Report on Climate Predicts Extremes More Droughts Likely in North America.

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer - Friday, June 20, 2008. Published on page 2 today.

As greenhouse-gas emissions rise, North America is likely to experience more droughts and excessive heat in some regions even as intense downpours and hurricanes pound others more often, according to a report issued yesterday by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

This Story - Report on Climate Predicts Extreme - How Global Warming Has Changed Climate.

The 162-page study, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of how global warming has helped to transform the climate of the United States and Canada over the past 50 years — and how it may do so in the future.

Coming at a time when record flooding is ravaging the Midwest, the new report paints a grim scenario in which severe weather will exact a heavy toll. The report warned that extreme weather events “are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate.” { We, like everyone else revolt when some preacher tells us that these are punishments from God for this-or-some-other misbehavior - but we accept that this might be Nature’s Reaction to our digging up fossil carbon from its nature intended grave }

While the Southwest is likely to face even more intense droughts, the scientists wrote, heavy downpours will become more frequent in some other parts of the country because of increased water vapor in the air.

“This report addresses one of the most frequently asked questions about global warming: What will happen to weather and climate extremes?” said one of the report’s two co-chairs, Thomas R. Karl, who directs NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.. He added that the report, which synthesizes the findings of more than 100 academic papers, “concludes that we are now witnessing and will increasingly experience more extreme weather and climate events.”

The authors found that the last decade has seen fewer cold snaps than any other 10-year period in the historical record dating back to 1895. Under a middle-range scenario of future greenhouse-gas emissions, climate models indicate that by mid-century, extremely hot days that now occur only once every 20 years will occur every three years.

Richard Moss, vice president and managing director for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund, said in an interview that the report was prepared by “an A-list of authors” and is “really frightening.”

In a conference call with reporters, Karl and the other co-chair, Gerald A. Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said there is no doubt that human-generated heat-trapping gases have helped intensify both the Southwest’s current drought and heavy downpours, which have been increasing at a rate three times that of average precipitation over the past century.

“That’s a certainty,” Karl said. “People aren’t questioning whether there’s been an increase in heavy downpours.”

By the end of the century, he added, models predict that intense bouts of precipitation that might have occurred once every 20 years will take place every five years.

The researchers, from both the federal and private sectors, reached more tentative conclusions about the connection between greenhouse-gas emissions and hurricanes.

The report noted that the intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms, as measured by an index that combines wind strength, duration and frequency, has shown a “substantial” increase since 1970 and that “there has been a strong statistical connection between tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures and Atlantic hurricane activity.” But the scientists said this suggestion of a connection to human activity is not conclusive.

NOAA research meteorologist Thomas R. Knutson, who contributed to the report and recently published an article in the journal Nature saying that it is too early to attribute more intense hurricane activity to a detectable human influence, said the synthesis reflects the current disagreement among scientists on the question of hurricanes.

“This is a report that is a consensus document, where you have a number of authors who may not agree on all things,” Knutson said.

—————

The Real Story Behind the Midwest Floods? Climate Change.
By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate. Posted June 19, 2008.

The floodwaters are rising, swamping cities, breaching levees. Tens of thousands are displaced. Many are dead. No, I am not talking about Hurricane Katrina, but about the Midwest United States. As the floodwaters head south along the Mississippi, devastating communities one after another, the media are overflowing with televised images of the destruction.

While the TV meteorologists document “extreme weather” with their increasingly sophisticated toolbox, from Doppler radar to 3-D animated maps, the two words rarely uttered are its cause: global warming. I asked former Energy Department official Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, about the disconnect:

“Part of the reason is that the people who write about global warming for most newspapers and TV are not the same people as those who tend to cover weather. In general, the media is covering this as all sort of unconnected events, just regular weather maybe gone a little wacky. But, in fact, the scientific community has predicted for more than two decades now that as we pour more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet will heat up, and that would redistribute water. If you heat up the planet … you evaporate more water, and areas that are wetter will tend to see more intense rainfall and deluges and earlier snowmelts, and all that will lead to flooding. So what we’re seeing is exactly what scientists have been telling us would happen because of human emissions.”
Perry Beeman is an award-winning investigative reporter for The Des Moines Register, and former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. From his flood-racked city of Des Moines, he told me: “Not even a few weeks before this all happened, we were in the middle of doing a climate-change series that’s going to run over the year. We had two-page graphic talking about the different things that would happen [in Iowa as a result of climate change] and pointing out … that you would expect more torrential rains. What has happened here is consistent with many scientists’ view of what global warming will mean in the Midwest.”

