• Obama, Netanyahu, Abbas to Meet Tuesday at UN; Ehud Barak: Iran Remains Top Priority – Ethan Bronner
  President Obama will meet in New York on Tuesday with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and Palestinian Chairman Abbas. On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Barak meets in Washington with Defense Secretary Gates. Barak said concern about Iran remains a top priority and that Israel favors tough sanctions after limited and well-defined diplomatic efforts being pursued by the Americans.
  In an interview last week, Barak was quoted as saying that Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel. The statement raised eyebrows in the U.S. because it seemed to suggest that Israel might be growing less concerned about Iranian nuclear weapons. But in a telephone interview, Barak said this was not the case. He simply wanted to urge his fellow citizens to refrain from panic over the Iranian program. (New York Times)
  See also Abbas to Meet Obama, Netanyahu, But Won’t Negotiate – Alastair Macdonald (Reuters)
• Gates: Iranian Medium-Range Missile Threat Developing More Rapidly Than Previously Thought
  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last week explained the reasons behind the change in the U.S. missile defense posture: There has been “a change in our intelligence community’s 2006 view of the Iranian threat: The intelligence community now assesses that the threat from Iran’s short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, such as the Shahab-3, is developing more rapidly than previously projected. This poses an increased and more immediate threat to our forces on the European continent, as well as to our allies.”  (U.S. Department of Defense)
• Clinton: “We Have No Appetite for Talks Without Action”
  Secretary of State Clinton told the Brookings Institution on Friday: “Iran’s continued failure to live up to its obligations carries profound consequences – for the security of the United States and our allies; for progress on global nonproliferation and progress toward disarmament; for the credibility of the IAEA and the Security Council and the Nonproliferation Treaty; and of course, for stability in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and beyond. Our concern is not Iran’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy, but its responsibility to demonstrate that its program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes. This is not hard to do. Iran’s continued refusal to cooperate has damaged the credibility of its claim that it does not seek a nuclear weapon.”
  “There will be accompanying costs for Iran’s continued defiance – more isolation and economic pressure, less possibility of progress for the people of Iran….Engagement must produce real results and…we have no appetite for talks without action.”  (U.S. Department of State)
• EU Condemns Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust Declarations
  The EU on Sunday condemned declarations by Iranian President Ahmadinejad including that the Holocaust is a “myth.” “The presidency of the European Union condemns statements by President Ahmadinejad at the Quds Day rally in Tehran where he repeated denials of the Holocaust and of the right to exist of the state of Israel,” a statement said. “Such statements encourage anti-Semitism and hatred. We call on the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran to contribute constructively to peace and security in the Middle East.” Britain, France, Germany and the U.S. have condemned Ahmadinejad’s comments. (AFP)
  See also Moscow: Ahmadinejad Holocaust Jibe “Totally Unacceptable” (AFP)
• Iranian Opposition Turns Anti-Israel Rally into Anti-Regime Rally
  Tens of thousands of opposition protesters swarmed the streets of Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan Friday, turning an annual rally in support of the Palestinians into the first major demonstration against the government of President Ahmadinejad in six weeks. “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, I’ll sacrifice my life for Iran,” chanted protesters in the capital. State-controlled Iranian television showed thousands of Quds Day attendees holding posters of Lebanese Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and chanting “Death to Israel,” but the opposition stole the day. (Chicago Tribune)

With a Russian bank buying into GM in Europe – German Government looking positively at Sverbank joint with Canadian Magna getting 55% of Opel – that puts 35% of the ownership in Russian hands; American Airlines and Delta looking at buying into Japan Airlines, the Michael Jackson family being booted out  from Vienna and London – does this all mean that we are seeing now a new – post economic crisis – look at the essence of globalization with money speaking louder then political considerations? Is it inconceivable to see in the near future more US oil industry being bought into  by their Islamic oil sources and even more direct Arab hold on Washinton DC?

And signs of more independence too – Austrian Bundeskanzler Werner Fayman of the Socialists, Joins Finance Minister Josef Proll of the ÖVP, in nixing any Austrian government financial aid to the ailing Opel in his answer to German Kanzler Angela Markel.

UNITED STATES ACCEPTS IRAN PROPOSAL FOR DIRECT TALKS

11 September 2009,  The New York Times

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, left, presents Iran’s
package of proposals for new talks with the West to the British Embassy
Counsellor and Deputy head of Mission, Patrick Davies, as German
ambassador, Herbert Honsowitz, stands at rear, in a gathering in Tehran,
Iran, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009. Iran presented world powers on Wednesday
with a proposal for new talks with the West, though Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ruled out negotiations over the central issues of his country’s controversial nuclear program. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki gave a
package of proposals to diplomats representing the five permanent members of
the U.N. Security Council and Germany.

BY MARK LANDLER and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times

The Obama administration said Friday that the United States would accept Iran’s offer to meet, fulfilling President Obama’s pledge to hold unconditional talks despite the Iranian government’s insistence that it would not negotiate over the future of its nuclear program.

The decision to engage directly with Iran would put a senior representative of the Obama administration at the bargaining table, along with emissaries from five other nations, for the first time since Mr. Obama took office.

The decision is bound to raise protests from conservatives who contend that unconditional talks are naïve, and from human rights groups that say the United States should not legitimize an Iranian government that appears to have manipulated its presidential election in June and crushed protests after the vote.

In advance of Friday’s announcement, senior administration officials said that their offer to negotiate directly with the Iranians, for what could turn into the first substantive talks since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, was, as a senior official had earlier put it, a “bona fide offer.”

But at the same time, officials said their expectations were extremely low. They also said their willingness to proceed was based in part on a recognition that some form of talks had to take place before the United States could make a case for imposing far stronger sanctions on Iran.

“We’ll be looking to see if they are willing to engage seriously on these issues,” said a State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley. “If we have talks, we will plan to bring up the nuclear issue.”

The talks would also include Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, which in the past have negotiated with Iran without the presence of an American representative, except for one meeting at the end of the administration of President George W. Bush.

During his first term, talks with unfriendly countries like North Korea and Iran were usually rejected out of hand in the hope of speeding their collapse. That loosened in Mr. Bush’s second term, but even then agreements to talk were usually under highly restricted conditions.

The result was a stalemate — one that Mr. Obama argued during last year’s presidential campaign was a huge mistake, in part because Iran was producing nuclear material while the standoff dragged on.

The United Nations Security Council has issued several rounds of sanctions against Iran for failing to comply with resolutions demanding it stop enriching uranium. It has called on Tehran to answer questions from international arms inspectors about documents that suggest that the country worked in the past on a nuclear weapons design.

Iran’s government insists that its efforts are aimed at the peaceful generation of electricity, and has charged that the documents were Western forgeries.

Iran made its offer to meet in a five-page letter delivered to several nations on Wednesday. Titled “Cooperation, Peace and Justice,” it touched on political, social and economic themes, called for reform of the United Nations and a Middle East peace settlement, and for universal nuclear disarmament.

But the letter said nothing about Iran’s nuclear program, and as recently as this week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed never to halt the fuel production, saying Iran would not relinquish its fundamental rights.

Administration officials were dismissive of the letter, saying that it rehashed past statements and offers. But they said they would consider the offer to meet, and they spent less than 48 hours studying its contents before deciding to tell Iran that the United States would join its negotiating partners in talks.

It is unclear where the discussions will take place, but the most likely American representative is William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, who is leading the diplomatic effort.

The first announcement of the decision was made Friday in Brussels by Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, who acts as an intermediary for the six countries.

Hours earlier, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, appeared to take a softer line on Iran, saying the administration would not impose “artificial deadlines” on Iran.

It was difficult to judge Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran because, she said, “the elections and their aftermath have added a layer of complexity to assessing the overtures and offers of diplomatic engagement.”

Some administration officials argued that Mr. Obama’s overtures, which included a videotaped New Year’s greeting and at least one letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, had thrown the Iranian leadership off balance. They thought that for the first time in recent history, the United States had Iran on the defensive, rather than the other way around.

Russia and China have expressed deep reservations about imposing additional sanctions on Iran. On Thursday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, expressed opposition to additional sanctions.

On Friday, Mr. Crowley also said the United States would be willing to hold direct talks with North Korea over its nuclear program, within the context of existing six-party negotiations.

“We are prepared to meet with North Korea,” he said. “When it’ll happen, where it’ll happen, we’ll have to wait and see.”

Carbon Tax Gaining Currency in Europe. By James Kanter and Matthew Saltmarsh, NYTimes, September 10, 2009. “Economists have long seen a carbon tax as a good idea because of its simplicity: Polluters pay at a level that is set by decree. But the idea never caught on widely in the United States or Europe, where governments jealously guard their autonomy on taxes. Industries lobbied for a market-based system called cap and trade instead, which they helped to design and from which some have profited handsomely. Now, with only modest progress so far in meeting goals set for greenhouse gas reduction, the carbon tax may be making a comeback. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on Thursday unveiled details of a carbon tax… initially set at 17 euros, or $24.70, per ton of carbon dioxide emissions… The plan, widely previewed in recent weeks by French ministers, still must be debated by lawmakers. But it has already ignited a political storm…

“Trailblazers in Scandinavia say their taxes have been effective in lowering emissions. Sweden has had such a tax in place since 1991, when the government imposed a tax equivalent to €28, or $41, for each ton of CO2 emitted. The Swedes currently levy a tax of €128 for each ton of CO2, although industries that are exposed to international competition are permitted to pay the tax at a lower rate. Emissions in Sweden would be 20% higher without the tax, yet the economy has still grown by 44% since it was put in place, said Susanne Akerfeldt, a senior adviser on tax issues at the Ministry of Finance in Stockholm… Some experts said they believed other E.U. states were likely to follow France in implementing carbon taxes now because of the need to address deep budget deficits resulting from the economic downturn and stimulus spending. Such taxes may be less likely to increase unemployment or damage output than other means of raising revenue… The French tax, however, is supposed to be revenue-neutral — meaning that other taxes are supposed to be lowered… Sweden has been using its current presidency of the E.U. to campaign for expanding the policy across the trade bloc. Yet Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, acknowledged in an interview this week that there still were serious challenges.”

As Hill Debate on Climate Flounders EPA Plows Ahead on Emission Rules. By Robin Bravender and Darren Samuelsohn, Greenwire, September 10, 2009. “The Obama administration is finalizing rules to control industrial greenhouse gas emissions amid growing skepticism about the prospects of Congress passing a comprehensive climate change bill this year. U.S. EPA is nearly finished with rules that answer the Supreme Court’s 2007 opinion on global warming, as well as a nationwide standard to control greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. The regulatory push comes as Senate Democrats struggle to find the votes to pass a global warming bill. Committee chairmen have delayed the introduction of their cap-and-trade proposal until later this month, but it is unclear if they will get traction as Congress wades deeper into a battle over overhauling the nation’s health care system.”

EPA Seeks to Block West Virginia’s Largest Mountaintop Removal Project. By Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette, September 8, 2009. “The EPA issued a letter that blasts a whole host of problems with an Arch Coal project, initially approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, that is the largest strip-mining permit ever issued in West Virginia. EPA experts have concluded that the mine, as currently designed and permitted, would violate the federal Clean Water Act. In response, Corps lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers for a 30-day stay in legal proceedings over this permit, to give Corps staffers time to re-examine the project.”

States Leaders and Industry Forming Offshore Wind Collaborative. By Evan Lehmann, ClimateWire, September 9, 2009. “Plans are brewing to promote a network of offshore wind farms all along the East Coast connected by a transmission ’spine’ and shared shipping ports where local turbines will embark for deepwater power fields over the horizon. A unique collaborative will emerge this fall that aims to temper the fierce competition among seaside states racing to build the first — or second and third — offshore project into a national effort to construct a whole fleet of them. Officials in coastal states and industry leaders are organizing the group, which aims to provide an influential voice for the nation’s infant offshore effort. The group will focus on cooperation. Shared facilities like manufacturing ‘headquarters’ and maintenance stations could surface to give the offshore industry — not single farms — a foothold in North America. Ships and standards are needed. So are new transmission lines and federal cash for the development of cheaper and better turbines… The U.S. Offshore Wind Collaborative, as the group is called, is inviting industry leaders, environmentalists and others to join its board of directors. Officials from clean-energy offices in states along the East Coast and the Great Lakes are ‘on board’ to provide technical expertise… Texas and California are also expressing support for the program. The group will formally unveil itself this fall.”

