokesman said Tengzhong failed to provide a sound purchase plan. He reiterated China’s policy of encouraging development of a renewable, green and environmentally friendly economy.

The ministry has previously insisted it never received an application by Sichuan Tengzhong – but the company repeatedly denied it.

Yale Zhang, of CSM Automotive in Shanghai, said the deal violated not only Beijing’s environmental goals but also Chinese insistence on consolidation in the auto industry, which has about 50-100 carmakers.

“This was just the wrong group making the wrong purchase in the wrong way,” said an industry insider, noting Tengzhong did not obtain provisional clearance before announcing the deal.

Beijing is thought willing to sanction the much bigger $1bn acquisition of Volvo by Geely, the big private Chinese automaker. That deal is expected to be finalised by March’s end.

Last year BAIC, the Beijing automaker, acquired some assets of Saab from GM, with central government approval.

—————

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Goodbye, Hummer
Published: February 25, 2010

The world might be saved: It looks as if the Hummer is destined for the junkyard. The plan by General Motors to sell the muscular brand to a Chinese company went up in a puff of exhaust smoke on Wednesday after government officials in China said that they had never received the necessary application for approval and thus couldn’t grant it.

We suspect the deal collapsed because the Chinese Communist Party — which rarely shows much shame — is worried about China’s image as the most polluting nation on the planet. If true, that is good news.

There may be other good news. While some policy analysts have called — sensibly, in our opinion — for steeper gasoline taxes to encourage American drivers to embrace fuel efficiency, some economists have been skeptical. They acknowledge that drivers might decide to drive less and take public transportation more. But they warn that most could not afford to quickly dump their gas guzzlers for more fuel-efficient cars.

Yet given time, it seems, people change their ways. Americans drove 3.4 percent fewer miles in 2008 — when gas prices shot up to a peak of $4 a gallon nationally — than in 2007. And many who had bought the Hummer when a gallon of gas cost $2 decided that they couldn’t afford to tool around town in a small tank that would run, on average, around 10 miles on a gallon.

By last year, even as gas prices drifted downward, only about 9,000 Hummers were sold in the United States. That was a steep drop from 71,000 in 2006. In the spring of 2008, G.M. announced that it could not keep the sinking brand. The company is weighing two long-shot bids, but it is more than likely to wind down the brand.

Gasoline is back around $2.50 a gallon, and Americans are falling back on some of their old bad habits. Still, the Hummer’s tale is a vivid example of the power of gas prices to change Americans’ ways. It also suggests that, given the proper incentives and disincentives, all the world’s nations can embrace a greener future.

February 25, 2010,  from ALDE
Ukraine must make up for lost time.

The European Parliament today adopted its opinion on Ukraine following recent Presidential elections.

ALDE Vice President, Adina Valean (PNL, Romania), was a member of the EU’s election monitoring mission. In adopting the resolution Valean highlighted the five years of lost time in addressing the constitutional deficits in Ukraine that have held back genuine reforms and undermined Ukraine’s reputation as a stable democracy:

“Ukraine has a great deal of potential but it has sacrificed a lot of good will in recent years by its failure to resolve the internal checks and balances in its own system of governance.”

“The paradox is that the leaders of the Orange revolution now find themselves in opposition whilst Victor Yanukovych has begun his mandate by making overtures to the European Union.”

“Unfortunately for the moment there exists a lack of clarity on both sides regarding the nature of the EU’s present and future relationship with Ukraine which is hindering better cooperation and understanding. Following the change in Government, this is the first honest debate we need to have with the new leadership in Kiev, and to see what common ground and common projects we can find that are in the interest of both parties.”

—————–

It is quite clear that the Ukraine is torn by its internal division of a west that looks forward to the EU and an east that looks backwards to Russia. We said it before – nothing wrong with a split and allowing each part to attach itself to whomever they chose. But neigh – the Ukraine has had a government that was led by the east faction, and then by one that was led by the west faction that ended up splitting in two, now we have a return to power of the east faction that has learned something by being in opposition and now approaches the West before turning to Russia. We wish them luck but think that in face of the rising economies of Asia, it is for Russia itself to start changing and push for its own incorporation with Europe. Obviously, this will mean that Russia give up its nuclear high rolling, starts aligning with the EU on issues like Iran, allow for more rights to its own people. What Russia’s efforts will do will then cause further stalling in the creation of the European Federation, but at least give a good reason for the stalling of these advances within the EU that occur anyway. The Ukraine’s future is indeed the link to the entree of Russia to its own negotiations with the EU.

The William Antholis of Brookings  ideas will constitute a separate reporting from a discussion today at the UN University Think Tank.

———-

A new approach to tackling climate change.
By Jagdish Bhagwati
Published: February 23 2010
 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8a147a62-201a-…

The resignation last week of Yvo de Boer, the Dutch diplomat, as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reflected his frustration over the Copenhagen meeting andproblems in climate change treaty design.

In fact, the soon-to-expire Kyoto protocol before it was also flawed. Nearly all of the 36 industrialised rich countries in annex 1 (which excluded the developing countries) failed to fulfil the emission-reduction targets they had signed on to. The US (along with Australia) had not even ratified the protocol. The Senate, in a bipartisan 99-1 demonstration of defiance, had also rejected the protocol under the administration of Bill Clinton.

The failure of Copenhagen lay in the fact that creativity was required to bridge differences between rich and poor countries. It was badly missing. Building international institutions requires that we seek their principles in actual practice, not utopian ideas. We need to build the new protocol on principles in existing international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation. How can this be done?

First, while the Kyoto protocol had obfuscated the distinction, it is now customary for negotiators to distinguish between commitments arising from the “stock” and “flow” aspects of climate change. The former relates to commitments arising from historical carbon emissions; the latter to current emissions. But, though the language of “legally binding” commitments is routinely used, there is no process by which anyone’s feet can be held to the fire if the delivery falls short.

With the new protocol we need to draw on the example of the WTO. There, failure to deliver on accepted trade-openness obligations can be challenged and a dispute settlement process exists where an adverse finding leads to penalties. A climate change protocol where the commitments on stock or flow aspects are mere declarations with no consequences would lead to a charade and breed cynicism, not produce action.

Second, the pledge by rich countries at Copenhagen to spend $100bn (€73.5bn, £64.5bn) on mitigation and local adaptation may be seen as a response to the “stock” issue of past damage. But the sum has been explained as funds to be given to the poorest countries and that it can come at the expense of normal aid. This reflects faulty thinking.