So if the disasters that follow one another, from hurricanes to tornadoes to flooding, are consistent with global warming, why aren’t the networks, the weather reporters, making the link? Dr. Heidi Cullen, a climate expert on The Weather Channel, created a stir in late 2006 when she wrote in her Weather Channel blog: “If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS [American Meteorological Society] shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming.”

As reporters stood in waist-high water in the flooded downtowns of major American cities, President George Bush basked in the sunlight in Washington, D.C., urging Congress to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling and on oil shale drilling, and to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. While regular people are getting hit in the wallet at the gas pump, paying now more than $4 per gallon for gasoline, the oil, coal and gas industries are reaping huge rewards, and applying pressure to open up protected spaces for resource extraction.

One of the candidates to replace Bush has a solution. When I asked Ralph Nader about global warming this week, he said: “We’ve got to have a national mission of converting our economy, and the example for the world is solar energy, 4 billion years of supply. It is environmentally benign, decentralized, makes us energy-independent and replaces the ExxonMobil/Peabody Coal/uranium complex. That is why we have got to go for economic, political, health and safety reasons.”

Nader understands how the levers of power and influence operate in Washington, but also how flooding can devastate a community. He grew up in Winsted, Conn., where the Mad River and Still River flooded in 1955, where another Nader confronted another Bush. Ralph Nader’s mother, Rose, shook the hand of Bush’s grandfather, Sen. Prescott Bush, R-Conn., and refused to let go until he agreed to build a dry dam. The dry dam got built, and Winsted hasn’t flooded since. A half-century later, our global problems have gotten far worse. Citizen activists need to shake not hands but the system, holding to account those with power and influence, from politicians to the personalities who report the weather on TV.

Denis Moynihan assisted on today’s column.

American Occupation at the Pump: Is $250 a Barrel Oil on Its Way?
By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com. Posted Friday June 13, 2008.

It’s time to ask whether the U.S. military should have anything to do with American energy security.

If you thought things were bad, with a barrel of crude oil at $136 and the oil heartlands of our planet verging on chaos, don’t be surprised, but you may still have something to look forward to. Alexei Miller, chairman of Russia’s vast state-owned energy monopoly, Gazprom, just suggested that, within 18 months, that same barrel could be selling for a nifty $250. Put that in your tank and … well, don’t drive it. It will be far too valuable.

Think of Miller’s sobering prediction as, at least in part, a result of the Bush administration’s attempt to “secure” the Middle East and the oil-rich Caspian basin by force in two failing wars (and occupations). Now, imagine for a moment, what his price scenario might be if, as journalist Jim Lobe — never one to leap from rumors to sensational conclusions — recently suggested, forces in the Bush administration (and in Israel) in favor of launching an air campaign against Iran are gaining strength. Just the suggestion last week by Shaul Mofaz, an Israeli deputy prime minister, that an attack on Iran is “unavoidable” if that country doesn’t halt its nuclear program — “If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective.”

The talk helped send the price of crude oil soaring. Imagine what an actual air attack might do.

You know that old joke: military justice is to justice as military music is to music; well, someday, not so far into the future, a similar, though far grimmer joke, is likely to be made about Washington’s attempts to secure the U.S. oil supply by military means.

In the meantime, Michael Klare, author most recently of “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy,” considers the madness of Washington’s long-term militarization of oil delivery and the devastating oil wars that have resulted. (His previous book, Blood and Oil, by the way, has recently been turned into a documentary film. Check it out.) — Introduction by TomDispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.