New Coalition Aims to Keep Climate Bill on the Radar This Fall. By Kate Sheppard, WashIndependent, September 8, 2009. “The new 63-member coalition unveiled today aims to combat the attacks against climate action and keep the issue atop the agenda this fall, with members from environmental, faith, labor, and minority groups. It includes big green groups, like Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense Fund, along with unions like the United Steelworkers and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Also on board: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Truman National Security Project, VoteVets, American Hunters and Shooters; Catholics United; Union for Reform Judaism. The coalition, under the name ‘Clean Energy Works,’ has a hub in Washington, D.C., with paid staffers, as well as organizers on the ground in 28 states whose senators are seen as key swing votes on climate — many of them Midwestern, industrial, and coal states. They’ve already unveiled a Web campaign that compares members of Congress who opposed climate action to cavemen. Coalition member Environmental Defense Fund also rolled out new national ads last week in the states where the National Association of Manufacturers has been running anti-climate-bill ads. The coalition plans to unveil more ads later this week, and veterans groups involved in the coalition will be in Washington as part of their Operation Free effort to create a national security push for climate action. ‘This is the largest, broadest effort to date by quite a bit,’ said coalition spokesperson Josh Dorner, who comes to the coalition from Sierra Club.”

Pipelines and Supporting Structures Create New Habitats, Unbalancing Artic Ecology. By Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, September 8, 2009. “A spreading mesh-work of pipelines and supporting structures is required to get fuel to markets. As with a coral reef or a rain forest, structure is habitat, and on the treeless coastal plain the oil structures provide welcome cover, perches and nesting or denning sites for predators, particularly arctic foxes, ravens and gulls. A story in Science Times shows new research that these ‘subsidized predators‘ are having a significant impact on migratory birds that nest within three miles or so of oil infrastructure.”

Russia’s Peatlands Mining Could Release 113 Gigatons of Carbon. By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay, September 8, 2009. “Wetlands International is warning of drastic environmental consequences if the Russian government goes ahead with plans to begin large scale peat mining, including the potential release of 113 gigatons of carbon. Such emissions would comprise fifteen times the annual global carbon emissions.”

German Ships Completing First-Ever Commercial Northeast Transit. By Andrew Kramer and Andrew C. Revkin, NYTimes, September 11, 2009. “For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming. The ships started their voyage in South Korea in late July and will begin the last leg of the trip this week, leaving a Siberian port for Rotterdam in the Netherlands carrying 3,500 tons of construction materials. Russian ships have long moved goods along the country’s sprawling Arctic coastline. And two tankers, one Finnish and the other Latvian, hauled fuel between Russian ports using the route, which is variously called the Northern Sea Route or the Northeast Passage. But the Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal… The Russian government technically opened the Northeast Passage for international vessels after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but no commercial cargo carriers have until now ventured all the way across. Nikolai A. Monko, the head of the Northern Sea Route Administration in the Russian Transport Ministry, said the policy now was to promote the route. The ministry, he said, is considering lowering the flat fee charged for icebreaker escort and rescue if needed. The goal in part is to generate a revenue stream for the country’s six-vessel nuclear icebreaker fleet that escorts convoys through the passage, and to pay for fixed costs like navigation beacons, he said.”

EU Announces Plans for Green Index to Supplement GDP. By Paul Voosen, Greenwire, September 9, 2009. “On Tuesday, the European Union announced plans to launch an indicator this year to measure environmental stress. The index will reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc’s member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use and waste generation. GDP, which measures short-term spending, was not traditionally intended to measure well-being. And it is not a sufficient guide for modern policymaking that takes social and environmental objectives into account, said Stavros Dimas, the head of the environment directorate of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm… The commission is positioning its environmental indicator as a supplement to GDP, not a replacement… The environmental index will be ‘as simple, as reliable and as widely accepted as GDP,’ Dimas said. ‘It would be an index where populations take pride in positive results. It would change the way we understand progress and would be a catalyst for changing the way we live.’”

THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
Our One-Party Democracy

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published:The New York Times,  September 8, 2009

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
Go to Columnist Page »
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork. Thank goodness, it is still a bill worth passing. But it could have been much better — and can be in the Senate. Just give me 8 to 10 Republicans ready to impose some price on carbon, and they can be leveraged against Democrats who want to water down the bill.

“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” said Joe Romm, who writes the blog, climateprogress.org.

The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy.

The same is true on health care. “The central mechanism through which Obama seeks to extend coverage and restrain costs is via new ‘exchanges,’ insurance clearinghouses, modeled on the plan Mitt Romney enacted when he was governor of Massachusetts,” noted Matt Miller, a former Clinton budget official and author of “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.” “The idea is to let individuals access group coverage from private insurers, with subsidies for low earners.”

And it is possible the president will seek to fund those subsidies, at least in part, with the idea John McCain ran on — by reducing the tax exemption for employer-provided health care. Can the Republicans even say yes to their own ideas, if they are absorbed by Obama? Without Obama being able to leverage some Republican votes, it is going to be very hard to get a good plan to cover all Americans with health care.

“Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ” said Miller.

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

The Austrian Intstitute for International Affairs – oiip
A panel discussion:

Mongolia: challenges of a buffer state

between China and Russia.

with

H.E. Jargalsaikhan ENKHSAIKHAN, Ambassador of Mongolia

Welcome and Moderation:

Otmar HÖLL, Director oiip

Thursday, September 17, 2009

6:00 p.m.

oiip library

1040 Wien, Operngasse 20B/9th floor

Programme: please follow this link

 Registration form

26 July 2009

Why nuclear energy is not the answer to Climate Change.

by Ben Williams Original article at : examiner.com

It’s funny. People really believe that nuclear power is emissions free. Powering cities with nuclear, they propound, is the panacea to climate change. And yet, if you really take a look at the fuel cycle, it is obvious nuclear energy is, in fact, emissions intensive.

First off the ore needs to be mined. This involves drilling, explosions, heavy equipment. Even at the EPA standard of 15 grams of carbon per break horsepower engine hour, this translates to a lot of carbon. Then the ore needs to be shipped to a processing facility, or mill.
Here, twenty-four hours a day, heavy equipment loads the ore into a hopper, the intake into the semi-autogenous grinding mill. This grinding mill uses electricity (coal) to turn an enormous steel drum filled with metal tumbling balls. Additionally, tons — yes tons — of concentrated sulfuric acid are needed to help leach the uranium from the ore, among quantities of other highly caustic chemicals, all of which must be prepared on industrial scales and shipped to the facility.
After a number of other mechanical operations, all of them energy intensive, the ore must be dried in an oven, where, twenty-four hours a day, countless kilo-watt hours are burned heating the rock to temperature.
Finally, the processed ore, now ‘yellow cake’, has to be boxed up, sealed in steel drums (refined and produced industrially), and then shipped to market.
Then, of course, it needs to be reacted with hexaflourine, or some other chemical, to be refined and turned into the uranium rods that are used in the reactor core. Only now can the power be said to be emissions free: once the rods are installed and operational, powering generators with their nuclear heat.

Of course, after a few months the rods are spent. They then need to be safely disposed of — or, more accurately, buried somewhere where no one will notice them, contained for 1,000 years, after which they become someone else’s problem (probably the DOE or EPA). They must be safely interred for over four billion years. Yes, they need to be baby-sat for an amount of time that exceeds the current age of the Earth.

Because a nuclear core demands fresh, refined uranium, there is a constant use-cycle — an unstoppable appetite — that, ultimately pollutes in manifold ways:

1. The diesel burned in extracting the ore produces CO2, CO, NOX, SOX, dioxins, VOCs among the other expected particulates from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels.
2. The dust produced from mining becomes airborne and settles on downwind communities, increasing the cancer rate noticeably.
3. The diesel burnt in shipping the heavy rock to processing produces the same slew of pollutants as the heavy mining machinery, while trailing radioactive dust along the way.
4. The mill itself burns up millions of KWh every year, KWh generated, in this day and age, almost exclusively from burning coal — high SO2, H2SO3 and H2SO4 meet heavy metals like Hg with the clouds of greenhouse gases.
5. The mill must vent many toxic gases as it processes the ore. It must store radioactive slurry in the ground, hoping it will evaporate so the tailings can be capped. Groundwater and runoff pollution occurs. Once capped, the tailings are radioactive for billions of years. Future contamination becomes a certainty. (Just, the mill operators hope, not in their lifetime.)
6. Shipping the yellow cake to market. There are only two enrichment plants in the Northern United States, and one of them is in Canada. Long trips equal large emissions. Much of the yellow cake will be shipped overseas, adding emissions from large container vessels and potential maritime spills to the list.
7. The enrichment facility then vents toxic gases from the reagents used in reducing the yellow cake to weapons-grade uranium.
8. The rods are shipped to power plants, necessitating the fourth round of distribution-related emissions.
9. The rods are used, then spent, sealed up, and transported to a nuclear waste dump — more emissions, more radioactive decay along public roads and waterways.
10. Countless emissions result from policing the waste site.

Of course, none of this includes the emissions from the industrial-scale production of the reagents needed by the uranium refining cycle. Not to mention their weekly delivery to processing mills and enrichment facilities.

Nor does it take into account the ‘depleted’ uranium used as munitions (which, despite what you might infer from its name, is actually enriched — it is depleted of the less radioactive isotopes). That causes enough pollution to contaminate our armed-forces personnel before it’s even fired! Let alone the land where it is unleashed.

The whole thing is utterly non-sustainable. And no model on which to base future, responsible energy production. So why all the hoo-ha? Simple. Uranium allows, not so much for clean energy, but centralized energy production. Centralized energy production — aside from being grossly inefficient from the distribution angle, losing more than 7% of all energy generated — means centralized profits. Same, boring story we’re all tired of hearing about. Corporate profits should no longer trump the public right to choose viable, alternative energy. Making the right choice means sharing the benefits of energy production: Not letting a small group of corporate elitists eat the whole pie while pushing the future costs (which approach infinity) onto every subsequent generation of human beings, ever.

Wake up. This is madness. And it won’t stop until we hold CORPORATE GREED accountable. Haven’t you had enough of this yet?

Related stories:

Atomic Nightmare: Krümmel Accident Puts Question Mark over Germany’s Nuclear Future
By SPIEGEL Staff
The recent accident at the Krümmel nuclear power plant in northern Germany was more serious than was previously known. Anglea Merkel’s Christian Democrats are now finding themselves on the defensive with their plans to extend the life of German nuclear reactors…
Read more…

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nuclear Power* but were afraid to ask (Includes a text transcript of the entire video)
The compelling new video, Everything Nuclear, produced by David Weisman and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, is packed with… authoritative interviews of experts on the myriad problems of nuclear power. Featured here is a transcription of the highly informative speakers juxtaposed against industry promotional videos and government propaganda videos.
Read more…

Living with Chernobyl – The Future of Nuclear Power
This documentary by Berkeley filmmakers and journalists Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin covers disadvantages and advantages of nuclear power, and includes interviews with scientists, environmentalists and Chernobyl survivors about the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Chernobyl Disaster: wikipedia.org

Turkey Gets Boost from Pipeline Politics.

by Helena Cobban

WASHINGTON, Jul 19 (IPS) – The political geography of the modern Middle East has been affected for one hundred years by the appetite of westerners and other outsiders for the region’s hydrocarbons. Last week, the region’s “pipeline politics” took another step forward with the signing in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, of an agreement to build a new, 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline called Nabucco, running between eastern Turkey and Vienna, Austria.

The project underlines the new influential role that Turkey, a majority Muslim nation of 72 million people, is playing in the Middle East, and far beyond. The new project’s name was chosen, Austrian officials said, after the Verdi opera that representatives of the five participating countries – who include Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, along with the two terminus states – saw together during an earlier round of negotiations in Vienna.

But the name also gives clues to two intriguing aspects of the project’s geopolitical significance. The theme of the opera is the liberation from bondage of slaves held by the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (‘Nabucco’) – and it is a widely discussed feature of the Nabucco project that many European nations want access to a gas source that is not under the control of Russia. Last winter, several European nations suffered severe gas shortages after Russia, locked in a tariff dispute with transit-country Ukraine, closed off the spigots completely.

But the other implication of the name is more strictly Middle Eastern. The modern-day home of Nebuchadnezzar is Iraq. Washington has given strong support to the Nabucco project – and one of the reasons U.S. officials give for this support is their hope that once Nabucco is up and running in 2015, Iraq can be one of the nations that reaps large profits by feeding gas into it. However, construction of the pipeline is estimated to cost some eight billion dollars, and many officials in the participating countries are still unclear where they will get enough gas to make it economically viable.

The Nabucco participants had been hoping that a key feeder state would be one of Turkey’s eastern neighbours, Azerbaijan. But on the eve of the project’s inauguration in Ankara, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took the CEO of the vast Russian gas company Gazprom to Azerbaijan, where they signed a contract with the state gas company that will force Nabucco to compete hard against Gazprom for any purchase it wants to make from Azerbaijan. One fairly evident other source for Nabucco’s would be Iran, which is reported to have considerable amounts of new gas coming online in the next five years.