The US in addressing domestic pollution created the superfund after the Love Canal incident, where a successful tort action was filed against Pacific Gas & Electric in 1996 for leaking toxic chromium into the ground water. Under the superfund legislation, hazardous waste has to be eliminated by the offending company. This tort liability is also “strict”, such that it exists even if the material discharged was not known at the time to be hazardous (as carbon emissions were until recently). In addition, the people hurt can make their own tort claims.

Rejecting this legal tradition in US domestic pollution, Todd Stern, the principal US negotiator, refused to concede any liability for past emissions. This stand is even more astonishing given that Barack Obama, the US president, belongs to a party that thrives on contributions from tort lawyers.

Evidently, the US needs to reverse this stand. Each of the rich countries needs to accept a tort liability which can be pro rata to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-estimated share of historic world carbon emissions. Since the payment would be on the tort principle, the idea that the funds would substitute for normal aid would be outrageous: you do not take away the pension of a person who has won a tort settlement.

Third, on “flow” liability for current emissions, the WTO principle of a “single undertaking”, where each member state accepts obligations, is a better model than one where the world is divided into annex 1 countries and the rest. But, as with the WTO, special treatment can be accorded to developing countries in the shape of suitably extended grace periods before the obligations kick in.

Finally, in determining these obligations for developing countries such as India, it is clear thatcutting emissions can damage growth. New technologies can help, provided they can be accessed at negligible cost. However, no one will subsidise the sale of technologies to India and China. But, why not take a sizeable fraction of the tort funds in each country and use them to create the technologies by open tenders and make them freely accessible to India or China – just as we did when the US used its public funds to develop new seeds in the 1960s and made them freely accessible by India et al. Those seeds created the Green Revolution in agriculture. The same strategy could create a revolution in climate change.

————
The writer is a professor at Columbia University and senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is chair of the Independent India-US Task Force on Copenhagen at Columbia Law School

WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION

A SPECIALIZED AGENCY OF THE UNITED NATIONS

___________________________________________

INVITATION TO THE MEDIA

WMO PRESS CONFERENCE
Date and time:          Friday 26 February, 11:45 am

Subject: First meeting of the High-Level Taskforce for the Global Framework for   Climate Services

Speakers:  Mr Michel Jarraud, WMO Secretary-General, with Members from the High-Level Taskforce

Venue: WMO Headquarters, Room B

7 bis, Avenue de la Paix, Geneva, Switzerland

BACKGROUND:
In September 2009, World Climate Conference-3 (WCC-3) decided to establish a Global Framework for Climate Services to “strengthen production, availability, delivery and application of science-based climate prediction and services”. Terms of reference were recently approved, and the composition of a High-Level Taskforce of independent advisers endorsed. On 25-26 February, the Taskforce will meet for the first time in Geneva, at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

HIGH-LEVEL TASKFORCE
Joaquim Chissano (Mozambique)
Jan Egeland (Norway)
Angus Friday (Grenada)
Eugenia Kalnay (Ms) (Argentina/USA)
Ricardo Lagos (Chile)
Julia Marton-Lefevre (Ms) (Hungary/France/USA)
Khotso Mokhele (South Africa)
Chiaki Mukai (Ms) (Japan)
Cristina Narbona Ruiz (Ms) (Spain)
Rajendra Singh Paroda (India)
Qin Dahe (China)
Emil Salim (Indonesia)
Mahmoud Abu-Zeid (Egypt)
Fiame Naomi Mata’afa (Ms) (Samoa)

For more information, including biographies: http://www.wmo.int/hlt-gfcs/index_en.htm…

————————

MEDIA ACCREDITATION

Journalists not accredited to the Palais des Nations, who wish to participate in the press conference, are encouraged to send a request to Gaëlle Sévenier, WMO Press Officer ( gsevenier at wmo.int) prior to 25 February 2010.

WMO is the United Nations’ authoritative voice on weather, climate and water

For more information please contact:  Communications and Public Affairs Office, WMO
Ms Carine Richard-Van Maele, Chief, Tel: +41 (0)22 730 83 15, E-mail:  cpa at wmo.int,
Ms Gaëlle Sévenier, Press Officer, Tel: +41 (0) 22 730 84 17, E-mail:  gsevenier at wmo.int

Internet website: http://www.wmo.int

 http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2010/02/b…

20 February 2010 – The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough ?
Posted by Big Gav in bloom energy, cogeneration, fuel cells.

CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” program has a look at cogeneration / fuel cell company Bloom Energy this weekend – The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?.
For the past year and a half, several large California corporations have been secretly using the “Bloom Box,” a potentially revolutionary fuel-cell system. Confirming this for the first time, several of the companies report this system is a more efficient, clean, and cost effective way to get electricity than off the power grid. Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras get the first look inside the secretive California company, just days before the Bloom Energy official launch, scheduled for this Wednesday (24). Stahl’s report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

John Donahoe, CEO of E-bay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that E-bay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl. Google, FedEx, Staples and Wal-Mart are among the first 20clients Bloom is confirming.

Stahl is the first journalist to be allowed into the Bloom Energy lab and factory where they currently make one box a day. The boxes create electricity by a chemical process that utilizes oxygen and fuel, but involves no combustion. Bloom’s founder and CEO, K.R. Sridhar, insists all the materials in the box are cheap and available in abundance. Bloom says each large Box – which can power about 100 homes – currently sells for $700-800,000. They hope within five to 10 years to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit.

Bloom Energy was the first clean energy start-up Kleiner-Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in. They currently invest in about 50 clean tech companies. Sridhar confirms the company has received over $400 million, making it one of the most expensive startups in history. The majority of that comes from Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who invested in Bloom, has high hopes. “The Bloom Box is intended to replace the [electric power] grid for its customer,” says Doerr. He thinks existing utility companies should not be threatened or have a problem with Bloom Energy. “The utility companies will see this as a solution. All they need to do is buy Bloom Boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity,” he says.

But there is another hurdle says Michael Kanellos, editor in chief of the Web site GreenTech Media. Even if Sridhar can mass produce his boxes and sell them cheaply enough, “The problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates that can probably do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents,” he tells Stahl.

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?

60 Minutes: First Customers Says Energy Machine Works And Saves Money.
CBS NEWS
CREATED: 02/18/2010 05:03:11 PM PST

(CBS)   For the past year and a half, several large California corporations have been secretly testing the “Bloom Box,” a potentially revolutionary fuel-cell system. Confirming this for the first time, several of the companies report this system is a more efficient, clean, and cost effective way to get electricity than off the power grid.

Lesley Stahl and “60 Minutes” cameras get the first look inside the secretive California company, just days before the Bloom Energy official launch, scheduled for next Wednesday (Feb. 24).