Garrisoning the Global Gas Station - Challenging the Militarization of U.S. Energy Policy.
By Michael T. Klare

American policymakers have long viewed the protection of overseas oil supplies as an essential matter of “national security,” requiring the threat of — and sometimes the use of — military force. This is now an unquestioned part of American foreign policy.

On this basis, the first Bush administration fought a war against Iraq in 1990-1991 and the second Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003. With global oil prices soaring and oil reserves expected to dwindle in the years ahead, military force is sure to be seen by whatever new administration enters Washington in January 2009 as the ultimate guarantor of our well-being in the oil heartlands of the planet. But with the costs of militarized oil operations — in both blood and dollars — rising precipitously isn’t it time to challenge such “wisdom”? Isn’t it time to ask whether the U.S. military has anything reasonable to do with American energy security, and whether a reliance on military force, when it comes to energy policy, is practical, affordable, or justifiable?

How Energy Policy Got Militarized:

The association between “energy security” (as it’s now termed) and “national security” was established long ago. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first forged this association way back in 1945, when he pledged to protect the Saudi Arabian royal family in return for privileged American access to Saudi oil. The relationship was given formal expression in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter told Congress that maintaining the uninterrupted flow of Persian Gulf oil was a “vital interest” of the United States, and attempts by hostile nations to cut that flow would be countered “by any means necessary, including military force.”

To implement this “doctrine,” Carter ordered the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, specifically earmarked for combat operations in the Persian Gulf area. President Ronald Reagan later turned that force into a full-scale regional combat organization, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. Every president since Reagan has added to CENTCOM’s responsibilities, endowing it with additional bases, fleets, air squadrons, and other assets. As the country has, more recently, come to rely on oil from the Caspian Sea basin and Africa, U.S. military capabilities are being beefed up in those areas as well.

As a result, the U.S. military has come to serve as a global oil protection service, guarding pipelines, refineries, and loading facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere. According to one estimate, provided by the conservative National Defense Council Foundation, the “protection” of Persian Gulf oil alone costs the U.S. Treasury $138 billion per year — up from $49 billion just before the invasion of Iraq.


For Democrats and Republicans alike, spending such sums to protect foreign oil supplies is now accepted as common wisdom, not worthy of serious discussion or debate. A typical example of this attitude can be found in an “Independent Task Force Report” on the “National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency” released by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2006. Chaired by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and former CIA Director John Deutch, the CFR report concluded that the U.S. military must continue to serve as a global oil protection service for the foreseeable future. “At least for the next two decades, the Persian Gulf will be vital to U.S. interests in reliable oil supplies,” it noted. Accordingly, “the United States should expect and support a strong military posture that permits suitably rapid deployment to the region, if necessary.” Similarly, the report adds, “U.S. naval protection of the sea-lanes that transport oil is of paramount importance.”

{ we were present at the CFR when that report was released and asked about the need of disengaging from oil because of Global Warming/Climate Change issues. That was considered an unfriendly queation in that environment. We made ourselves unwanted at the CFR seemingly because we never got invited since - so be it.}

The Pentagon as Insecurity Inc.

These views, widely shared, then and now, by senior figures in both major parties, dominate — or, more accurately, blanket — American strategic thinking. And yet the actual utility of military force as a means for ensuring energy security has yet to be demonstrated.

Keep in mind that, despite the deployment of up to 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, Iraq is a country in chaos and the Department of Defense (DoD) has been notoriously unable to prevent the recurring sabotage of oil pipelines and refineries by various insurgent groups and militias, not to mention the systematic looting of government supplies by senior oil officials supposedly loyal to the U.S.-backed central government and often guarded (at great personal risk) by American soldiers. Five years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is only producing about 2.5 million barrels of oil per day — about the same amount as in the worst days of Saddam Hussein back in 2001. Moreover, the New York Times reports, “at least one-third, and possibly much more, of the fuel from Iraq’s largest refinery… is [being] diverted to the black market, according to American military officials.” Is this really conducive to American energy security?