From:  haertl at oiip.at

Role and Potential of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Regional Affairs

by Bolat Kabdylkhamitovich NURGALIEV (Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation)

Welcome: Gerhard REIWEGER (Deputy Director of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna)

Moderation: Markus KORNPROBST (Chair of International Relations, Diplomatic Academy of Vienna)

After the Lecture the Embassy of Kazakhstan kindly invites to a reception.

Wednesday, 22 July 2009
7.00 p.m.
Festsaal of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna
Favoritenstraße 15a, 1040 Wien

Programme

Registration : Please fax (no: 01/504 22 65) or send an e-mail to info@da-vienna.ac.at

In cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Austria, the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and the Academic Forum for Foreign Affairs.

www.oiip.at

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We recommend this event as a chance to ask about Kazachstan trying to be part of an economic grouping with Russia and Belarus, while also trying to be seen as a European and Asian state at the same time. Is this a planned pivotal position or will they be seen as a Russian satelite?

 The UN came into existance in 1945 as a post-World War II organization, as a club of the victors in the war, to guide the world under the supervision of the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council: the US, Britain, France, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China.The war-axis states of Germany, Italy and Japan were not members of the UN

It became slowly evident that the above five were not the world economic leaders and in 1975, thirty years later, in Paris, a new club was formed – the G6 that had in it the US, Britain, France the free economy states that won WWII, and the newly successfully reconstructed former losers of the WWII Germany, Italy and Japan. Those were the six largest free market economies and the main democracies that could have been viewed together as the motor of the world economy.

Canada was added to above group two years later – so it was G7 – then for various political reasons – and seemingly as an encouragement for its internal change – in 1997 President Clinton got Russia admitted to what became then known as the G8. Above structure had a small corrrection nevertheless when the other states of the European Union wanted also some sort of recognition, and the representative of the EU was also given a chair next to the above G8.

Another thirty years later that group – the US, Europeans, Japan, and Russia has shown its irrelevance when much of the economy is now decided in a completely new world of Beijing, Delhi, and Brasilia that includes the two billion plus fast growing markets of Asia and another economic potential giant that is becoming the leader of South America.

 So what is happening now is that for particular purposes new groupings are being created for the purpose of attacking ongoing important issues.

The UN itself, with its 192 mix of members is hardly an organization for efficiency. In effect already while still relatively a much smaller body, back in 1945, its General Assembly was planned as a pure debating club. The best use for the UN is to allow its Secretary General to sit also in the smaller room of the more powerful, and let him present the wish list of the dispossessed.

President G.W. Bush, not really with problem solving best intentions, allowed the establishing of a G-20 that covers many more diverse participants – from Argentina to Turkey – and hoped that this smaller debate club will make it clear to the world the extent of what can be agreed upon and what not. This group met November 2008 and created its own cycle of meetings that had in 2009 a Summit in London and has planned another Summit in Pittsburgh for this September. The L’Aquila G8 Summit is thus, time-wise, halfway in between those two meetings, but on a different cycle of meetings.

President Berlusconi wanted to show that he can save the G8 and had sessions to which he invited besides the G8 leaders also the leaders of China, India and Brazil – the first redress of the problem that could have created a G11. If the EU could show that it is capable of getting its act together and have just one seat at the table for a new ideal global economic leadership – the US, the EU, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Russia, Canada – this could have been the most practical reformulated G8, but this sort of solution is still light years ahead of us.

As above G11 looked politically incorrect with no African or Arab on board – Mr. Berlusconi invited to his group also South Africa and Egypt – and this new G13 was host to some of the L’Aquila meetings.

But even the G13 did not seem good enough to many other UN member states, so they knocked on the door and about 40 of them had their head-of-state admitted to L’Aquila to sit in at some of the meetings. Obviously, also the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was there and the Swedish UN Presidency for July-December 2009 was there.

Talking about climate change, President Obama has his own idea of a G16 + EU group. That was the group that witnessed the lack of practical results on the Climate issue. Yes, there is some talk of aspirational goal of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as limit to global warming with some behavioral intent figures as targets for 2050. But with no agreed upon shorter term targets for 202o and nearer, these are just fairy tails – and every level-headed person understands that. What is mistakenly called a G17 and is only a G16+EU, is the Washington created MAJOR ECONOMIES FORUM or MEF – which is the G11+EU+Mexico, South Africa + Australia, Indonesia, Korea. (Are these 16/17 the maximum one could work with?)

A serious problem is – the Europeans understand that the US House of Representatives figure of just 4% CO2 emissions reductions by 2020, based on 1990 figures – but dressed up in Congress language to make it look as 17% – it really does not compare to the EU figure of 20% for 2020 that they even offered to increase to 30% if the rest of the world is ready to go for the 20%.

Even the good meaning Barack Obama does not measure up to the Europeans, even when one looks at the criticism the Europeans get from their own NGOs.

UN’s Ban Ki-moon talks of “missed unique opportunity” at L’Aquila, but he must have been sleep-walking if he ever thought that there will be a result at L’Aquila. This website keeps pointing at the UN as a source of unreal sunshine – it is unreal because it does not exist. Instead of saying what has to be done and speaking truth to power, all we hear are hopes and missed opportunities. Now we hear about next target time – the September Pittsburgh meeting of the G20.

Further, China is busy now with its internal Xinjiang Province internal fights, but on climate change there is no substitute to a direct G2 agreement China-US. What we are saying is that with all the waste of time in the UN sponsored cycle of climate debates – the reality is that if there is no G2 material on the Copenhagen December 2009 table, there will simply be no climate change global agreement. Those that think that above G2 agreement will be just the lowest common denominator have not looked outside their window at what real life looks like.

The most important statement for the L’Aquila meeting was by Celso Amorim the Foteign Minister of Brazil: “THE G8 IS OVER AS A POLITICAL DECISION GROUP.” “IT SIMPLY REPRESENTS NOTHING AT ALL – YOU CAN’T IGNORE EMERGING COUNTRIES SUCH AS BRAZIL, CHINA, INDIA.” He said this a month earlier at a meeting in Paris.

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THE UPDATE

We learned from the Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Weisman that not only “G-8 DELAYS MAKING BIG DECISIONS” but actually that in light of the fiasco with this meeting, President Obama said: “THE ONE THING I WILL BE LOOKING FORWARD TO IS FEWER SUMMIT MEETINGS.” One can easily see that what he meant is meetings with people bound in organizations that have lost their relevance with the times so they cannot come up with decisions for our days and for the future.

The interesting thing is that President Obama clearly thinks that without China, India and Brazil, the G8 has simply lost any power to decide on issues like Climate Change and World Trade and economics. On the other hand he also said that the UN is not the place for series negotiations and we feel that the UN suggested formula is the G16 + the EU.

Mr. Obama also said, as we saw on TV, that the exact number of the new kind of “G” to be involved in joint decision making is a very difficult figure because everybody agrees that the figure must be small “but we must be part of it so they say” – when it was decided that the figure be 20, the country that comes 21 demanded to be included so it becomes G21. We know exactly about what country of the EU he was talking – and we also know what other EU country will then want to be #22. This clearly borders with the ridiculous – and it does not reach yet out to demands from the poorer and more suffering countries that also want to be heard!

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From AQUILA, Italy July 11, 2009 — The Group of Eight leading industrial democracies pushed many priorities of their summit here off to larger groups of countries, placing the next moves in trade negotiations, climate-change talks and containing Iran’s nuclear program in front of the so-called G-20 and the United Nations in September.

In his parting news conference here, President Barack Obama took a swipe at both the G-8 and the United Nations as antiquated, as other leaders also talked of formalizing a new grouping that would add a half-dozen of the biggest developing nations to the current G-8.

“There’s no sense those institutions can adequately capture the enormous changes that have taken place during those intervening decades” since their founding, Mr. Obama said. “The one thing I will be looking forward to is fewer summit meetings.”

Climate-Change Pact Falls Short
G-8 Opens to Emerging Economies
G-8 Voices Concern Over Iran Actions
Leaders Note Economic Risks Remain

$10 new Billion for a total of $20 Billion have been collected forAfrica Agriculture – aid and development with the proding from President obama and new pledges from Canada and the EU.

Senior White House officials said the president has more clearly defined expectations for the September meetings.

The nations gathered in L’Aquila did achieve one parting success, a $20 billion pledge over three years to overhaul food and agricultural assistance to the poorest countries. Only about half that pledge is new money, according to the White House, but it roughly doubles nonemergency agricultural assistance.

On Thursday, it had seemed that the total would be only $12 billion, below the level intended just days before. Instead, last-minute pledges came from Canada and the European Union, among other countries. Mr. Obama, in a Friday morning session, made an emotional, personal appeal, saying richer nations had an obligation to act. But he also said recipient nations had to acknowledge that they were complicit in their poverty, through corruption, a lack of transparency and other barriers to growth.

On Iran, Mr. Obama edged closer to an ultimatum, saying there would be consequences if Tehran continues to pursue nuclear weapons and shuns negotiations by the time the G-20 meets. “We’re not going to just wait indefinitely …. and wake up one day and find ourselves in a much worse situation and unable to act,” he said.

On trade, nations agreed to a series of bilateral meetings at which developing countries will outline for which products and services they intend to maintain protective tariffs and other barriers, and which they will allow to compete globally. The idea, according to a U.S. official, is to achieve clarity to speed up global trade talks that the 17-nation Major Economies Forum pledged to complete by 2010.

The forum also pledged to deliver plans to the G-20 meeting to finance clean technology and reforestation programs to combat climate change, and to help poor countries adapt to an already warming world.

That demand was a surprise move sprung by Mr. Obama behind closed doors Thursday, to come up with something concrete after developing countries unexpectedly balked at accepting firm targets for emissions reductions.

Progress on all of the issues will depend in large part on Mr. Obama’s sway both with the U.S. Congress and balky partners such as Russia. Congress on Thursday cut his aid request to help developing countries respond to climate change.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also struck a discordant tone after a week of wooing by Mr. Obama. He suggested no progress on Washington’s arms control agenda is possible until Mr. Obama scraps the East European missile-defense site. “If there is no positive decision on this particular issue, than all others will also fail,” he said.

Write to Jonathan Weisman at  jonathan.weisman at wsj.com

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Further from the press:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/opinio…

 NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
A Lesson on Warming.

July 10, 2009
President Obama had hoped to emerge from this week’s Group of 8 summit meeting in Italy with a tentative agreement uniting rich and developing nations in a common fight against global warming. Instead he got a lesson on how divided the world remains on the issue — and how hard he will have to work to pull off an agreement.

Mr. Obama was clearly eager to restore America’s leadership role. He convened a special side meeting of 17 nations — the G-8 plus China, India and seven other developing nations — that together emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

Before the leaders gathered, their negotiators had already settled on a draft communiqué, committing to a 50 percent cut in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The industrial countries would cut theirs by 80 percent, and the developing countries would make “significant” if unquantified cuts. But on Wednesday, things fell apart. The developing nations flatly refused to commit to the 50 percent goal by 2050.

It was not immediately clear why they balked. Some repeated an old demand: that the United States and the other industrialized nations — which bear responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases since the beginning of the industrial revolution — should do more and do it faster. Otherwise, the developing nations would be left with an unfair share of the burden while their economies were expanding rapidly.

What is clear is that Mr. Obama and the other leaders of the developed world have yet to come up with the right mixture of pressure and incentives to get the developing countries to commit.

The 17 nations did agree to an “aspirational” goal of preventing global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won’t carry things very far.

If there is any chance of pulling this off, the developed countries are going to have to take away all excuses from China, India and other developing nations. The Europeans have already committed to deep cuts in their emissions. The United States is doing a lot better under Mr. Obama, but it is still lagging.

The House’s climate change bill requires emissions reductions of only 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. (The Europeans have pledged themselves to a 20 percent reduction from a much earlier base line, which will require much more aggressive cuts.)

We know that getting the Senate to do as well as the House won’t be easy. But Mr. Obama will have to press them to do even better.

Mr. Obama should also continue to talk to the Chinese, who are now the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases. A host of top administration officials, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton included, have made the pilgrimage to Beijing.

The Europeans are concerned that Mr. Obama and the Chinese will cut a less ambitious side deal and undercut a worldwide agreement. There is no evidence to support those suspicions. Mr. Obama, like the Europeans, says he wants a strong deal to bring down emissions. Without China’s participation, the fight against global warming is essentially lost.

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 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/…

 NEWS ANALYSIS
Group of 8 Is Not Enough, Say Those Wanting In.

By PETER BAKER and RACHEL DONADIO
Published: July 9, 2009
L’AQUILA, Italy — The idea at first was simple power politics. Economic troubles prompted the most powerful democracies to convene a summit meeting to determine the course of the world, or at least as much of it as they could.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, left, greeted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India at the summit meeting.
It worked well enough that they did it again the next year. And the next. More countries joined, and more began banging on the door. Eventually, the so-called Group of 8 started what might be considered auxiliary clubs. And that was how they ended up with a meeting on Thursday that was actually dubbed the G-8 + 5 + 1 + 5. Seriously.