Stahl’s report will be broadcast this Sunday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

John Donahoe, CEO of E-bay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that E-bay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl.

Google, FedEx, Staples and Walmart are among the first 20 clients Bloom is confirming.

Stahl is the first journalist to be allowed into the Bloom Energy lab and factory where currently one box a day is built. The boxes create electricity by a chemical process that utilizes oxygen and fuel, but involves no combustion.
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Bloom’s founder and CEO, K.R. Sridhar, insists all the materials in the box are cheap and available in abundance. Bloom says each large box – which can power about 100 homes – currently sells for $700-800,000. They hope within five to 10 years to roll out a smaller home version for about $3,000 a unit.

Bloom Energy was the first clean energy start-up Kleiner-Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in. They currently invest in about 50 clean tech companies. Sridhar confirms the company has received over $400 million, making it one of the most expensive startups in history. The majority of that comes from Kleiner Perkins.

John Doerr, the Kleiner Perkins partner who invested in Bloom, has high hopes. “The Bloom Box is intended to replace the [electric power] grid for its customer,” says Doerr. He thinks existing utility companies should not be threatened or have a problem with Bloom Energy. “The utility companies will see this as a solution.All they need to do is buy Bloom Boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity,” he says.

To contact the Newsroom, call 907-274-1111.

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough?
CBS 60 Minutes: First Customers Says Energy Machine Works And Saves Money

Bloom Energy’s K.R. Sridhar, holding up fuel cells that are key components of the so-called “Bloom box.”

Lesley Stahl (CBS):  In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that’s inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.

You’ll generate your own electricity with the box and it’ll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.

It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive – until now.

K.R. Sridhar invited “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade.

Looking at one of the boxes, Sridhar told Stahl it could power an average U.S. home.

“The way we make it is in two blocks. This is a European home. The two put together is a U.S. home,” he explained.

“‘Cause we use twice as much energy, is that what you’re saying?” Stahl asked.

“Yeah, and this’ll power four Asian homes,” he replied.

“So four homes in India, your native country?” Stahl asked.

“Four to six homes in our country,” Sridhar replied.

“It sounds awfully dazzling,” Stahl remarked.

“It is real. It works,” he replied.

He says he knows it works because he originally invented a similar device for NASA. He really is a rocket scientist.

“This invention, working on Mars, would have allowed the NASA administrator to pick up a phone and say, ‘Mr. President, we know how to produce oxygen on Mars,’” Sridhar told Stahl.

“So this was going to produce oxygen so people could actually live on Mars?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” Sridhar replied.

When NASA scrapped that Mars mission, Sridhar had an idea: he reversed his Mars machine. Instead of it making oxygen, he pumped oxygen in.

He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.

In October 2001 he managed to get a meeting with John Doerr from the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

“How much do you think, ‘I need to come up with the next big thing’?” Stahl asked Doerr.

“Oh, that’s my job,” he replied. “To find entrepreneurs who are going to change the world and then help them.”

Doerr has certainly changed our world: he’s the one who discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google. When he listened to Sridhar, the idea seemed just as transformative: efficient, inexpensive, clean energy out of a box.

“But Google: $25 million. This man said, ‘How much money?’” Stahl asked.

“At the time he said over a hundred million dollars,” Doerr replied.

But according to Doerr that was okay.

“So nothing he said scared you?” Stahl asked.

“Oh, I wasn’t at all sure it could be done,” he replied.

(CBS)  But there was a selling point: clean energy was an emerging market, worth gazillions.

“I like to say that the new energy technologies could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” Doerr explained.

He told Stahl it was the firm’s first clean energy investment.

Many followed, and the clean tech revolution in Silicon Valley was off and running with start-ups that produce thin flexible solar panels, harness wind with giant balloons, or develop new fuels from algae.

But Bloom is among the most expensive. “I heard actually so far, not just from Kleiner Perkins, but total $400 million,” Stahl remarked.

“You’re in the ballpark,” Sridhar acknowledged.

With that kind of money comes a lot of buzz. “In Silicon Valley, every time a company raises over $100 million, and they haven’t come out with a product yet, everybody starts getting the heebie-jeebies,” Michael Kanellos, editor-in-chief of the Web site GreenTech Media, told Stahl.

Kanellos admitted he is skeptical. “I’m hopeful but I’m skeptical. ‘Cause people have tried fuel cells since the 1830s,” he explained. “And they’re great ideas, right? You just need producing energy at an instant. But they’re not easy. They’re like the divas of industrial equipment. You have to put platinum inside there. You’ve got zirconium. The little plates inside have to work not just for an hour or a day, but they have to work for 30 years, nonstop. And then the box has to be cheap to make.”

One thing stoking his skepticism: Sridhar has been hyper-secretive – there’s no sign on his building, a cryptic Web site, and no public progress reports.

Given the stealthiness, we were surprised when Sridhar showed us – for the very first time – how he makes the “secret sauce” of his fuel cell on the cheap.

He said he bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic. Then he coats it with green and black “inks” that he developed.

Sridhar told Stahl there is a secret formula. “And you take that and you apply that. You paint that on either side of this white ceramic to get a green layer and a black layer. And…that’s it.”

Sridhar told Stahl the finished product, a skinny fuel cell, would generate power.

One disk powers one light bulb; the taller the stack of disks, the more power it generates. In between each disk there’s a metal plate, but instead of platinum, Sridhar uses a cheap metal alloy.

The stacks are the heart of the Bloom box: put 64 of them together and you get something big enough to power a Starbucks.

Sridhar offered to give Stahl a sneak peek inside the Bloom box.

“All those modules that we saw go into this big box. Fuel goes in, air goes in, out comes electricity,” he explained.

(CBS)  Asked if Bloom box is intended to get rid of the grid, John Doerr told Stahl, “The Bloom box is intended to replace the grid…for its customers. It’s cheaper than the grid, it’s cleaner than the grid.”

“Now, won’t the utility companies see this as a threat and try to crush Bloom?” Stahl asked.

“No, I think the utility companies will see this as a solution,” Doerr said. “All they need to do is buy Bloom boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity and operate.”

“They’ll buy these boxes?” Stahl asked.

“They buy nuclear power plants. They buy gas turbines from General Electric,” he pointed out.

To make power, you’d still need fuel. Many past fuel cells failed because they needed expensive pure hydrogen. Not this box.

“Our system can use fossil fuels like natural gas. Our system can use renewable fuels like landfill gas, bio-gas,” Sridhar told Stahl. “We can use solar.”

“You know, it’s very difficult for us to come in here and make an evaluation. How are we supposed to know whether what you’re saying is true?” Stahl asked.