{We just got today material on this from the UN - we willl include this at the end of this article - Pincas Jawetz comment}

The same disappointing results have been noted in other countries where U.S.-backed militaries have attempted to protect vulnerable oil facilities. In Nigeria, for example, increased efforts by American-equipped government forces to crush rebels in the oil-rich Niger Delta region have merely inflamed the insurgency, while actually lowering national oil output. Meanwhile, the Nigerian military, like the Iraqi government (and assorted militias), has been accused of pilfering billions of dollars’ worth of crude oil and selling it on the black market.

In reality, the use of military force to protect foreign oil supplies is likely to create anything but “security.” It can, in fact, trigger violent “blowback” against the United States. For example, the decision by the senior President Bush to maintain an enormous, permanent U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia following Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait is now widely viewed as a major source of virulent anti-Americanism in the Kingdom, and became a prime recruiting tool for Osama bin Laden in the months leading up to the 9/11 terror attacks. “For over seven years,” bin Laden proclaimed in 1998, “the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight neighboring Muslim peoples.” To repel this assault on the Muslin world, he thundered, it was “an individual duty for every Muslim” to “kill the Americans” and drive their armies “out of all the lands of Islam.” { So again, these are things www.SustainabiliTank.info keeps remarking  on this website }

As if to confirm the veracity of bin Laden’s analysis of U.S. intentions, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew to Saudi Arabia on April 30, 2003 to announce that the American bases there would no longer be needed due to the successful invasion of Iraq, then barely one month old. “It is now a safer region because of the change of regime in Iraq,” Rumsfeld declared. ”The aircraft and those involved will now be able to leave.”

Even as he was speaking in Riyadh, however, a dangerous new case of blowback had erupted in Iraq: Upon their entry into Baghdad, U.S. forces seized and guarded the Oil Ministry headquarters while allowing schools, hospitals, and museums to be looted with impunity. Most Iraqis have since come to regard this decision, which insured that the rest of the city would be looted, as the ultimate expression of the Bush administration’s main motive for invading their country. They have viewed repeated White House claims of a commitment to human rights and democracy there as mere fig leaves that barely covered the urge to plunder Iraq’s oil. Nothing American officials have done since has succeeded in erasing this powerful impression, which continues to drive calls for an American withdrawal.

And these are but a few examples of the losses to American national security produced by a thoroughly militarized approach to energy security. Yet the premises of such a global policy continue to go unquestioned, even as American policymakers persist in relying on military force as their ultimate response to threats to the safe production and transportation of oil. In a kind of energy “Catch-22,” the continual militarizing of energy policy only multiplies the threats that call such militarization into being.

If anything, this spiral of militarized insecurity is worsening. Take the expanded U.S. military presence in Africa — one of the few areas in the world expected to experience an increase in oil output in the years ahead.

This year, the Pentagon will activate the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), its first new overseas combat command since Reagan created CENTCOM a quarter century ago. Although Department of Defense officials are loathe to publicly acknowledge any direct relationship between AFRICOM’s formation and a growing U.S. reliance on that continent’s oil, they are less inhibited in private briefings. At a February 19th meeting at the National Defense University, for example, AFRICOM Deputy Commander Vice-Admiral Robert Moeller indicated that “oil disruption” in Nigeria and West Africa would constitute one of the primary challenges facing the new organization.

AFRICOM and similar extensions of the Carter Doctrine into new oil-producing regions are only likely to provoke fresh outbreaks of blowback, while bundling tens of billions of extra dollars every year into an already bloated Pentagon budget. Sooner or later, if U.S. policy doesn’t change, this price will be certain to include as well the loss of American lives, as more and more soldiers are exposed to hostile fire or explosives while protecting vulnerable oil installations in areas torn by ethnic, religious, and sectarian strife.

Why pay such a price? Given the all-but-unavoidable evidence of just how ineffective military force has been when it comes to protecting oil supplies, isn’t it time to rethink Washington’s reigning assumptions regarding the relationship between energy security and national security? After all, other than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who would claim that, more than five years after the invasion of Iraq, either the United States or its supply of oil is actually safer?