The group’s 35th gathering is such a sprawling event that the leaders of about 40 countries traveled here for it. No longer can just eight powers drive every decision. President Obama headed one meeting with 17 leaders for what he called a Major Economies Forum because there would be no point grappling with climate change without, say, China and India.

So whither the Group of 8 in a Group of 20 world? What relevance does the Group of 8 have when it seemingly cannot take landmark action without enlisting others? Does it make sense for thousands of officials, diplomats, lobbyists, public relations people and journalists to descend on a single overwhelmed town each year when maybe a simple videoconference call might do? Or if it is still meaningful, then does it have the right membership in a changing world?

“Look at the amount of effort, of carbon, of cost that went into this,” said Kumi Naidoo of South Africa, co-chairman of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, an advocacy organization, looking at the large tents set up for the news media, complete with air-conditioning, wireless Internet and land lines.

“The G-8 is an elite cocktail, a self-appointed group,” he added. “I think it’s an anachronism, and consistently undermining the work of other multilateral initiatives.”

These are questions that come up every year, but more so lately as economic and political power shifts. The Group of 20, which includes the eight and an array of nations from Argentina to Indonesia to Turkey, has emerged in recent months as a potent forum addressing the global recession.

President George W. Bush summoned the Group of 20 leaders to Washington in November to figure out how to revive the world economy. Mr. Obama joined the group when it met in London in April and invited it to meet again in September in Pittsburgh.

As a first-time Group of 8 participant, Mr. Obama seems to have a skeptical eye, uncertain about its suitability as a vehicle for solving the world’s problems. This year’s meeting produced statements on the economy, Iran, the Middle East and other topics but made few breakthroughs, and Mr. Obama’s aides cast it as a mere way station between Group of 20 meetings.

“We view this meeting and this discussion as a midpoint between the London G-20 summit and the Pittsburgh G-20 summit,” said Mike Froman, the president’s chief negotiator, or “sherpa.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama concluded that it was pointless to talk about climate change among just the eight powers, so he invited nine others Thursday. Developing countries like China and India agreed to make “meaningful” reductions in greenhouse gases but refused to accept the specific targets for 2050 sought by the United States and Europe.

Mr. Obama cast that as victory enough, until discussions resume at the Group of 20. “We’ve made a good start,” he said, “but I am the first one to acknowledge that progress on this issue will not be easy.”

The developing countries of the Group of 20 say the days of the smaller club are numbered. “The G-8 is over as a political decision group,” Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, said last month at a conference in Paris. It “represents nothing at all,” he said, adding that “you simply can’t ignore emerging countries such as Brazil, China or India.”

Still, talk of restructuring or scrapping the Group of 8 invariably runs into resistance from current members. At a news conference on opening night, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, the host, said the summit meeting was “ideal for building confidence and cordiality, for creating friendships and deepening friendships.” He added, “We call each other by our first names and not our last names” and gather “at the same informal table.”

There is no doubt Italy pulled off a tour de force of last-minute organization, spending $75 million to transform a police training complex in an earthquake zone into an Olympic-style village, complete with high-quality espresso bars and wicker lawn sets. Cooks are preparing 25,000 meals over three days, and 3,700 journalists registered to attend.

It is a far cry from the original meeting outside Paris in 1975, when leaders of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan inaugurated the Group of 6. Canada joined two years later, and it became the Group of 7, an organization without organization — no headquarters, no bylaws, no staff, just a rotating leadership to hold the annual meeting.

President Bill Clinton got Russia admitted in 1997, and others started attending as observers. By this year, there was a regular meeting with China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, now dubbed the Group of 5.

Mr. Berlusconi also invited Egypt, so the secondary meeting became known as the G-8 + 5 + 1. Then there was a working lunch with international organizations called the G-8 + 5 + 1 + 5. Given that China’s president, Hu Jintao, abruptly left to deal with rioting at home, perhaps it should have been called the G-8 + 5 + 1 + 5 — 1.

Then there is breakfast on Friday with African leaders. All told, roughly 40 countries representing 90 percent of the world economy sent leaders to L’Aquila. But that has risks of its own; a president never knows whom he might run into. Mr. Obama found himself shaking hands on Thursday with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.

Robert C. Fauver, who was Mr. Clinton’s sherpa, agreed that the Group of 8 could be redefined, but noted that has complications too. “If you’re trying to negotiate an exchange rate deal with 20 countries or a bailout of Mexico, as in the early Clinton days, with 20 countries that’s not easy,” he said. “If you get above 10, it just makes it too darn hard to get things done.”

Attending his 21st summit meeting, John Kirton, director of the Group of 8 Research Group at the University of Toronto, said the group would evolve with additional formats involving more countries. But he said the core eight still represented unrivaled political and economic power and had the duty to weigh in on issues of democracy that others could not.

“There’s a lot that the eight can do that the others can’t,” he said. “You’ll always need the G-8.”

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The Wall Street Journal has a negative approach to the G8 and to everything that may impact on the US free style.
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12471830…

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12471889…

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Climate change deal eludes big polluting nations – Climate change talks grind to halt.
By Guy Dinmore in L’Aquila and Fiona Harvey in London

The Financial Times, July 10 2009 03:00

Leaders of the world’s 16 biggest polluting countries last night failed to agree on targets and funding to cut greenhouse gases, setting the stage for recriminations between rich and poor nations.

A sombre Barack Obama, US president, who chaired the meeting of the Major Economies Forum in Italy, said he acknowledged that progress would not be easy and that it would be “no small task” to bridge the differences.

The MEF countries, which produce 80 per cent of global emissions, agreed that the world should not heat up more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. But India and China resisted a push from the G8 developed nations to set a target of reducing emissions by an overall average of 50 per cent by 2050.

Leaders must “fight the temptation towards cynicism”, Mr Obama said, calling climate change the defining challenge of his generation and acknowledging that the US had a much higher per capita carbon footprint.

“No one nation is responsible. No one nation can address it alone,” he said, noting that he had to “wrestle” politically with the issue in the US and that a global recession made it harder for all countries to get on board.

However, Ed Miliband, UK secretary of state for energy and climate, told the Financial Times that a pledge by developed nations to limit global warming to less than 2 °C “significantly increases the chances of success at Copenhagen”.

NGOs and environmental activists were dismayed at the outcome, calling it a missed opportunity that risked undermining the UN conference in Copenhagen in December, which must set a climate change programme to replace the Kyoto framework expiring in 2012.

“The blame lies squarely with the G8,” said Anantha Guruswamy of Greenpeace. “The blame game will start. The EU and others are blaming India and China and then there will be a harsh pushback.”

While the G8 club of rich nations agreed on Wednesday in what Mr Obama described as a “historic consensus” to cut their emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, they failed to set near-term goals. They also refused to commit themselves to the huge funding required – estimated by experts at some $150bn (€107bn, £92bn) a year – to help developing countries adapt to climate change and cut their own emissions. Mr Obama only said that the MEF had agreed to a “substantial increase” in contributions to poor countries.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, who will chair the Copenhagen meting, was quoted as saying the G8 summit had “missed a unique opportunity”.

China in particular wanted assurances from the G8 that intellectual property rights would be relaxed so it could benefit from new technologies to take a lead in clean energy markets.

Joanne Green, head of policy for the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, said the 2 °C limit agreed by MEF was “forward movement but it is woefully inadequate compared to what is needed”.

Climatico, a network of climate change experts, said that, to limit temperature rises to 2 °C, emissions needed to peak in the next 10-15 years. It said the US Senate was the best hope for breaking the impasse by giving Mr Obama a strong cap-and-trade bill.

The data show that the total GDP of the G8 in 2008 was $22 trillion using today’s exchange rates – but this is a decreasing figure – there is no way to avoid seeing that they the G8 institution is in decline.

Russia, part of the G8, started from way behind so it is considered a developing market, but politically, based on post World War II history, it is sort off hovering in between the two worlds.

China, India, Brazil and Mexico are considered pure emerging states and the total of the four reached the GDP level of one quarter of the G8 minus Russia – and is growing.

 Pope Benedict XVI in a recent encyclical warns: “Sometimes modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society.”

In practice, watching L’Aquila, any one could agree that the annual talking shop for eight still relatively rich, northern hemisphere nations, taking place in Italy on Wednesday, has an inflated view of its own influence – although this sense of self-importance is now diminishing given the powerful unwinding of global economic forces that have been decades in the making. But there are those that go further and reckon the G8 is now almost irrelevant and that the really important economic action is to be found further south and east. The Financial Times, based on its Northern upbringing, thinks that this view is wrong.

The strange thing is that The Financial Times bases its argument on the fact that the consumption factor is at present still with the old G8 – private consumption there totalled $14 trillion last year, according to Economist Intelligence Unit data, seven times more in dollar terms than that in China, India, Brazil and Mexico combined.

The economists of the North still believe that consumption is what will increase global demand, and thus propel back the global economy into growth which they see as the way out of the present global economy slump.

But we humbly suggest that the above is crazy. The facts are that we caused the global economy crash by over-consuming – so unchecked consumption is in fact rather our way down to historical oblivion.

It is insane to think that if the G8 produce 4 times as much as the combined domestic production of China, India, Brazil, and Mexico, they have a God given right to consume 7 times as much as those four nations. Does nobody realize that this imbalance is exactly what caused the economic crash in the G8 countries –   based directly on the high consumption rather then on the decreasing production?

Does nobody think of the harm to the environment and the decreased natural resources stash that comes with the noted imbalance?

Of course, emerging countries will now grow bigger and faster. It is rather for the North to tighten their own belts and to make space for the emerging economies to grow not just in production, but also in consumption.   What this means is to buy less from them, and to advise them to sell to their own internal markets so their own people will be the beneficiaries of their newly found global importance.

It is the emerging economies that have the largest internal markets because they have those large numbers of people intended not just as cheap labor but also as loyal consumers!   If we are ready to allow their economies to work for their own markets, we could all get back in some balance with our environment and with the idea that we must recognize our interdependence not by exploitation but by making space to others. This is the only way G8 could still keep some relevance for their members – that is in context of working within larger groups – perhaps as a G20 group.

THURSDAY, JULY 09, 2009 from the IPS

G8 Summit: The Five Throw a Challenge
Sanjay Suri

L’AQUILA, Italy, Jul 8 (IPS) – “The world needs a new global governance,” the G5 declared Wednesday, “the construction of which must be based on inclusive multilateralism.” As rhetoric goes, this might sound like more of the same. But the time and place of that declaration gave the words a new significance.

The current G8 summit in Italy was billed as an occasion where developed and developing countries would come together to seek common solutions to such global problems as the economic crisis, climate change and food security. And some commonality is certain to emerge.

But on a string of vital issues the major five developing countries – China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa – took a common position that approached confrontation with the G8 on several counts; certainly they outlined their own paths. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva demanded that the G8 take note. “We cannot go on being split into 300 working groups,” he said on the first day of the three-day summit Wednesday.

The G8, he said, must consider first the joint declaration produced by the G5, so that a consensus may emerge. And in consensus-building with the G8, “developing countries must not be treated as second-class citizens.” They need to be up on the “top floor” with the G8, “for the collective welfare of humanity,” said Lula.

All of which might have been just nice words if the G5 had not also taken collective steps in line with this position. This they did most effectively over climate change, that most controversial of international issues this year, strongly taken up by the G8 in a year that is meant to end with a consensus in Copenhagen in December.

A Major Economies Forum is due to come up with a declaration Thursday on climate change. That declaration by a group of countries that includes the G8 and the G5 stops short of specific numerical targets. And the developing countries effectively blocked any move to sign them on to binding targets – while pledging to cut emissions on their own.

So while agreement will be reached in general terms, there will be no individual or group targets for either developing or industrialised countries, according to a senior official close to the negotiations.

The G5 campaigned collectively to ensure that the principles they support are respected – prime among them the recognition that the developed nations are the prime polluters, and therefore carry primary responsibility to cut emissions such as carbon dioxide that are believed to cause global warming, and consequently, damaging climate change.

Through the climate change negotiations, an effective grouping among the developing nations is already fact. A strong message went out following their summit on Wednesday that they can stand together and bargain hard with the G8.

Extraordinary, too, was the very range of issues on which they took a firm stand in relation to the perceived interests of the G8 countries (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia).

The G5 called on the G8 to act in line with their speeches at the G20 meeting of major industrialised and emerging nations in London in April. The leaders then had agreed to financial stimulus to boost investment and economic activity in developing countries. Nothing of the sort happened since. As a first step out of the economic crisis, the G5 said Wednesday, “we call for the full implementation of the G20 London summit declaration without delay.”