“Why don’t we talk to our first customers?” he replied.

Yes, he already has customers. Twenty large, well-known companies have quietly bought and are testing Bloom boxes in California.

Like FedEx. We were at their hub in Oakland, the day Bloom installed their boxes, each one costing $700-800,000.

One reason the companies have signed up is that in California 20 percent of the cost is subsidized by the state, and there’s a 30 percent federal tax break because it’s a “green” technology. In other words: the price is cut in half.

“We have FedEx, we have Walmart,” Sridhar explained.

He told Stahl the first customer was Google.

Four units have been powering a Google datacenter for 18 months. They use natural gas, but half as much as would be required for a traditional power plant.

Sridhar told Stahl that three weeks in at Google, suddenly one of the boxes just stopped.

Asked if he panicked, he told Stahl, “For a short while… yes.”

He fixed that; then there was another incident. “The air filters clog up and air is not coming into the system because the highway is kicking dirt. You just flip the system around, and the problem is gone,” he explained.

Another company that has bought and is testing the Bloom box so Sridhar can work out the kinks is eBay. Its boxes are on the lawn in the middle of its campus in San Jose.

John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, says its five boxes were installed nine months ago and have already saved the company more than $100,000 in electricity costs.

“It’s been very successful thus far. They’ve done what they said they would do,” he told Stahl.

eBay’s boxes run on bio-gas made from landfill waste, so they’re carbon neutral. Donahoe took us up to the roof to show off the company’s more than 3,000 solar panels. But they generate a lot less electricity than the boxes on the lawn.

“So this, on five buildings, acres and acres and acres,” Stahl remarked.

“Yes. The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” Donahoe said. “When you average it over seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the Bloom box puts out five times as much power that we can actually use.”

(CBS)  But not everyone is convinced that even if the technology works, Bloom – that now makes one box a day – will ever be able to be as big as its backers say.

“Going from a few to mass-manufacturing’s going to be tough. And then making them so people won’t run away at the price tag. It needs to be cheaper than solar. It needs to be cheaper than wind,” a

href=”http://www.greentechmedia.com/”target=new”>GreenTech Media’s Michael Kanellos told Stahl.

“What if he can get the price way down? He claims he can,” she asked.

“And if he can, the problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates probably can do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents; they have research teams that have looked at this,” Kanellos replied.

“What do you think the chances are that in ten-plus years you and I will each have a Bloom box in our basements?” Stahl asked.

“Twenty percent,” Kanellos replied. “But it’s going to say ‘G.E.’”

“Companies that you have bet on, they haven’t all succeeded?” Stahl asked John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins.

“I have some famous failures,” he acknowledged.

Doerr is praying that Bloom is not the next Segway, as he and Sridhar get ready for the company’s official launch this Wednesday. They’re pulling out all the stops, including high profile endorsements.

“I have seen the technology and it works,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell said.

He joined Bloom’s board of directors last year.

Asked if this is the answer to our energy problems, Powell told Stahl, “I think that’s too big a claim to make. I think it is part of the transformation of the energy system. But I think the Bloom boxes will make a significant contribution.”

To make a contribution, in Sridhar’s mind, Bloom boxes will power not just our richest companies, but remote villages in Africa and all our houses.

“In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home,” he told Stahl.

He said a unit should cost an average person less than $3,000.

“You are an idealist,” Stahl remarked.

“You know, it’s about seeing the world as what it can be and not what it is,” Sridhar replied.

“I see you seeing a Bloom box in the basement of the White House,” she said.

“Absolutely. I would love that to go on the lawn,” he replied.

“So, forget…the basement. You want the Bloom box in the Rose Garden?” Stahl asked.

“Maybe next to that organic vegetable garden,” Sridhar joked. “I would be happy with that.”

Inside Politics Daily
Support for Obama and Democrats Slips Among 18-to-29 Year Olds.
CPAC Gets Younger, Hipper, More High Tech.

Conservative Favorites for 2012:
Texas Rep. Ron Paul was the clear winner of a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Saturday, garnering 31 percent of the vote. Click through to see the next favorites.

Patricia Murphy, Columnist

Ron Paul Wins CPAC Straw Poll, Sarah Palin is Third With 7 Percent.
POSTED: 02/20/10

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) ran away with the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday, with 31 percent of the vote. Paul’s libertarian conservative message has made him a hero to small-government Republicans for years, but this is the first CPAC straw poll he has ever won.

Paul’s victory came as a surprise to supporters of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, who has won the straw poll at this event for the last four years. Romney was second this year, with 22 percent.

Another surprise came with Sarah Palin’s third-place finish, with 7 percent of the vote. Palin is a favorite of the conservative base, but was one of the few Republicans included in the straw poll ballot who did not attend or speak to the conference.

CPAC’s straw poll is an unscientific, voluntary poll, but it has served as a barometer of support for possible Republican presidential candidates among their all-important conservative base.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul was the clear winner of a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Saturday, garnering 31 percent of the vote. Click through to see the next favorites.
 http://xml.channel.aol.com/xmlpublisher/…

 http://www.aolcdn.com/ke/media_gallery/v…

- – - -
Here are the full results:

Rep. Ron Paul- 31 percent

Mitt Romney- 22 percent

Sarah Palin- 7 percent.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty – 6 percent

Rep. Mike Pence- 5 percent

Mike Huckabee- 4 percent

Newt Gingrich- 4 percent

Gov. Mitch Daniels- 2 percent

Rick Santorum- 2 percent

Sen. John Thune- 2 percent

Gov. Haley Barbour- 1 percent.

———

The highest rated comments that represent best that meeting were:

from: Carlene’s Visit
11:23PM Feb 20th 2010
OBAMA IS NEITHER A DEMOCRAT OR A REPUBLICAN AND HE IS NOT EVEN A LIBERAL -
HE IS A PROGRESSIVE SOCIALIST LEADER WHO HAS DONE NOTHING TO HELP AMERICA
BUT PUT US FURTHER IN DEBT.