Creating Real Energy Security

The reality of America’s increasing reliance on foreign oil only strengthens the conviction in Washington that military force and energy security are inseparable twins. With nearly two-thirds of the country’s daily oil intake imported — and that percentage still going up — it’s hard not to notice that significant amounts of our oil now come from conflict-prone areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. So long as this is the case, U.S. policymakers will instinctively look to the military to ensure the safe delivery of crude oil. It evidently matters little that the use of military force, especially in the Middle East, has surely made the energy situation less stable and less dependable, while fueling anti-Americanism.

This is, of course, not the definition of “energy security,” but its opposite. A viable long-term approach to actual energy security would not favor one particular source of energy — in this case, oil — above all others, or regularly expose American soldiers to a heightened risk of harm and American taxpayers to a heightened risk of bankruptcy. Rather, an American energy policy that made sense would embrace a holistic approach to energy procurement, weighing the relative merits of all potential sources of energy.

It would naturally favor the development of domestic, renewable sources of energy that do not degrade the environment or imperil other national interests. At the same time, it would favor a thoroughgoing program of energy conservation of a sort notably absent these last two decades — one that would help cut reliance on foreign energy sources in the near future and slow the atmospheric buildup of climate-altering greenhouse gases.

Petroleum would continue to play a significant role in any such approach. Oil retains considerable appeal as a source of transportation energy (especially for aircraft) and as a feedstock for many chemical products. But given the right investment and research policies — and the will to apply something other than force to energy supply issues — oil’s historic role as the world’s paramount fuel could relatively quickly draw to a close. It would be especially important that American policymakers not prolong this role artificially by, as has been the case for decades, subsidizing major U.S. oil firms or, more recently, spending $138 billion a year on the protection of foreign oil deliveries. These funds would instead be redirected to the promotion of energy efficiency and especially the development of domestic sources of energy.

Some policymakers who agree on the need to develop alternatives to imported energy insist that such an approach should begin with oil extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and other protected wilderness areas. Even while acknowledging that such drilling would not substantially reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, they nevertheless insist that it’s essential to make every conceivable effort to substitute domestic oil supplies for imports in the nation’s total energy supply. But this argument ignores the fact that oil’s day is drawing to a close, and that any effort to prolong its duration only complicates the inevitable transition to a post-petroleum economy.

A far more fruitful approach, better designed to promote American self-sufficiency and technological vigor in the intensely competitive world of the mid-21st century, would emphasize the use of domestic ingenuity and entrepreneurial skills to maximize the potential of renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, and wave power. The same skills should also be applied to developing methods for producing ethanol from non-food plant matter (”cellulosic ethanol”), for using coal without releasing carbon into the atmosphere (via “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS), for miniaturizing hydrogen fuel cells, and for massively increasing the energy efficiency of vehicles, buildings, and industrial processes.

In applying this general rule, however, priority clearly should be given to new forms of transportation fuel. It is here that oil has long been king, and here that oil’s decline will be most harshly felt. It is thanks to this that calls for military intervention to secure additional supplies of crude are only likely to grow. So emphasis should be given to the rapid development of biofuels, coal-to-liquid fuels (with the carbon extracted via CCS), hydrogen, or battery power, and other innovative means of fueling vehicles. At the same time, it’s obvious that putting some of our military budget into funding a massive increase in public transit would be the height of national sanity.

An approach of this sort would enhance American national security on multiple levels. It would increase the reliable supply of fuels, promote economic growth at home (rather than sending a veritable flood of dollars into the coffers of unreliable petro-regimes abroad), and diminish the risk of recurring U.S. involvement in foreign oil wars. No other approach — certainly not the present traditional, unquestioned, unchallenged reliance on military force — can make this claim. It’s well past time to stop garrisoning the global gas station.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of several books on energy politics, including Resource Wars (2001), Blood and Oil (2004), and, most recently, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.