The G5 declared they would work together to reform the world’s financial system and to replace it with one that is “fair, just, inclusive and well-managed.” They declared they would work together to “fundamentally resolve the issue of under-representation and the inadequate voice of developing countries in international financial institutions, which is urgently needed.”

They asked for an end to trade protectionism and measures “inconsistent with the World Trade Organisation (WTO),” and agreed to “vigorously support South-South and trilateral cooperation,” while acknowledging that it is not a substitute for North-South cooperation.

The G8 have also stepped up their campaign for reform of the U.N. system, most potently the United Nations Security Council. That demand, primarily for expansion of the Security Council’s five permanent members with veto powers, has the backing of several of the G8 countries as well, particularly Britain.

The G5 issued a trade declaration separately from their political declaration. And that only firms up the position the developing countries have taken at talks so far that have blocked a deal on the principle that no deal is better than a bad deal.

The G5 said they want to see an end to subsidies in rich countries. Broadly speaking, the developed world has refused to drop subsidies, while demanding that developing countries open up their markets to goods from industrialised nations.

On trade rules, as with the negotiations on climate change, developing countries have been holding firm, and holding together. This G5 summit appears to have toughened their plans to work together to break down established forms of dominance.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

G8 ITALY SUMMIT.
G8 summit gets off to rough start – Hu’s exit damages climate talks as emerging economies challenge the industrialized powers

By JUN HONGO
Staff writer, The Japan Times online. – Japan Time – Thursday, July 9, 2009.

ROME — With the relevance of the Group of Eight being challenged by emerging powers, the G8 leaders got down to business Wednesday addressing climate change and what their next move might be when and if the global recession subsides.

But the launch of the three-day G8 summit in L’Aquila was spoiled even before it began, with Chinese President Hu Jintao returning home to get a handle on the ethnic riots tearing apart the restive city of Urumqi in the northwest.

A shadow also grew over the climate change issue as chances appeared slim that the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, or MEF, would be able to hammer out long-term greenhouse gas emissions cuts, Japanese diplomatic sources said.

The key multinational emissions forum was to meet Thursday on the sidelines of the summit in the Italian mountain town.

The sources said MEF preparatory negotiations failed to bridge the gap between members of the industrialized and developing countries, effectively dashing hopes of achieving a substantial agreement.
Hu’s absence exacerbated the MEF discord, the sources said.

An initially prepared MEF draft declaration pledged a global emissions reduction of 50 percent by 2050, with industrialized countries promising an 80 percent cut in the same time frame, they said.

The 17-member MEF was established in March under the initiative of U.S. President Barack Obama to complete the groundwork for forging a new international carbon-capping framework to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Along with the G8, major greenhouse gas emitters China, India and Brazil are also members of the MEF.

Despite the forum’s apparent inability to produce tangible results, the G8 was nevertheless expected to issue a joint statement on climate change later in the day, in addition to discussing the global economy, the sources said.

The eight leaders were expected to share views on how not to jeopardize the “green shoots” of recovery being seen in some areas, as well as “exit strategies” for reversing the heavy fiscal stimulus that many countries embraced to revive their economies, the sources said, adding that how to stave off global unemployment was also on the agenda.

During a working dinner, the G8 was expected to focus on political matters, including domestic unrest in Iran and North Korea’s nuclear threat.

Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, who agreed Tuesday to reduce the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, were expected to lead the discussion on global denuclearization.

For Prime Minister Taro Aso,denuclearization and how to end North Korea’s nuclear threat are expected to be key concerns.

Earlier this month, Foreign Ministry officials in Tokyo listed five key themes for this year’s summit: Iran, North Korea, global denuclearization, the Middle East peace process and the war in Afghanistan.

The L’Aquila summit concludes Friday after assistance to Africa is discussed. But with emerging economic powers like Brazil and India being kept outside the discussion framework, critics say any talks held within the G-8 alone are incapable of resolving global economic issues.

In that sense, the Thursday meeting with the emerging powers will have more relevance than the G-8 itself, they said.

But Japanese officials defended the G-8 framework, saying its agreements are still influential in forming the base for discussions with other economic powers.

The G-8 includes the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, France and Russia.

——————

www.SustainabiliTank.info take on the Wednesday-Thursday-Friday July 8-10, 2009 meetings follows:

President Obama of the US came to Rome after having achieved an agreement with the Medvedev/Putin leadership of Russia on what concerns nuclear arms reduction and certain aspects of non-proliferation. Those issues allow thus for US leadership at the G8 meeting. On the other hand, at the Obama created G-16 + the EU and the UN meeting on climate change, the fact that the US is well behind Europe on the main issues on Global Warming, the US is really not in position of leadership.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK is in very weakened internal position so he is no great asset at the G8 table.

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper leads now a weak minority government and does not radiate influence either.

Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso is just as weak at home as Messrs. Brown and Harper and thus not really in a leadership position either.

Italy’s Berlusconi, thanks to his personal peccadilloes, is rather an international joke, even though his countrymen may think his behavior charming. His country-women – that is those that did not profit from his closeness – may think differently.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is in best position of them all when it comes to the issues of climate change, but in what concerns applying stimulus packages in Europe she is just slow or lacks interest as she saw that this might not have brought in the US the results that the Obama administration was promising to Americans and the world. She clearly has no intention to cooperate in what she is not convinced that it works, and is also critical of the US lack of progress in alternatives to the old fossil-fuels based economy. We do not think that President Obama will be able to convince her to change her mind during the three days of these meetings.

France’s President Nicolas Sarcozy is strong politically at home – so here no problems – but when it comes to evaluating his two years in office, one has difficulty finding his international agenda – thus another non-leader for these events.

Russia’s double-headed eagle – President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin – will rest on the perch and don’t expect them to lead either.

Looking at the above and at the ruins of the earth-quake damaged Italian age-old city of L’Aquila, one can only hope for reconstruction if the world is going to see a better economy in the future and in the process also create a program of what to do with the pesky issue of climate change. Let us face the reality that there is little chance to achieve progress at the   July 2009 meetings.

***

Thursday there is the meeting of 17 members that is the G16 + the EU – or actually the G8 + G5 (Brazil, India, China,   Mexico, South Africa) + Australia, Indonesia, Korea,   and the EU.

Those are the 17 that were invited to participate at the State Department building, in Washington DC, meeting for climate talks under the Major Economies Forum (MEF) April 27, 2009. That meeting was organized by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Later there was also a meeting in Mexico City and in September 2009 they will have yet another meeting in Pittsburgh. The intent was to come up with an agreement to be presented before the Copenhagen climate meeting this December.

OK – so where are we now? Did the US and China formally agree on how to proceed jointly on the effort to find a G2 solution? But really we will not find out if this is the case on Thursday, July 9, 2009. Chinese President Hu Jintao returned home today to deal with the ethnic riots tearing apart the restive city of Urumqi in the Muslim Northwest Province of Xinjang, and without him present there is little sense for the Thursday meeting. India also does not seem to be ready to let the OECD countries of the hook so indeed setting only long term targets without well funded immediate action will not do this time. India just released its budget plans and worldwide there are reactions that the government did not plan enough as stimulus packages either. Indeed, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton will be going mid July to India like she did go to China at the start of her taking over at State. Will she be able to come up with better understanding with India, while it seems to the Indians that the US is back to a pre Bush China-first policy?

Also Indonesia will not be there as President Yudhoyono just was having a reelection campaign that it seems he won.

***

Friday is the last day and it is dedicated to the provision of funds for Africa. OK – this subject will get some figures and it will be $15 Billion that President Obama pushed for – as aid for poor farmers – and when President Obama will be on Saturday in Ghana he will be able to present those figures to his African hosts.

Our prediction is thus that from L’Anquila the main product of these meetings will be a new promis for Africa. Will it be funded this time in reality – that is something to check upon later. But then a serious review regarding Africa is really in the making indeed. The key is to be henceforth less reliance on food aid from subsidized produce in the US and the EU, and more investments and help in order to build up local agriculture in Africa – as the future economy of Africa. Some of the African NGOs have finally spoken up that the relliance on food hand-outs has destroyed Africans’ potential to feed themselves.

***

Will the real legacy of L’Anquila be that the G8 has lost its relevance in a world where most of the so called great economies are indeed dependent for their well being on some of the members of the lesser G5? With China, India and Brazil not part of the august post-World War II group is there any reason for the separate G8 pow wow? Would not going directly to a more updated group have been more effective? Then what about the EU? Could it not be practical to letthe member states finally decide that they could speak with one voice? If that is not the case why litter the G16 with an added presence at a time that the UN is rightly not mentioned at all?

——-

G8 must galvanise talks on warming.
The Financial Times, July 8 2009

The summit meeting of the Group of Eight industrialised nations that opened in Italy on Wednesday looks increasingly like an event in search of a purpose. The more broadly based G20, including China and India among others, is the place where deals on the global economy are being done. So what is the point of the G8?

The answer should be: to galvanise the debate on climate change. A consensus is needed between the rich and poor for a new deal to slow down global warming. It is supposed to be finalised by the United Nations at Copenhagen in December. But to have any hope of progress there, the leaders gathered in L’Aquila this week must give a clear sense of direction.

The European Union has been consistently in the lead in setting ambitious targets to cut emissions. The good news now is that the US president is engaged and enthusiastic. Barack Obama will co-chair Thursday’s meeting of the 17-member Major Economies Forum, including both China and India. The bad news is that Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, has gone home to deal with the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang. But that should not give an excuse for indecision.

The first ominous sign is that the two sides have not agreed on a target of halving global emissions by 2050. That is the minimum necessary to ensure that the rise in global temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, the danger level agreed by scientists. It would require the developed economies to cut their emissions by 80 per cent, to allow developing economies to pollute more as they grow faster. But China is not prepared to sign up to the target until there are more concessions on the table. It is hard to understand, as China stands to be a big beneficiary.

India is also playing hard to get. Delhi will not move on a complete package until there is more money on the table, with rich countries paying the poor to mitigate the effects of global warming, and adapt to them. Such an attitude could scupper any deal.

The G8 leaders can and should do more. In particular, they should start work on a commercial mechanism via the cap-and-trade system to finance bigger transfers from rich to poor. That would be politically more acceptable than straight handouts. The EU might also unilaterally increase its target to cut emissions in 2020 from 20 to 30 per cent. Both the US and Japan need to set more ambitious targets for 2020 as well as 2050. But in the end, a deal on climate change is not just for the rich to do. The poor will suffer most if it fails.

———–

Nations agree to steeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions
By Fiona Harvey in London, and Guy Dinmore and George,Parker in L’Aquila
Published: July 9 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 9 2009 03:00
The Group of Eight industrialised countries yesterday agreed to more stringent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than ever before.

The G8, meeting in Italy, pledged to take on the lion’s share of the emissions reductions scientists say are needed, with cuts of 80 per cent by 2050 for developed countries. This would contribute to a hoped-for target of halving emissions globally by the same date.

They also resolved to try to hold global temperature rises to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, which scientists regard as the limit of safety.

This is the first time such a target has been formally adopted in a leading international forum. Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, hailed the deal as “historic”.

But British officials said there was “no chance” that these targets would also be agreed by a wider group of countries, including emerging economies, meeting today on climate change.

Leaders of 16 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitting countries are meeting at the G8 at the request of Barack Obama, US president.

He called the meeting, known as the Major Economies Forum, which he is co-chairing with Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister, to break the deadlock in climate change talks aimed at producing a successor to the Kyoto protocol at a conference in Copenhagen in December.

It is the first time leaders of all the big emitters have held a summit on climate change. The United Nations secretary-general held a meeting for world leaders in 2007, but George W. Bush, then US president, turned up only for the dinner at the end.

However, China and India have so far refused to agree to the target of halving global emissions by 2050, despite assurances that the G8 will take on the largest slice of the burden.

The early departure of Hu Jintao, China’s president, from the meeting yesterday made any change in position even less likely.

One of the aims of the MEF was to bring leaders of the main emitting countries together so that they could allow their environment ministers – who attend the UN negotiations – greater latitude in making a deal.

Anantha Guruswamy, Greenpeace programme director, said China and India had refused to sign up to the global target because the G8 club of rich nations had not put forward proposals for financing emissions cuts and measures to adapt to climate change in poor countries.

“It is up to Obama to show leadership on this,” he added.

Beijing and Delhi also want rich countries to agree higher targets on cutting emissions by 2020 than they have come up with.

The 16 countries in the MEF produce 80 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. The European Union and Denmark, as host of the Copenhagen conference, also attend its meetings.

***

to be a bit more exact the first 9 out of the 16 – CO2 emissions in billions of metric tons, 2006 are as follows – and if you wish it is about 75% just for the first 8 total and they are not the old G8.