RATE THIS COMMENT: (150)

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from: fmtflf
11:53PM Feb 20th 2010

I like Ron Paul…if you watch the debates from the last election, everything he said was going to happen in the financial markets happened! he tried to get people to listen and fix this and nobody would. he is the only politician that is screaming for smaller govt and plans to remove the irs and income tax, as his reduction in govt would allow for this. we all can agree that govt spending is out of control and he’s got a plan to fix that. I also like that he supports bringing our military home from all over the world. We don’t need to be in Japan and Germany…plus we can’t afford to keep them there. fb

RATE THIS COMMENT: (166)

——————–

Matt Lewis, Contributor Politics Daily.
CPAC Gets Younger, Hipper, More High Tech.
POSTED: 02/21/10
Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and Liz (and Dick) Cheney gave big speeches on the opening day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — and Glenn Beck closed it to a rousing ovation, but just as interesting as the speakers on stage was the ages of the people sitting in the seats, congregated around the bars and cafes, and holding court in the lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

I speak from experience. My first CPAC conference was eleven years ago. Since then, I’ve attended seven or eight of the annual affairs. The most obvious difference this year is that there are more young people in attendance.
CPAC director Lisa De Pasqual told me: “Our pre-registration numbers were 20 percent above last year’s. We’re expecting over 10,000 attendees and more than half of them are college students. I think it really speaks to the excitement and energy in the conservative movement right now.”
One seasoned CPAC veteran, who asked not be named, bluntly told me, “I’ve been coming to these for years. This used to be a convention of blue hairs; now it has youthful energy.” If you’re a conservative — as I am — it was nice to see fresh young faces, who attend at a greatly reduced price. “Blue dog” Democrats are one thing, blue-haired Republicans are quite another.
Liberal blogger Bill Scher, who has gone to previous CPAC’s, speculated to me that the increase in young attendees is a result of “the James O’Keefe Effect” — a referece to someone their own age who made a splash. Scher’s theory is that young conservatives now have a contemporary example of a person in their age bracket who made a difference, and got lots of attention in the process.
For young conservatives, who exist in a sea of skepticism, if not downright hostility, on the typical college campus, CPAC offers a safe haven where they can network with other like-minded students. A student named Kelly Schumacher, who attends college in Milwaukee, told me, “It’s nice to have a conversation with someone who isn’t arguing with you.”
Added Chelsea Lapp, a high school student attending CPAC with 18 of her classmates at Westfield Academy near Buffalo, New York: “Everybody seems pretty pumped up about it.”
Jason Mattera, a young conservative who works for Young America’s Foundation, was so pumped that he gave a rousing, if politically incorrect, speech at CPAC — and found himself singled out for criticism in the New York Times for his trouble. That might mortify a typical liberal college student. Here, it’s a badge of honor.
Conference organizers did more than just offer to reduce the entry fees for students. For the past few years, bloggers had been relegated to the nether reaches of an exhibition hall, requiring them to dash upstairs to wait in line for the keynote speakers, and then scurry back to their warrens to write up something about the speech — before setting out in search off a stray WiFi connection. This year, as New Media consultant Justin Hart told me, “bloggers have the best seats in the house. WiFi was up … and the blogger row table has gone from seating 25 to seating about 100.”
“Our new set-up for Bloggers Lounge is packed thanks to Erick Erickson and Redstate.com,” explained De Pasqual, referring to relatively new stars of the conservative blogosphere. “We’ve also integrated a lot of panels and speakers who can educate attendees about modern media success stories and how they can apply them to their efforts.”
Aside from bloggers getting a huge upgrade, and aside from seeing more young people than ever, it was also interesting to note who was not seen. There are always gadflies who show up at these things — you see them year in and year out — but this year, they were noticeably in short supply. I had assumed that the Tea Party movement would mean an influx of unkempt grassroots activists at CPAC, but if they were here, they brought their khaki pants with them.

Yvo de Boer, the new free man, gives  to The Financial Times his first interview as elder statesman – and we gleaned three elements in his statement as his very balanced views after 20 years of experience with the climate international problematics.

(1) The Copenhagen non-binding outcome has nevertheless provided us with a good basis for a treaty.

It Copenhagen accord has for the first time drown from from both – rich and poor countries pledges to limit their  GHG emissions, and promised financial assistance from the developed to the developing world to do so. (we did in effect earlier today post already such an agreement between Japan and Kenya.)

(2) There is no practical hope that a binding treaty that has both form and content – can be signed at the meeting of December 2010 in Mexico. (Mr. de Boer has removed the smiley face that the UNSG has imposed on him these last two years)

(3) While governments provide the necessary policy framework for addressing climate change, the real solutions must come from business. As such there are two stages in the process:

(a) Governments must use Taxes or a Cap & Trade methodology to limit emissions.  No corporation can justify the investment required to reduce their carbon intensity without confidence that carbon emissions will become and remain much costlier than today, with few loopholes for those unwilling to pay. Only government can provide that predictability. As we see it today – the EU failed in its effort because of the permit system that allowed for too many permits to float around, and for the US – even the bill that is stalled in Congress is useless as it was emasculated by emission permits giveaways to favored sectors. (what he is saying is what we say all the time – government is there in order to govern – without this nothing logical will evolve from plain empty handed competition.)

(b) If governments dared to embark on real efforts to limit emissions – as long as it is more then just a token idea – the private sector would take it in its stride, it would even thrive, especially the low-carbon companies and sectors that would emerge to replace those unable to kick the carbon habit.

———

We knew already that Yvo de Boer will join KPMG consulting. We know that he is not the first to jump the public policy wagon for the private sector. Al Gore, former US Vice President and father of The Inconvenient Truth” has shown the way He is doing very well – thank you – in the corporate world. We know of people that were formerly with Greenpeace that make now a good living supporting renewable energy corporations.

What we did not know before this interview is that in the academic world, Mr. de Boer chose Yale University and the University of Utrecht that will benefit from his direct involvement.

———

Strange remarks we saw from some that did very little to help the climate cause earlier, but now look down at Mr. de Boer as if he were a traitor to that lost cause to which they did not put their honest heart earlier. Specifically we found the mention to Paul Bledsoe the policy director at the Washington – US National Commission on Energy Policy and former White House adviser.

He said: “This resignation is simply dispiriting – if someone as politically adept, dedicated and charismatic as Yvo de Boer can’t bring the UN process to heel, then the process is broken and has to be reformed.” That is true but disingenuous – why did he not work harder at creating the US government solution that could have been helpful to that UN process? After all, there were times that even the UN was trying to achieve climate goals. On the other hand, the fact that BP and ConocoPhillips walked out from a business pro-climate group this week, came about because they found that the White House will subsidize nuclear power so the price of energy stays low – but oil companies are not electric utilities to be subsidized under this plan – so why should they be part of a program that can only harm them. This was clearly a give-away to the nuclear lobby on the back of the oil lobby – and thus two out of the only three progressive oil companies, that dream of becoming energy companies, found it completely irrational of participating in the backing of an Administration that did not think through all aspects of the issues.