———————-

From:    unnews at un.org
Subject: UN DAILY NEWS DIGEST - Friday, June 13, 2008.
UN OFFICIAL SAYS FINANCIAL CONTROLS ON IRAQI OIL PROCEEDS ‘DEFICIENT’

The United Nations representative on the international body monitoring the handling of more than $100 billion in proceeds from sales of Iraqi oil says financial controls are “deficient” although progress has been made in some areas.

Warren Sach, the Secretary-General’s representative on the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) for Iraq, reported to the Security Council today on independent audits that were carried out on the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) in 2007.

Under Security Council Resolution 1483, $106 billion was deposited with DFI from petroleum sales between 2003 and 2007. A further $10.4 billion from the balance of the UN oil-for-food programme was deposited with DFI as well as $1.5 billion from Iraq’s frozen assets.

“The results of the audits in 2007 indicate that, while many efforts are being made, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, the overall financial system of controls in place in the [Iraqi] spending ministries, the US agencies handling of outstanding commitments using DFI resources and the Iraqi administration of DFI resources remain deficient and financial management reforms need to be pursued further,” Mr. Sach said in his report.

Mr. Sach said that the IAMB aims to ensure that the IDF is used in a transparent manner for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that export sales of petroleum were consistent with international market best practices.

He said that audit reports on DFI have highlighted weaknesses in internal financial controls, including incomplete record keeping at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, lack of a comprehensive oil metering system, sale of oil and oil products outside of the DFI, incomplete contract information associated with US agencies’ contracts and bartering.

The UN comptroller also reported that fewer than 15 per cent of previous recommendations to Iraqi spending ministries had been implemented. While noting that some progress had been made, “further measures to strengthen the internal control framework are necessary,” Mr. Sach added.

On oil metering, Mr. Sach said it was a key factor to achieve financial transparency and accountability and was in accordance with standard oil industry practices, but he noted that while some metering had been installed at oil terminals, there continued to be no metering in oil fields.

However, the Special Adviser said that there had been indications of progress on political dialogue in the country. He cited reports that talks on the return of the leading Sunni bloc, Tawafuq, to the Government were apparently progressing well, and added that Turkoman representatives had ended their 18-month boycott of the Kirkuk Provincial Council.

It seems that even this anaemic UN does not find its way in the Iraq maze that the military intervention has created - not that we say here that the change of regime in Iraq was something that should have been avoided. All what this says is that the US, by staying in Iraq for oil reasons, has hardly secured that oil. { Pincas Jawetz comment}

Further, the UN also looked this week at Iran, and today the following comment was released also:
HEAD OF IRAN SANCTIONS MONITORING GROUP REPORTS TO SECURITY COUNCIL

The chairman of the Security Council committee monitoring sanctions imposed against Iran today updated the 15-member body on the number of countries which have reported on their implementation of these measures, and the work carried out by the panel during the past three months.

Ambassador Jan Grauls of Belgium told an open meeting of the Council that “to date, the reporting figures are: 89 reports under resolution 1737, 76 reports under resolution 1747, and 51 reports under resolution 1803.”

Resolution 1737 of December 2006 banned trade with Iran in all items, materials, equipment, goods and technology which could contribute to the country’s enrichment-related, reprocessing or heavy water-related activities, or to the development of nuclear-weapon delivery systems.

In March 2007 the Council adopted resolution 1747, further tightening the sanctions by imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding the freeze on assets.

The 15-member body imposed further sanctions against Iran in resolution 1803, adopted in March of this year. These included the inspection of cargo suspected of carrying prohibited goods, the tighter monitoring of financial institutions and the extension of travel bans and asset freezes, over its nuclear programme.

Mr. Grauls also reported that the committee now had revised guidelines for its work that incorporated the relevant provisions of the three separate resolutions. In addition, the group consolidated the annexes to the three texts – containing the names of individuals and entities subject to the travel ban, travel notification or assets freeze – into a single list.

By resolution 1737 the committee is also tasked with seeking information from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on actions it has taken to implement measures imposed by the resolution, defining the scope of the technical cooperation provided to Iran.