China     6.0

US           5.9

Russia     1.7

India       1.3

Japan       1.3

Germany     0.9

Canada         0.6

UK               0.6

S. Korea       0.5

———-

CLIMATE CHANGE
Obama insists world climate accord possible.
By George Parker and Guy Dinmore in L’Aquila and Fiona Harvey in London
The Financial Times,   July 9 2009

Barack Obama, US president, insisted on Thursday there was still time for the world to agree binding commitments to cut greenhouse emissions, in spite of stalemate at the G8 summit in L’Aquila.

Mr Obama takes centre stage in the Italian town on Thursday when he chairs a session on global warming, bringing together 17 rich and emerging economies, including China and Brazil.

US diplomats say there is no chance that the countries will agree to cut world emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 – from a still undecided baseline of 1990 or later. They are however likely to agree on an aspiration to stop temperatures rising more than 2 degrees centigrade compared with pre-industrial levels.

The early departure of Hu Jintao, China’s president of China, from the meeting made any change in position on cuts even less likely.

But Mr Obama believes an agreement on binding intermediate targets – for a deadline sometime before 2050 – can be reached before a UN climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.

Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman, said Mr Obama told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil that “there was still time in which they could close the gap on that disagreement in time for that important [meeting]“.

Mr Obama is seen as a pivotal figure in reaching any Copenhagen agreement, but months of tense negotiations lie ahead.

India, China and other big emerging economies want to be sure the west is serious about meeting medium term targets for cutting emissions before they commit themselves. They also want money to help them clean up their industries.

The credibility of the G8 on climate change was challenged by Russia, which had earlier signed up to a communique by the group committing wealthy nations to an even more ambitious 80 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 – again with a still undecided baseline. The Russian delegation however has questioned whether such a long-term target is meaningful.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, said progress on climate change at the G8 was so far “not enough”. He added: “This is politically and morally [an] imperative and historic responsibility … for the future of humanity, even for the future of the planet Earth.”

————–

Further – the UN travelog:

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
8 July, 2009 =========================================================================

SECRETARY-GENERAL EN ROUTE TO ITALY TO MEET WITH G8 LEADERS

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is heading today to the Italian city of L’Aquila, where he will meet with the leaders who are attending the annual summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations, after wrapping up his first official visit to Ireland.

In a letter sent to G8 leaders ahead of their 8-10 July summit, Mr. Ban highlighted climate change and development as some of the current challenges requiring action.

Among other things, Mr. Ban asked G8 governments to take the lead on the issue of climate change by making “ambitious and firm commitments” to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 per cent, the levels the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says are required on the part of industrialized countries to ward off the worst effects of global warming.

On development, the Secretary-General urged the G8 to outline how donors will scale up aid to Africa over the next year to fulfil the commitments the Group made at its summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005.

Mr. Ban departed for Italy from Ireland, where he met today with Irish Defence Minister Willie O’Dea. They travelled to the McKee Barracks, where the Secretary-General met with a group of veteran UN peacekeepers from Ireland and also took part in a ceremony paying respect to Irish peacekeepers that made the ultimate sacrifice while serving the Organization.

The UN chief is scheduled to travel again next week to attend the 15 July Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where he will deliver an address encouraging the group to build on its leadership role to address some of today’s challenges, including disarmament, the economic crisis and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The eight MDGs – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education – have a target date of 2015, as agreed by world leaders in 2000.  

DESERT ENERGY

by Dennis Nottebaum 8 – 07 – 2009

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/desert-energy

The idea sounds intriguing: place a vast number of solar thermal energy collectors in an area where both solar energy and space are available in abundance – the desert – and supply a major part of the population with emission-free electricity. What sounds like a remote scenario for energy creation in a future world has become an actual project that awaits realization in the nearer future. Desertec, a project initiated by the German Association of the Club of Rome, attempts to build large-scale solar farms in North African deserts and transmit the gathered electricity to Europe. A consortium of major German industrial and financial giants stands behind Desertec. Headed by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance company, the consortium consists of Deutsche Bank, the engineering giant Siemens, the energy companies E.ON and RWE, and several companies specializing in solar technology.

The mechanism behind the technology is quite straightforward and anyone who has ever tried to set a piece of paper on fire by using a looking glass will understand it: Large mirrors reflect and concentrate sunlight on one point which creates intense heat. This is used to turn water into steam that drives turbines. Thus Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) may be turned into electricity, which may then be transmitted via high-voltage direct current cables. Direct current bears the advantage of relatively low transmission losses while relying on more expensive infrastructure than alternating current.

Desertec is designed to cover around 15% of Europe’s electricity consumption, plus parts of the needs of those North African states in which the facilities will be installed. In order to gather such vast amounts of energy an area of 150 by 150 km would have to be covered by mirrors. The technology to realize a project of that size is readily available, the initiators say. Solar thermal energy collectors have been used in California and Nevada for almost two decades while Spain has built four facilities over the last years. The transmission from the desert to all corners of Europe would require the installation of high-voltage direct current cables through the Mediterranean Sea; an expensive endeavor. All in all, the project costs are estimated to reach as much as 400 Billion Euro. But the investment would ultimately pay off, a study of the German Aerospace Centre says. It estimates the costs for the creation of one Kilowatt-hour of electricity by CSP to be lower than the costs of any other form of energy creation in the long run.

Munich Re, the consortium leader, has long pushed for a more sustainable climate policy. The reinsurer has suffered most from major natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis and floods, which have been ascribed to climate change. Its major branch is the reinsurance of insurance companies. Whenever there is a hurricane in Florida, an earthquake in Italy, or a flood in Southeast Asia the reinsurance industry comes into play. Assessing the risks of these catastrophes happening therefore is an integral part of their business. Climate change has resulted in a rise of unforeseen events and the reinsurers find it increasingly hard to assess the risks of unforeseeable disasters; a reason for them to tackle climate change.

However, as intriguing as the idea of Desertec may be some points have so far not been considered by its proponents. Firstly, even though a consortium of major companies has kicked the project off and put it on the agenda it cannot be realized without political will. Although major German politicians and parties have indicated their support for the undertaking, the prospects are much dimmer on the European stage. France is not going to support a project that may undermine one of its primary export goods: atomic energy. And without French support it will be harder to convince other states to join the project. Moreover, the installation of trans-European power lines is a sensitive issue. The establishment of a European energy grid has long been a troublesome project.

Secondly, the plan rests on the assumption that North African countries will readily join the project. Although these countries may themselves benefit, it will be a major issue to garner long-term support in that area of the world. While solar energy is available in abundance, political stability is not. Conflicts such as Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and despotic leaders such as Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya may put the plan in jeopardy. What is more the influence of OPEC states in the region may lead to conflict and a possible division. They will certainly see an alternative energy project as a threat to their dominant position. These states would be the big losers of the project. It would mean a shift of geopolitical power from the Middle East to the Maghreb, a reason for OPEC states to undermine any efforts.
Thirdly, facilities in these areas will be prime targets for terrorist attacks and sabotage. The solar farms would therefore have to be decentrally located and heavily guarded. But who is going to be responsible for the safety? The neglect of these political issues shows that the project is still in its infancy. A further feasibility study, which is planned to be carried out over the next two years, will show whether Desertec is actually feasible.

Fourthly, it is still unclear whether the project would be run as a supranational organization or a private enterprise. Given the process of privatisation in the energy sector of the EU, the European Commission will have a close look at a state-run business. On the other hand private networks will certainly find it harder to garner venture capital for a project of this size and risk level. Currently the consortium also seeks guaranteed feed-in tariffs in order to bring the project to maturity. This would again presume a long-term commitment on part of national governments and the EU.

On the other hand Desertec may be an opportunity for deeper cooperation between Europe and North Africa from which both sides could possibly benefit. Ultimately, much will depend on whether Europe would be the sole beneficiary or whether North Africa would get its fair share. Such a project always runs the risk of being perceived as imposed on North African states as a neo-imperialist gesture.
However, a stronger economic link between both regions would mean a strong incentive for deeper collaboration. It may actually attract further investments alongside the solar farms and converter stations and be an attractive technology for export. The project will thus be more than just a business endeavor. It could possibly also boost political relations and economic development in North Africa. Furthermore, Europe currently relies on natural gas from Russia and oil from the Middle East. Whether these sources are politically more stable is surely debatable. From this perspective, a diversification of energy sources would be a definite plus.

Additionally, solar thermal power is the only means of energy creation that comes at low environmental costs. CO2 emissions result solely from the construction and maintenance of the solar farms themselves, not from the generation of electricity. And while atomic energy always bears an incalculable risk, CPO is basically free of technological risk. Finally, solar energy is free and available in abundance. Thus CPO may be the first large-scale alternative to our use of fossil fuels and atomic power, as long as the political risks are taken into consideration.

Page 7 of The New York Times  Tells Us That The Oil Industry Was On President Obama’s Wings On His Flight To Moscow.

Yes – ConocoPhillips of the US and Lukoil of Russia already are cooperating on marketing oil to the US from the Russian Arctic. Lukoil already owns a chain of gas stations in the US. Now these two companies will cooperate in the construction of an oil refinery on the East Coast of the US that will receive Russian oil and provide products for their sales to the US consumers via their own chains. Mind you, if this does happen – it will be the first new refinery built in the US for several decades. We predict that it might actually drive out of business some older refineries.

 Also agreed, ExxonMobil that is operating oil development on Sakhalin Island of Siberia, not far from Japan, will ramp up investments in that area.

 

On the other hand, we saw on C-Span President Obama speaking to the New Economic School in Moscow. He really did a terrific job, and got much applause, but his words were not carried by the regular Russian channels. Nevertheless, he had his chance to address the future leaders of Russian business about free trade, about reduction of corruption and improvement in human rights – things that help the economy.  Also about new non oil&gas energy. We hope that his words will bear fruits someday.

Also, he spoke how common interest in peace and the economy will drive both states to cooperate.There are plans for nuclear disarmament, for prevention of proliferation of nuclear devises,  and for mutual respect between the two nations and for all other nations.

 Interesting, talking about his visit to Normandy and the WWII battlefields, he said that already President Kennedy said that the Soviet Union lost more soldiers in the War then any nation lost in a war in history. He added special mention of the Soviet soldiers from Kazan (the capital of autonomous Muslim Tatarstan) and Kiev (the capital of independent Ukraine).

This while talking of the new joint aproach to the Afganistan/Pakistan region and to the Middle East while making it clear that defensive missiles are intended because of Iran and that a joint Russian-European approach is in the interest of all.

 

Heard the one about the rabbi, the imam, and the Buddhist monk?

Reuters

Religious leaders met for discussions at the Palace of Peace and Accord.

Kazakhstan was the unlikely host of a conference uniting the world’s faiths. Jerome Taylor reports from Astana.

The Independent, Monday, 6 July 2009

As a man who was born and raised within the secularism of the Soviet Union and has ruled his nation with a velvet-gloved iron fist for the past two decades, Nursultan Nazarbayev is an unlikely pin-up for religious tolerance.

Like so many other Central Asian dictators, Kazakhstan’s President was perfectly positioned to take over the running of his new country after the implosion of the Soviet Union precisely because he was an apparatchik of the avowedly secular Communist Party.

Decades of Soviet domination deliberately stifled overt displays of religious expression in Central Asia – particularly for the region’s majority Muslim population – and many of Mr Nazarbayev’s neighbours have continued in the same vein, treating religion as a potential political threat which needs to be closely monitored.

But the 68-year-old grey-haired President, who rose from being a humble metalworker in a factory to become the leader of Central Asia’s largest and most stable country, is increasingly styling himself as a former Communist with whom the faithful can nevertheless do business.

For two days last week he ensconced himself in an astonishing-looking, purpose-built steel pyramid – designed by the British architect Norman Foster – in his pharaonic capital Astana. He was there to host what was quite possibly the largest gathering of the world’s religious leaders in recent times. A list of those seated in front of the giant round table at the grandly titled Palace of Peace and Accord reads like a Who’s Who of the world’s religions. Robed Buddhist monks chatted to bearded imams who exchanged pleasantries with rabbis and priests. Top delegates to the snappily titled “Third Congress for Leaders of the World and Traditional Religions” included the Israeli President Shimon Peres, two chief rabbis, and the leader of the highly influential Al Azhar university in Cairo, generally regarded as the world’s most authoritative Islamic institution.

Yet despite the unmistakably Soviet-sounding name of the conference – and a somewhat embarrassing hiccup when an Iranian delegation walked out during Mr Peres’ speech – the discussions were centred around the delightfully un-Communist notion of using religion to win world peace.

Whether such deliberations will hail a new era of harmony is a moot point, according to Nicholas Baines, the Anglican Bishop of Croydon who travels regularly to Kazakhstan.

He has watched Mr Nazarbayev transform himself from an open atheist into pro-religion leader who has even made the Haj pilgrimage.

“I admit at times these conferences feel a bit Soviet, but there is lots of good work being done,” Bishop Baines says.