Now, just two nights ago, at a meeting at a top University here, I saw people from Academia and Businesses (the AB of the process) trying to spread the word about what they are doing, but did also not understand the basic policy logic on which they were trying to sell – but on this on a different posting. Here it will suffice to say that we will look forward at what Mr. de Boer will do for Yale University with the strong hope that from now on he will be ready to stand up for what he believes, without bowing to UN or business interests that will flock on him like vultures trying to push him in their preferred directions. We had our difficulty with his bowing to the UN bosses, but we expect to see no future problem in his AB role.

Dr. ElBaradei was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1942, son of the late Mostafa ElBaradei, a lawyer and former President of the Egyptian Bar Association. His father often found himself at odds with the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. ElBaradei’s father was also a supporter of democratic rights in Egypt, supporting a free press and a legal system that was independent.

The son gained a Bachelor’s degree in Law in 1962 at the University of Cairo, and a Doctorate in International Law at the New York University School of Law in 1974. He began his career in the Egyptian Diplomatic Service in 1964, serving on two occasions in the Permanent Missions of Egypt to the United Nations in New York and Geneva, in charge of political, legal and arms control issues. From 1974 to 1978 he was a special assistant to the Foreign Minister of Egypt.

In 1980 he left the Egyptian Diplomatic Service for work at the United Nations, and became a senior fellow in charge of the International Law Program at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). From 1981 to 1987 he was also an Adjunct Professor of International Law at the New York University School of Law.

From 1984, Dr. ElBaradei has moved to a substantial senior staff member position of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Secretariat, in Vienna, holding a number of high-level policy positions, including Agency’s Legal Adviser and subsequently Assistant Director General for External Relations under  former Swedish Foreign Minister Hans Blix as Director General. The IAEA was set up by suggestions in 1953 from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the world´s sleepy “Atoms for Peace” organization in 1957. It was set up as a UN affiliate that eventually had to become the UN watchdog on nuclear proliferation matters. The first Director General was American, W. Sterling Cole, 1957–1961 – followed by two Swedes 1961-1997 as nuclear issues meant arbitrating between the US ans the Soviet Union.

ElBaradei under UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992-1996), another Egyptian, and it was assumed that this is an opening to what the UN called the Third World, he was then appointed to the office of the Director General of the IAEA effective 1 December 1997, and reappointed to a third term in September 2005 under UNSG Kofi Annan (1997-2006). In November 2009 he retired from that position after three terms of four years, and was succeeded by the Japanese Yukiya Amano defeating Abdul Samad Minty of South Africa and Luis E. Echávarri? of Spain.

Elbaradei’s tenure has been marked by high profile non-proliferation issues including the inspections in Iraq preceding the March 2003 invasion and tensions over the nuclear program of Iran – one could say that a main issue of the IAEA in his time was the ongoing activities to create an Islamic bomb.

In 2005, The United States initially voiced opposition to his election to a third four-year term. In a May 2005 interview with the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, charged former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton with an underhanded campaign to unseat ElBaradei. “Mr. Bolton overstepped his bounds in his moves and gyrations to try to keep [ElBaradei] from being reappointed as [IAEA] head,” Wilkerson said. The Washington Post reported in December 2004 that the Bush administration had intercepted dozens of ElBaradei’s phone calls with Iranian diplomats and was scrutinizing them for evidence they could use to force him out. IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the agency worked on “the assumption that one or more entities may be listening to our conversations”. “It’s not how we would prefer to work, but it is the reality. At the end of the day, we have nothing to hide,” he said. Iran responded to the Washington Post reports by accusing the United States of violating international law in intercepting the communications. We guesthe deeds were illegal but iran’s actions were worse. What about ElBaradei?

The United States was the only country to oppose ElBaradei’s reappointment and eventually failed to win enough support from other countries to oust ElBaradei. On 9 June 2005, after a meeting between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ElBaradei, the United States dropped its objections. Among countries that supported ElBaradei were China, Russia, Germany and France. China praised his leadership and objectivity and supported him for doing “substantial fruitful work, which has maintained the agency’s role and credit in international non-proliferation and promoted the development of peaceful use of nuclear energy.”  France, Germany, and some developing countries, have made clear their support for ElBaradei as well, Russia issued a strong statement in favor of re-electing him as soon as possible, and ElBaradei was unanimously re-appointed by the IAEA Board on 13 June 2005. In 2008 ElBaradei said he would not be seeking a fourth term as Director General. One could say that the squirmish with the US because of the US false alegation regarding the Iraqi bomb, had much to do with El Baradei and the IAEA under his leadership, getting the Nobel Prize for Peace. It seems that this was rather a reaction to US high-handedness. Whatever – not much love was lost between the US last two Administrations and ElBaradei.

The current Board members of the IAEA are: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, China, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Malaysia, Mongolia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, and the USA, Uruguay, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Venezuela) 2009–2010).

ElBaradei’s two children live and work in London.

ElBaradei’s name has been circulated recently by opposition groups as a possible candidate to succeed President Hosny Mubarak to Egypt’s highest executive position. ElBaradei demanded that certain conditions have to be met to ensure fair elections accompanied by changes to the constitution that will allow more freedom for independent candidates before he would actually consider running for presidency. Several opposition groups and parties have endorsed him, considering him a neutral figure who could transition the country to greater democracy.

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Mr. Ahmad Fawzi, currently News and Media Division Director under the UN USG for Communications and Public Information, has held this position for quite a while and was thus able to shape also the roster of who is allowed to participate at UN Press conferences.

His activities at the UN Headquarters in New York started with his  serving as Deputy Spokesman for UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali from 1992 through 1996 or during the whole time that Mr. Boutros-Ghali held that job.It was thus Mr. Butros Ghali who brought him to the Headquarters.

Born in Cairo on 28 March 1948, Mr. Fawzi has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and Language from Cairo University. He pursued post- graduate studies at the Newhouse School of Communications of Syracuse University, New York.

Before joining the United Nations, he worked for many years in broadcast journalism, as a news editor, reporter and regional news operations manager. Much of his work was in the Middle East and much of it with Reuters. We assume that his contacts with Mr. Boutros-Ghali started in the Middle East and Egypt – perhaps back to interviews at time Mr. Boutros Ghali was part of the Government of Egypt.

After the Boutros-Ghali years, during the Kofi Annan Years at the UN, and until now, Mr. Fawzi continued to work with the UN Department of Public Information and had various stints like his being spokesman for Lakhdar Brahimi the UN special envoy to Iraq.

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Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Born the 14 November 1922 in Cairo (Egypt) into a most distinguished Coptic Christian family, Mr Boutros-Ghali received a bachelor’s degree from Cairo University (1946) and a Ph.D. in international law from the University of Paris (1949). He then held a professorship at Cairo University and lectured in international law and international affairs at various universities and institutes in the United States, Europe, India, the Middle East.