In this regard, Mr. Grauls said that the IAEA had informed the committee that no projects had been added to its technical cooperation programme with Iran since the Agency’s February 2007 report, which was updated the following August.

Iran’s nuclear programme – which its officials have stated is for peaceful purposes, but some other countries contend is driven by military ambitions – has been a matter of international concern since the discovery in 2003 that the country had concealed its nuclear activities for 18 years in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Asia’s rise befalls the West.

By FRANK CHING from Hong Kong,  Friday, May 23, 2008 — “When many Western observers look at China,” the former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani writes in his latest book, “The New Asian Hemisphere,” “they cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system. They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is taking place in China.”

At a time when the Chinese people have mobilized themselves to cope with the May 12 earthquake, with untold numbers volunteering to give blood, to donate money and to actually travel to devastated towns and villages to help the afflicted, it is easy to see the country’s current vibrancy. There is a new spirit abroad, different from that before Deng Xiaoping launched the country on the road of reform and openness 30 years ago.

This book is full of insights — and contradictions.

Mahbubani praises the West for Asia’s development. Asian countries progressed, he says, because they implemented seven pillars of Western wisdom: free market economics, meritocracy, pragmatism, a culture of peace, the rule of law, an emphasis on education, and a willingness to pursue advances in science and technology.

But while he says the United States has done more good for the world than any other country, he calls it an international outlaw who refuses to be bound by “the constraints of international law.”

What makes his book controversial is his assertion that “the era of Western domination has run its course,” although so far “the West has refused either to admit its domination of the world or to contemplate sharing power in a new world order. This is a prescription for eventual disaster.”

The thesis of the book is stated in its subtitle: “The irresistible shift of global power to the East.” Mahbubani says that Asia is returning to the position that it had occupied for most of the last 2,000 years, before the industrial revolution catapulted the West forward.

“In the period from A.D. 1 to 1820, as British historian Angus Madison has recorded, the two largest economies of the world were China and India,” Mahbubani notes. “The past two centuries of Western domination of world history are the exception, not the rule, during two thousand years of global history.”

Citing Goldman Sachs, Mahbubani says that by 2050 three of the four of the largest economies in the world will be Asian: China, India, the U.S. and Japan. And that, Mahbubani seems to say, is the way it ought to be. But that raises the question: Why did China and the rest of Asia fall behind the West?

Mahbubani offers a partial explanation: “We have not fully understood why the West leaped ahead. But we know some of the reasons why Asia slipped behind: a religious mind-set that spurned the material world, a lack of belief in the idea of human ‘progress,’ a natural deference to authority, and a lack of critical questioning.”

He left out one crucial factor, one identified by Deng as being responsible for China’s backwardness. That was the self-imposed isolation of the country from the outside world after the 15th century, during the Ming dynasty.

Deng said in a speech in 1984: “A closed-door policy prevents any country from developing. We suffered from isolation, and so did our forefathers. As a consequence, the country declined into poverty and ignorance.”

Since Mahbubani says he doesn’t know what it was that made the West advance, it is possible to question his conclusion that the West must decline. No one doubts that Asia will rise, but that does not necessarily imply a Western decline, other than in a relative sense.

It may be true that certain things will change, such as the current cozy arrangement whereby the World Bank is always headed by an American and the International Monetary Fund by a European, with Asians excluded.

The rise of Asia means change, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all global power will pass from West to East. A sharing of power — and responsibilities — is a more likely, and more acceptable, outcome.

Whether one agrees with Mahbubani or not, his book is well worth reading. It is crammed with interesting information and provides an Asian perspective that is frequently missing in Western discourses on issues of global importance. And in this day and age, no such discussion is worth anything.

In 2006, China produced a 12-part documentary series on “The Rise of the Great Powers,” clearly an attempt on its part to understand the West. It is now incumbent on the West to try to understand Asia and this book will go far to meet that need.

Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator.

Johann Hari: Why bananas are a parable for our times.
Thursday, 22 May 2008

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon – in five, 10 or 30 years – the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world – and where they are leading us.

Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in the world’s jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet; some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.