“The unique contribution here is that the Kazakhs have been able to bring together some phenomenally responsible people from world religions under one roof and they have to sit and listen to each other as well as talk … Where else would you have two chief rabbis of Israel sitting in the same room as top Muslims, and they’re having to listen to each other and not just walk out or argue?”

Supporters of Mr Nazarbayev say their leader’s new-found enthusiasm for promoting religious tolerance is governed by the remarkably mixed ethnic background of his country. The more cynical believe it is simply shrewd pragmatism, aimed at avoiding the inter-ethnic fallouts that have disrupted neighbours such as Tajikistan.

Either way, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Kazakhstan is becoming an increasingly religious place under his rule. Tomash Peta, the Catholic Archbishop of Astana, says the government’s favourable stance towards religion means that the atheist attitudes of the Soviet era are fast disappearing. Church attendance is also rocketing. In Kazakhstan nowadays there are very few people who actively reject religion,” he says. “People are suddenly rediscovering their connection to God.”

Newly-built churches and mosques have sprung up all over the country. When Kazakhstan gained its independence there were just 68 mosques to administer to the nine million Muslims who make up 57 percent of Kazakhstan’s population. Currently there are 2,300 mosques and 10 madrasas, most built in the past five years on the back of the enormous wealth generated by Kazakhstan’s oil exports.

Whilst Kazakhs are keen to shed their Soviet atheism, they are simultaneously happy to keep the social advantages that came with Russian domination – especially in the cities. At Friday prayers in the main mosque in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital which remains its financial and artistic hub, it is not unusual to see women in miniskirts temporarily hiring a robe for prayers before hitting the city’s notoriously raucous bars or clubs.

But whilst Kazakhstan may like to portray itself as an island of ethnic and religious harmony, there are some denominations or sects which have fallen foul of the regime. Baptists, Evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ahmadi Muslims and even Hare Krishna devotees have all created growing communities in the country. This is much to the annoyance of both Mr Nazarbayev and mainstream religious leaders who fear such “foreign sects” are damaging Kazakhstan’s historical identity. Minority religious groups frequently complain they are targeted by hostile officials.

Bennett Graham, an expert on Kazakhstan at the Beckett Fund, an American human rights group which monitors religious tolerance, says the Kazakh government’s insistence that freedom of worship is absolute should always be taken with a pinch of salt. “I wouldn’t want to be overly critical, as I want to encourage steps in the right direction,” he says.

“But I have yet to see President Nazarbayev exemplify robust religious tolerance in his own country towards minority religious groups, and until then, will maintain scepticism about the sincerity of the Kazakh efforts to promote religious tolerance and respect around the world.”

Noticeably absent from this week’s inter-faith conference were any of those religious groups that the Kazakh state has been accused of suppressing. But Bishop Baines believes that ultimately Kazakhstan is light years ahead of some of its neighbours.

“Every prediction was that of all the republics formed when the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan was the one that would fall apart because of its ethnic and religious constituency and it history,” he says. “Yet that break-up hasn’t happened. That is a remarkable legacy. They are a young country and they’re heading in the right direction.”

Israel struggles to adapt to a changing picture of Iran.
By Philip Stephens
The Financial Times July 2 2009

No one watches events in Iran more closely than Israel. Tehran has long been the abiding preoccupation, some would say obsession of political discourse in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now the story line has changed.

At first glance the violent repression deployed by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s regime in the wake of last month’s presidential election has been grist to the mill. The images of beaten and bloodied demonstrators have described vividly to a global audience Israel’s long-held view of the Iranian theocracy. Yet the implications do not all run in the same direction. The apparent fixing of the poll result and the subsequent crushing of dissent has also made the case for more rather than less engagement by the west.

Before one or two of my regular correspondents of a neo-conservative leaning accuse me of going soft on an authoritarian Islamist regime with nuclear ambitions, I should say that this point was made to me this week in Tel Aviv by a shrewd member of the Israeli diplomatic establishment and sometime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – no friend of the ayatollahs, in other words.

The reaction of western governments to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s determination to remain in power suggests a different course. The Group of Eight rich nations has issued a strong – by diplomatic standards – denunciation of violence against demonstrators. I am sure I was not alone in seeing a certain irony in Russia’s signature on a document affirming individual liberties. That aside, the condemnations of the suppression of peaceful protest – including those of the European Union and the US administration – were surely right in their rejection of Tehran’s flimsy efforts to blame the west for the flowering of Iranian democracy.

Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponent, was not offering the radical departure in Iranian politics that some Republicans in Washington have chosen to imagine. The presidential contest was a power struggle within Iran’s revolutionary family.

That said, the popular reaction to the apparent vote-rigging has indeed changed the game. The authority of the regime has suffered irrecoverable damage. Few of those who took to the streets will believe that it was all an American, or even more unlikely, a British plot.

This observation was offered to me by another Israeli. Isaac Herzog, the Labour minister for welfare and social services in the government coalition, recalled the occasions when his famous father visited the Shah’s Iran during the 1960s. Chaim Herzog would report back that the Shah was living on borrowed time: the ruler had grown too distant from the ruled.

The same can now be said of the gulf between Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and Iran’s youthful middle classes, although, as with the Shah, the end may be some time in coming.

The earlier point made by the Israeli diplomat was that Iran was no longer the country the west had thought, or wanted to think, it was. The post-election scenes on the streets of Iranian cities would surely strengthen those who argued that the way to encourage Iran’s return to the international community was through engagement – by embracing the ambitions of the protesters rather than shutting them out along with the regime. No one could pretend that Iran was the monolith that is North Korea.

As for suggestions that Israel is ready to bomb Iran to prevent Mr Ahmadi-Nejad from getting his hands on nuclear weapons, the issue was now more complicated. “How do you bomb Neda?” the diplomat said, in a reference to Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death on the streets of Tehran has become a symbol of the regime’s repression.

Mr Netanyahu would doubtless dispute this analysis, but the Israeli prime minister’s views no longer carry weight. Until my discussions this week with Israeli politicians and scholars from across the political spectrum I had not realised quite how comprehensively he had wrecked his own foreign policy.

If Mr Netanyahu had started out with a single strategic objective it was to engage Barack’s Obama’s administration in a joint project to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As an academic sympathetic to the prime minister’s predicament put it, he wanted above all from Washington “a credible policy on Iran”.

No matter that no one quite knew what such a policy would have amounted to; focusing on Iran would have allowed the prime minister to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back-burner and sidestep international pressure to accept a two-state solution.

That was the plan. And what has happened? Mr Obama upturned the argument: a deal between Israel and the Palestinians was promoted in Washington as part of the broad regional initiative necessary to deal properly with Iran. Worse, from Mr Netanyahu’s perspective, Israeli-US relations have been reduced to an increasingly bitter argument about his refusal to halt settlement building on the West Bank.

As for Iran, the US president has indeed stepped back from immediate engagement. Doubtless he has been influenced by those who argue that restoring relations with Tehran would “legitimise” Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. Much the same argument was heard a few decades ago about détente with the Soviet Union.

But Mr Obama’s options remain open, as do those of European leaders. They should listen carefully to the voices in Iran who want the country to join the modern world.

Before visiting Israel I heard a prominent, Tehran-based academic put the case well. The policy of isolating Iran, he said, played into the hands of the regime by allowing it to demonise the US and its allies and forestall, in the name of national security, the opening up of society.

Breaking into this vicious circle will not be easy. It will require from Mr Obama a willingness to expend more political capital in explaining that diplomacy is not a synonym for defeatism. Engagement may well fail to persuade Iran to give up its quest for full mastery of the nuclear cycle – an ambition, incidentally, that the ayatollahs inherited from the Shah. It might just persuade Tehran not to build a bomb. In any event, the alternatives are all worse – unless, of course, Mr Obama feels he should take some foreign policy advice from Mr Netanyahu.

 philip.stephens at ft.com

 http://www.bechollashon.org/resources/ne…

Francesca Biller-Safran

Japanese-Jew Doesn’t “Oy Veh” So Much Since Obama.

By Francesca Biller-Safran
Huffington Post
Published: June 4, 2009

As a Japanese-Jew, I have historically used self deprecating humor at my own expense as a way to explain and defend to others who I was and to feel accepted.

My cultural confusion can be summed up in this anonymous quote, “There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?”

Until recently I believed “everything” was my fault.

And I would certainly be the last person I would ever want to visit, with all of my kvetching to anyone kind enough to listen. “Oy Veh,” I would lament. “No one accepts me; I am neither a truly Japanese or Jewish soul, so I will just sit here alone in the dark, eating a knish in my kimono.”

But gratefully, since Obama has become president, not only do I feel more comfortable as the multiracial shikseh that I am, but engage in thoughtful conversations about my heritage and background, without jokes, defense or much self-deprecation.

I only hope that I conduct myself with an ounce of the class, genus and moral fortitude the president has displayed when continually questioned about his cultural identity.

In his keynote 2004 speech to the Democratic Convention, Obama said, “In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As a child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of race.”

I too was born in Hawaii and attended University High School in Hawaii a few years before Obama just a couple miles from his school, Punahoe High, whose students I shared long bus rides with from remote areas in order to get a good education; a value that my parents, like his, believed was invaluable.

Like my mother and father, Obama’s parents are from two different cultures, yet he never feels the need to defend or justify his background, rather, he consistently responds to questions and assumptions with dignity and forethought.

When asked during the presidential campaign what he considered his ethnicity to be, Obama answered simply that he is an American from two equally rich and diverse cultures.

In a 2004 speech, Obama said, “My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.”

As a blend of cultures with a Jewish-Russian, Irish father and Japanese-Hawaiian mother, I too have faced continual questions as to what I considered my race, people, culture and ethnicity to be.

I was given several names, including three middle names, all five on my birth certificate. One is named after my Jewish great grandmother, Beatrice, the other a Japanese name, Yukari, and the third, Caitlin, named after the wife of my father’s favorite poet, Dylan Thomas. My first name is named after a man — the Italian Renaissance painter, Piero Della Francesca, with his last name chosen for my first.

Who was I, where did I come from, was I merely a mistake, an experiment, and how I might actually exist as a identifiable human — have been relentless questions that have sewn experiences throughout my culturally odd and unasked for politically patch-worked life.

This sentiment from an anonymous quote defines the neurotic dichotomy of my life, “To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.”

One searing memory I experienced involves a boy who told me on the schoolyard there was no such thing as a Japanese-Jewish person. Afterwards, I ran all the way home from this boy with the piercing blue eyes and looked into the mirror wondering if I really didn’t exist at all; at least in any real identifiable sense that mattered.

This was just one comment amongst countless surreal exclamations that secured my stalwart allegiance to defining myself as a person from different cultures, but never defined by them.

In his keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

I can assume the President Obama has heard countless comments denying his existence as a fortified American as well, but was intrepid enough to remain an honorable candidate despite cultural ignorance on the part of others.

This is the essential definition for any strong person; the ability, will and might to face oppression and hatred and march forward anyway.

No one thought it was truly possible that a man who was Black may become president yet, no one. Some hoped, some feared, some dreamed, and many imagined a courageous, ambitious reality, but not one of us truly believed with full breadth that this young country was ready to make such a fearless and autonomous leap for the betterment of us and for the world.

Like Obama’s parents, the marriage of my parents confounded some, upset others and was dismissed by the rest.

My father was raised in Los Angeles and then attended The University of Hawaii not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He came back with an education and a wife, who was a second-generation Japanese-American known as the Nisei generation, who grew up as a farmer on the coffee plantations of Kona, Hawaii.

My Japanese-American uncles were part of the 442nd Infantry, also known as The Purple Heart Battalion, the most highly decorated fighter pilots in United States History. This includes some 4,000 Bronze stars and nearly 9,500 Purple Hearts.

In this period, many Japanese-Americans were interned throughout the U.S, with land taken away, families torn apart and lives devastated, not unlike Jewish family members of my husband’s during the Second World War with more tragic results.

A lot of anti-Japanese sentiment existed at this time, and yet my parents married, with whispers heard loudly as shouts and bombs from some family, while others chose to keep quiet with disdain; perhaps even more devastating.

Martin Luther King said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

My parents had four children during the 1950’s and 60’s, and thankfully we were raised in Southern California, a region more liberal and tolerant of interracial marriage than many other parts of the country.

A visceral account of the confused cultural identity I experienced in a Japanese-Jewish household can be summed up in the following quotes, the first from a Japanese emperor, “Generally speaking, the way of the warrior is the resolute acceptance of death,” and the second from Woody Allen, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

At least as a writer, my life experiences give me more material to work with than my mother’s hundreds of antique kimonos combined with all the chuppah’s this side of Golden Gate Bridge.

A perfect example of conflicting philosophies learned during childhood includes Buddha’s lesson that “Life as we know it ultimately leads to suffering,” while we were told simultaneously that although Jesus was indeed a suffering member of our tribe, we should never actually worship him.