From 1960 to about 1975, Boutros-Ghali founded, edited, and wrote for Al-Ahram Iqtisadi, where his beat was regional and international law, diplomacy and political science. He was a member of Parliament in Egypt, and helped negotiate the 1978 Camp David accords, bringing peace between Egypt and Israel. He worked with President Sadat’s foreign service, was known to oppose originally Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem but later was involved in furthering the succes of that mission. He was sort of an odd man in Cairo. His wife – the former Leia Maria Nadler was Jewish.

Hosni Mubarak was appointed Vice President in 1975, and assumed the presidency on 14 October 1981, following the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat. He really was not interested in keeping Mr. Boutros Ghali in Egypt, and was quite happy to volunteer his services to the UN when that opportunity arose. So he was instrumental in getting Mr. Boutros-Ghali elected UN Secretary- General in 1992 where he lasted till 1996.

Looking back – Mr. Boutros Ghali was the former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1992-1996) and Secretary-General of the International Organization of Francophonie (1997-2002). Currently he is president of the National Council of Human Rights of Egypt, he also chairs the International Panel on Democracy and Development (IPDD), set up by UNESCO in 1998. He is also a member of the Support Committee of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. From his work at the UN – really nothing positive to be remembered. Basically, our present posting argues that his two appointments – those he made possible to Messrs. ElBaradei and Fawzi – perhapse were his longest lasting legacies he left behind at the UN. Also, some other people he introduced to the UN, including members of his wife’s family, turned up as reasons for the UN blunder that was discovered, under his successor’s time at the UN helm, in what becanme the oil-for-food scandal. The Paul Volker investigation of that affair has left stained both named UNSGs.

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Having introduced the actors – let us now look at the latest news:

Hosni Mubarak is now in his 30th year of his Presidency – that is he is ending his 5-th consecutive six year term. There will be elections, probably in a year – in 2011, but there are no candidates because of the way Mubarak kept out of site any budding opposition. Even what was supposed to be the opening for democratization – the 2005 constitutional amendment that established multi-candidate presidential elections in Egypt came with rules designed to ensure that no independents could easily enter  the race, helping to stifle challenges to Mr. Mubarak’s rule. In fact, even discussing who would replace Hosni Mubaraq was not tolerated. The feeling is that Hosni Mubaraq has full intent to stay on and then pass the mantle to his son – Gamal Mubarak – we think named so after Gamal Nasser – the previous big Chief that run Egypt as if it were still in  the Pharaohnic days – and the whole Arab world was just larger Egypt.

Anwar Sadat (Muhammad Anwar El Sadat, or Anwar El Sadat  was the third President of Egypt, serving from 15 October 1970 until his assassination by Islamists on 6 October 1981 – he was indeed different and he paid with his life for having tried to do something for his country. He also did not ask for a parliament’s permission but at least did not put himself at the center of is world.

And the press? That is all government owned – what is written is the word that comes from Mubarak – that is the kind of Journalism that conquered the UN thanks to Ahmad Fawzi – a good disciple of his Egyptian friends – you get a Press Release and don’t ask questions – you write it down because that is what you are there for. The notion that there is something like a Media Think-Tank, or Media Independent Thinking that does not serve a cause – is unheard off on the shores of the Nile.

But then, Egypt’s people are proud people indeed. They are proud that one of theirs has gotten the Nobel Prize, they also are tired of the face of the old Pharaoh – they are ready to induct ElBaredei to run for the Presidency. He is free and available – but what about those rules/ he asks Egypt to change the rules so that there is an open election and he is ready to run – he seems to be the kind of person that is saying up-front that he is not blind to the barriers that Mubarak encircled himself – something like the security wall of the Israelis.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the basic resistance that was connected in the past with those that Killed Anwar Sadat, or helped foot the Al Kaeda in its infancy, religious nationalistic fanatics that are afraid of nothing – they are still there and sort of tolerated by Mubarak who remembers that they made it all possible for him 30 year ago, they say now: “The question is, can ElBaradei, who lived most of his life – 30 years – working in Europe, can he lead a new Egyptian revolution for change?

El Baradei came for a 10 day visit last week and there were 1,000 people waiting for him at the airport for six hours. his Facebook numbers 60,000 Egyptians – they feel that for the first time there is a viable option besides Mubarak and his son – his actual persona is the symbol that there can be an alternative because some Egyptians speak up now and say – it is our right to chose the person who will represent us. Even the Muslim brotherhood agrees to see in El Baradei the transition to a new Egypt.

Considering the high level of corruption in Egypt, the fact that El Baradei came from outside, so he is not sullied by the home-grown stagnation of Egyptian politics, he has a terrific advantage of being that fresh face they would like to induct.

OK – that is ElBaradei – what about Fawzi? He is retiring next month and we suggest he can be available to be thrown into this new Egyptian brew. He is not a new face, but he knows how to look as media while backing a cause he has in mind. I really do not think that what he had in mind was Mubarak, I rather think he remembers Boutros-Ghali and other Arab interests – be it oil or culture. We do not think that ElBaradei either has fully absorbed Western liberalism and Egypt might not be ready for this either, what seems to be needed is the kind of spokesperson that knows to dress up the concerns of the Middle East environment, and Egypt,  with a good race-horse like ElBaradei, can concoct the public winning formula. So – here for a step of loosing up the frozen major States of the Middle East – Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The first wave of reporting was only  a rewrite of the UNFCCC Press release. Then came some further wording from an AP interview. Now we see the start of thinking journalism.

The bottom line seems to be: “Bickering at Copenhagen convinced many countries that the UN negotiating process must be reformed, and that agreement might be sought in other forums.” So, here goes that proverbial 192 UN Member States list or the 193 figure that appears when the UNFCCC is mentioned. We never understood why that discrepancy and assumed the fault is with us for not knowing where to put the EU, Taiwan, the Vatican, Puerto Rico, Palestine … and some other such preferred UN preoccupations.

Fiona Harvey of the Financial Times quotes an official of a developed country: &quot;You have to wonder whether you could get moremovement by working in smaller groups.&quot; If you want to get results indeed – you must bring together the World’s biggest GHG emitters.

The New York City newspapers – The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal went over to the UN and got hold of Janos Pasztor, the potentially homeless head of the “in-Headquarter-house” climate-change team-head for UNSG Ban Ki-moon.