But nevertheless, I have made it, I have arrived, and I am as they say in Yiddish, I’m “Nisht geferlech,” which basically means “Not so shabby.”

Surely President Obama must realize this profound effect he has had on a nation who soldiers so many different religions, races and cultures while speaking in native tongues more freely understood now at least now in spirit, if not yet comprehended in each syllable, syntax or inflection.

And because we now have a president with a different story than president’s past, who holds his head high with his own proud blend of integral cultural being, each language and culture that is different is now more highly revered, as is each person’s individual journey.

Each story sheds an even broader and brighter light on a nation that not only endures, but empowers; not only inspires but includes, and not only validates, but values each lesson, paragraph and infinitesimal anecdote that boasts the value of us all.

This is now an axiomatic concept for the country, one that is only beginning to change America’s story and each person willing to tell their cultural rhythms on their own.

For this one Japanese-Jewish woman who always thought she was strange; even once given the title of “Shikseh Princess” at a Bar Mitzvah by some nice Jewish boys, my story has now changed for the better and interestingly enough, still interesting all the same.

Finally I can stop commiserating with Woody Allen when he said, “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” Except those rare moments when I begin to doubt the integrity and veracity of my own personal story that is just as valuable as anyone else’s.

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “This is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think; write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.”

The doors for us all now open with greater ease and determination, and the answers and questions we hear on the other sides of each door are purely reflective of a nation that is now more unified in its diversity, and more open to discussion, depth, profundity and inclusion.

Originally published here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/francesca-…

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 http://bechollashon.org/resources/newsle…

Judge Sotomayor, a mythic ‘Hispanic’

The supposedly racial term was pushed by Nixon to lump distinct Spanish-speaking groups into one voting bloc. There’s no such thing, and the judge should be appointed on her merits.

By Jonathan Zimmerman
LA Times
Published: June 12, 2009

Here’s a good argument for putting Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court: She’s knowledgeable, respected and deeply experienced. As a federal judge for nearly two decades, she’s heard thousands of cases and written hundreds of opinions.

And here’s a lousy argument for confirming Sotomayor: She would be the first “Hispanic” on the court.

I put the term in quotation marks because it’s a recent invention, dating to the 1970s and ’80s. Before then, when Sotomayor was growing up with her Puerto Rican family in New York City, she was not Hispanic.

And words make a difference. As many commentators have reminded us since President Obama nominated Sotomayor, judges are inevitably shaped by their life experiences. But these experiences are themselves shaped — and, sometimes, distorted — by the terms that we use to describe them.

How did Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans all become Hispanic?

Amid the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, many of these groups joined hands to demand voting rights, bilingual education and social services. Here they received a big assist from an unlikely source: Richard Nixon. Eager to bring Mexicans and other Latino immigrants into the Republican fold, Nixon also saw them as a potential bulwark against black political aspirations.

“All Spanish-speaking Americans share certain characteristics — a strong family structure, deep ties to the church, which makes them open to an appeal from us,” wrote one GOP campaign strategist on the eve of Nixon’s 1972 presidential reelection bid. “The Democratic Party is under suspicion for favoring politically potent blacks at the expense of the needs of Spanish-speaking people.”

So Nixon threw his weight behind bilingual education, which has since become a bête noire for the GOP. He also ordered the Census Bureau to add a query on its 1970 form asking whether respondents were “Hispanic,” hoping to further solidify this new voting bloc.

Census Bureau officials balked, noting — correctly — that the term lacked scientific and historical precision. They also worried that respondents wouldn’t recognize it. So the most commonly used census form in 1970 asked respondents if they were of “Spanish” origin, not whether they were Hispanic.

All that would change in 1977, when the Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to classify Americans as one of four races — white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native or Asian/Pacific Islander — and also to distinguish between two ethnic categories, “of Hispanic origin” and “not of Hispanic origin.” Since then, the census has asked people their race and whether they’re Hispanic, which is not listed as a “race” per se.

Increasingly, however, Americans thought of it as such. Government agencies used “Hispanic” alongside “Asian” and “black,” making Hispanic into a de facto racial category. Businesses and educational institutions counted Hispanics — or, sometimes, “Latinos” — as a race in diversity and affirmative action reports.

Not surprisingly, then, Hispanics became more likely over time to identify themselves as a separate race too. In the mid-1990s, 60% of the respondents to a study of more than 5,000 Latin American immigrants self-identified as “white,” for example, but only 20% of their children did so.

That’s an unprecedented development, as the United States had continuously absorbed people formerly identified in the census as from nonwhite races into the white majority. Jews, Italians and Slavs were all once classified as separate races; now, they’re white. But Hispanics are moving in the opposite direction — from white to nonwhite. In our minds, at least, they’ve become a minority race.

The language of race is a unifying one, blinding us to the irreducible diversity that a single category can contain. Consider Sotomayor’s now infamous comment that a “wise Latina woman” would render a better judicial decision than a white male. While GOP antagonists accused Sotomayor of reverse racism and Democrats rushed to her defense, nobody pointed out that wise Latina women come in all shapes, sizes and ideologies. Would a wise Cuban woman in South Florida see eye-to-eye with a wise Mexican woman in San Diego, or with a wise Salvadoran woman in Washington, D.C.? Probably not.

Even worse, the idea of race tricks us into seeing “Hispanic” as a biological category rather than a cultural one. I frequently do an exercise with my students, asking them how a scientist would identify their race. The most common reply is also the most troubling one: via a blood test. In fact, that would tell you the opposite: We all come from the same ancestor, in East Africa, and we’re all mongrels. The blood test does not identify your “race,” which primarily exists only in our minds.

As a child, Sotomayor was probably classified as white; now she’s Hispanic. But her DNA is the same. The only thing that has changed is the way we look at her. Belying every shard of evidence, we continue to believe that races are different under the skin.

So let’s hope that the Senate confirms Sotomayor, one of the most qualified nominees in the history of the Supreme Court. Then let’s welcome her as the first person of Puerto Rican descent on the court, not as the first “Hispanic.”

If you think the words don’t matter, you haven’t been listening.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University and is the author of the just-published “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”

Originally published here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-o…

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The issue is really not the backing of Moussavi – it is the fact that the young want to be part of the world and know that the 21st century has things to offer them that their country’s leadership tries to take away from them. They really want freedom and if given the chance could provide for Iran the needed new leadership.

Earlier Monday, Ayatollah Khamenei stepped in to try to calm a growing backlash, forcing him into a public role he generally seeks to avoid as the country’s top religious authority. Under Iran’s dual system of government, with civil and religious institutions, the supreme leader can usually operate in the shadows while elected officials serve as the public face of governance and policy.

He called for the Guardian Council to conduct an inquiry into the opposition’s claims that the election was rigged and then had that announcement repeated every 15 minutes on Iranian state radio throughout the day. It was a rare reversal.

On Sunday he met with Mr. Moussavi, a moderate, to listen to his concerns. And on Monday, he promised the inquiry into the results.

Nevertheless, his announcement could not calm the anger of the people. There was so much distrust that some people said they believed the leader was just trying to buy time and to calm the crowds, rather than attempting to really investigate the outcome.

“These people are not seeking a revolution,” said Ali Reza, a young actor in a brown T-shirt who stood for a moment watching on the rally’s sidelines. “We don’t want this regime to fall. We want our votes to be counted, because we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world.”

Mr. Moussavi, who had called for the rally on Sunday but never received official permission for it, joined the crowd, as did Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president. But the crowd was so vast, and communications had been so sporadic — the authorities have cut off phone and text-messaging services repeatedly in recent days — that many marchers seemed unaware they were there.

“We don’t really have a leader,” said Mahdiye, a 20-year-old student, who like many protesters declined to give a last name because of fears of repercussions. “Moussavi wants to do something, but they won’t let him. It is dangerous for him, and we don’t want to lose him. We don’t know how far this will go” – report the New York Times correspondents.

It was too soon to tell whether Ayatollah Khamenei’s decision to launch an inquiry, or the government’s decision to let the silent rally proceed, would change the election results. Many in the crowd said they believed that officials expected the protests to dissipate, as smaller protest movements did in 1999 and 2003.

“People feel really insulted, and nothing is worse than that,” said Azi, a 48-year-old woman in a yellow headscarf who participated in the massive rally on Monday. “We won’t let the regime buy time, we will hold another march tomorrow.”

At nightfall, large numbers of people in Tehran took to their roofs for a second night, chanting “God is great!” and “Death to the dictator!” in neighborhoods across the city. The Associated Press, quoting residents, also reported that shooting was also heard in three districts of wealthy northern Tehran.

In Moscow, meanwhile, an official at the Iranian Embassy said that Mr. Ahmadinejad had delayed a visit to Russia that was to have started Monday. The meeting, in Yekaterinburg, is of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China and four Central Asian countries. Reuters reported that he arrived on Tuesday.

————

Democracy could still win in Iran.
By Gideon Rachman
The Financial Times, June 15 2009.

Thirty years after the Iranian revolution, could we be witnessing an Iranian counter-revolution? In the short term, events in Iran are depressing and alarming – a stolen election, violence in the streets, repression. In the long term, the weekend has provided heartening evidence that Iran, and the Middle East in general, need not be immune to the great wave of democratisation that has swept the world since the late 1970s.

Of course, there are those who think that – despite the turmoil in Tehran – President Mahmoud Ahamdi-Nejad may actually have won the election. Their line of argument is that western journalists and middle-class Iranians have been deceived by focusing too much on opinion in the capital city and amongst the educated elite. Iran might be like Thailand – a country that has recently been through political turmoil because the urban middle-classes are regularly out-voted by the rural poor.

These arguments are unconvincing. The Iranian election bears all the hallmarks of a stolen vote. The official count has Mr Ahmadi-Nejad winning even in the home town of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, his main challenger. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is said to have won even in Azeri-speaking constituencies, despite the fact that Mr Moussavi comes from an Azeri background. The official tally gave Mr Ahmadi-Nejad 63 per cent of the vote, which is way out of line with most pre-election predictions. The Iranian regime has reacted to popular protests with all the instincts of a dictatorship – beating up protesters, locking up opponents, shutting down text messaging services and internet sites.

In retrospect, the Iranian revolution of 1979 replaced one despotic regime with another – and so cut the country off from the democratising forces that were just beginning to make themselves felt throughout much of the rest of the world.

It used to be said that Iran was a rare example of a semi-democracy in the Middle East. But the weekend elections have ripped away the country’s democratic veil.

During the 1980s most of the Latin American authoritarian regimes were swept away. Democracy came to the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s – and to central Europe in 1989. In the 1990s apartheid fell in South Africa and so did the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

In recent years, the global democratic revolution has threatened to run out of steam. Russia has slipped backwards towards authoritarianism and China has made the case for a new form of enlightened one-party rule. The chaos that followed the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan has threatened to discredit the whole case for democratisation.

Some conservative realists have argued that it is, in any case, a mistake to promote democracy in the Middle East, since Islamists are liable to win power and impose illiberal regimes. The joke has been that it would be “one man, one vote, one time”. The best response to this has always been that Islamism is only likely to lose its popular allure when Muslim fundamentalists are allowed to govern – and prove themselves to be incompetent, oppressive and corrupt.

That cycle is now playing itself out in Iran. Even if Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and his cohorts succeed in clinging on to power, their claim to represent a popular Islamic revolution is now in shreds.

***

In the meantime, how should the outside world react to Iran’s stolen election? The Obama administration has already been criticised for what some conservatives regard as an excessively mild and cautious response to events in Iran.

But heavy-handed intervention by the west would be mistaken at this stage. The Iranian regime has three possible sources of domestic legitimacy: popular support, economic success or an external threat. The economy is doing badly and the stolen election has wrecked the idea that this is a government that rests on a broad popular mandate.

That leaves the possibility that the regime will use the bogeyman of foreign intervention to rally patriotic support and to crack down even harder on the opposition. There is a history of western meddling in Iranian politics – for example the US-backed coup of 1953, acknowledged by President Barack Obama in his recent speech in Cairo. So an appeal by the regime to rally all patriotic Iranians against foreign intervention might resonate.

The crucial lesson of the long wave of democratisation that has rolled round the world since 1979 is that democratic revolutions ultimately succeed for almost entirely domestic reasons. Occasionally, outsiders can influence events. The Russian decision not to intervene in 1989 was obviously crucial to the success of the democratic revolutions in central Europe. America’s decision to spirit away Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 clinched the “people power” revolution in the Philippines.

But these were client regimes. In most cases, democratic revolutions have been driven overwhelmingly by “people power” at home – usually followed by a loss of nerve or cracks in the ruling regime. This might yet happen in Iran.

It is still possible that the country will have a successful “Green” revolution to match the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. But the sad truth is that all the outside world can do, for the moment, is offer rhetorical support for Iranian democrats, watch, wait and hope.

 gideon.rachman at ft.com