{On “homeless” – As we reported earlier: “The UN’s and Ban’s climate unit under Janos Pasztor, which was told there was no room for it in the UN’s Temporary North Lawn Conference Building where Ban has his office, is now looking at space in the Alcoa Building on 48th Street, Inner City Press is told. For now, they are left behind in the nearly empty UN skyscraper where asbestos removal has already begun.”}

According to the WSJ – Janos Pasztor said: “It does not matter what a senior UN civil servant does, ultimately – if governments are not ready to sign off on an agreement, then they will not sign off on an agreement;” Mr. Pasztor said that Mr. de Boer called Mr. Ban “two days ago;” to inform him of the decision. Mr. de Boer’s four-years appointment was going till September and he could have asked Mr. Ban to appoint him for another term, but we never came to that point, he said. Asked whether Mr. Ban would have reappointed Mr. de Boer, Mr. Pasztor said: ‘That we don’t know.”

Mr. Pasztor said further that Mr. Ban will begin looking for a successor for Mr. de Boer “extremely quickly;” he does not know who might be considered.

Neil MacFarquhar and John M. Broder ot the NYT did some further inquiries outside the UN.

Mark Kenber, the policy director for the Climate Group, an international organization involving industry that wants to see a climate agreement, said that it is probably the right time to get a fresh face in. It was a grueling two years of negotiations and a new face would re-spark the process.

Michael A. Levi, the climate change expert at the Council on Foreign Relations said that Yvo de Boer has put in a lot of time towards a very well-defined end, and the fact he resigns means that he did not see potential success on the horizon of COP 16, this year. Had he seen the possibility that there might be a positive outcome before the end of the year, he would have stuck with it so he would get credit for his work.

Others faulted the UN team for not having moved faster to find areas where agreement among those 190+ participating member states at Copenhagen, such as the preservation of rainforests, could have been agreed upon in smaller fora first. Another such topic could have been the taxing of livestock emissions that is being described in today’s FT that says FAO is ready to help review the meat industry.

So, after 48 hours since Yvo de Boer’s resignation, provided that the UN does not rush in with a Ban Ki-moon new appointment, but is ready to listen to possible new opportunities, this might turn out as a blessing in disguise – an opening for change – an actual new opportunity.

Some question the UNFCCC process itself – but we think that this is rather too much. It does not remember that the UNFCCC was born in Rio de Janeiro in the 1992 UNCED Conference – just because there was no agreement to have a full convention like it was the case with Biodiversity and in regard to Arid and Semi-Arid lands and Desertification.

Decreasing the size of the negotiation table, by bringing the number of participants down to those that are the most serious polluters, with delegations present from groups most seriously affected, could be more fit to help bring about the needed agreements.

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And From Canada – the host for the 2010 meetings of the G8 and G20:

from Shawn McCarthy, Ottawa — From Friday’s Globe and Mail reporting.
Published on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010
Mr. de Boer – who had worked tirelessly to reach a consensus at Copenhagen – said he was depressed for weeks after the summit ended with a vague, non-binding agreement among major emitters known as the Copenhagen Accord. Angry recriminations resulted from Copenhagen’s failure to produce a more substantial document, and the refusal of the participants to unanimously endorse even the more modest pact.

Mr. de Boer’s successor – to be appointed by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon – will not only have to reinvigorate the effort to achieve a treaty, he will need to revisit the UN process itself. The requirement for consensus may make it impossible to reach an accord in Mexico, even in the unlikely event that an agreement can be achieved among major emitters. Some critics suggest Mr. de Boer was part of the problem – bringing a rigid, bureaucratic approach to the international talks.

“I never had the sense that we were dealing with a person of vision, a person who could see the changes that were necessary in the international system to get a climate-change agreement,” said Robert Page, chairman of Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Mr. Robert Page suggested the new UNFCCC executive director will likely have to come from a major developing country – such as Brazil – and be committed to reforming the UN process.

In Denmark, a small group of countries blocked the conference as a whole from adopting the Copenhagen Accord, which had been brokered at the 11th hour by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is urging a reform that would see agreement based on a 75-per-cent majority, rather than unanimity. The Catch-22: The UN requires consensus to change the voting rules.

“As far as the process goes, we’re in a lot of trouble,” said John Drexhage, climate-change director for the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development and former Canadian negotiator.

“We need to have very realistic expectations for Mexico. I think it would be a mistake to push for a legally binding comprehensive agreement by Mexico. That’s just not going to happen with the current state of affairs.”

Indeed, Mr. Drexhage said Mr. de Boer’s successor faces a convergence of factors that will make it extremely difficult to regain momentum for the international talks.

Public skepticism about the dangers posed by climate change has risen, fuelled by incidents in which a few researchers manipulated data to get desired results, and the inclusion of non-scientific information in the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa, India and China – the so-called BASIC group – have made clear they will not subject their emission-reduction policies to international verification. Any commitments they have made are conditional on the developed world – notably the United States – taking strong action, and delivering promised financing to the developing world.

Mr. Obama faces major hurdles in getting a climate bill passed in Congress this year, raising questions about his administration’s commitment to reduce emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. And as the United States goes, so goes Canada.

World leaders have a couple of opportunities to advance the broad commitments of the Copenhagen Accord into a more robust agreement, including a May meeting in Bonn, Germany, and the Group of Eight/Group of 20 summits to be hosted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper this summer.

The G8 and G20 can deliver progress – especially the G20, which includes China, India, Brazil and Mexico. But it remains unclear whether Mr. Harper, who is hosting the meetings and influences the agendas, will make climate change a priority.

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 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20…

Yvo de Boer’s successor has big footprints to fill: The former head of the UN’s climate body commanded great respect in a near-impossible job, but in the end, he failed. His successor must not.

Because De Boer took over from another Dutchman in 2006, there will be strong pressure on the UN to choose his successor from a developing country. “I would like to see someone from a developing country who can negotiate with those countries,” Seb Walhain, the head of environmental markets at Fortis Netherlands, told Reuters. Because so much is at stake and the talks are at such an advanced stage, the appointment is likely to be fiercely contested.

Countries will want an early decision, but the UN’s selection process is laborious. A successor is likely to be chosen from within the UN system, though there will be few people considered diplomatically acceptable or authoritative enough to resist world leaders and muscle though an agreement acceptable to all.

De Boer’s successor’s first tasks will be to keep the US aboard the negotiations and to clear up the vexed question of the legal status of the Copenhagen accord, the deal struck at Copenhagen by a small group but not endorsed by a majority of countries.

Get it right, and the new head of the UNFCCC will be celebrated as the man or woman who steered the whole world to a historic agreement that could save the planet from calamitous climate change. Get it wrong, and negotiations could be set back a decade.