A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type – the Gros Michael – out of the jungle and decided to mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and creamy and handy for your lunchbox.

There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there – but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: “The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World,” it worked like this. Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won’t, topple it and replace it with one that will.

Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn’t work, move on to the next country. Begin again.

This sounds like hyperbole until you study what actually happened. In 1911, the banana magnate Samuel Zemurray decided to seize the country of Honduras as a private plantation. He gathered together some international gangsters like Guy “Machine Gun” Maloney, drummed up a private army, and invaded, installing an amigo as president.

The term “banana republic” was invented to describe the servile dictatorships that were created to please the banana companies. In the early 1950s, the Guatemalan people elected a science teacher named Jacobo Arbenz, because he promised to redistribute some of the banana companies’ land among the millions of landless peasants.

President Eisenhower and the CIA (headed by a former United Fruit employee) issued instructions that these “communists” should be killed, and noted that good methods were “a hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker or kitchen knife”. The tyranny they replaced it with went on to kill more than 200,000 people.

But how does this relate to the disease now scything through the world’s bananas? The evidence suggests even when they peddle something as innocuous as bananas, corporations are structured to do one thing only: maximise their shareholders’ profits. As part of a highly regulated mixed economy, that’s a good thing, because it helps to generate wealth or churn out ideas. But if the corporations aren’t subject to tight regulations, they will do anything to maximise short-term profit. This will lead them to seemingly unhinged behaviour – like destroying the environment on which they depend.

Not long after Panama Disease first began to kill bananas in the early 20th century, United Fruit’s scientists warned the corporation was making two errors. They were building a gigantic monoculture. If every banana is from one homogenous species, a disease entering the chain anywhere on earth will soon spread. The solution? Diversify into a broad range of banana types.

The company’s quarantine standards were also dire. Even the people who were supposed to prevent infection were trudging into healthy fields with disease-carrying soil on their boots. But both of these solutions cost money – and United Front didn’t want to pay. They decided to maximise their profit today, reckoning they would get out of the banana business if it all went wrong.

So by the 1960s, the Gros Michel that United Fruit had packaged as The One True Banana was dead. They scrambled to find a replacement that was immune to the fungus, and eventually stumbled upon the Cavendish. It was smaller and less creamy and bruised easily, but it would have to do.

But like in a horror movie sequel, the killer came back. In the 1980s, the Cavendish too became sick. Now it too is dying, its immunity a myth. In many parts of Africa, the crop is down 60 percent. There is a consensus among scientists that the fungus will eventually infect all Cavendish bananas everywhere. There are bananas we could adopt as Banana 3.0 – but they are so different to the bananas that we know now that they feel like a totally different and far less appetising fruit. The most likely contender is the Goldfinger, which is crunchier and tangier: it is know as “the acid banana”.

Thanks to bad corporate behaviour and physical limits, we seem to be at a dead end. The only possible glimmer of hope is a genetically modified banana that can resist Panama Disease. But that is a distant prospect, and it is resisted by many people: would you like a banana split made from a banana split with fish genes?

When we hit up against a natural limit like Panama disease, we are bemused, and then affronted. It seems instinctively bizarre to me that lush yellow bananas could vanish from the global food supply, because I have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can buy and eat.

Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.

But have we learned? Across the world, politicians like George Bush and David Cameron are telling us the regulation of corporations is “a menace” to be “rolled back”; they even say we should leave the planet’s climate in their hands. Now that’s bananas.

To purchase ‘Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World’, click here.

 j.hari at independent.co.uk

www.GeorgeSOROS.com

George Soros’ new book, “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets” is now available in hardcover.

In this book Soros offers the view that the current financial crisis is unparalleled in our history. He says in the introduction:

“To understand what is going on we need a new paradigm. The currently prevailing paradigm, namely that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, is both false and misleading; our current troubles can be largely attributed to the fact that the international financial system has been developed on the basis of that paradigm. “

“The new paradigm I am proposing is not confined to the financial markets. It deals with the relationship between thinking and reality, and it claims that misconceptions and misinterpretations play a major role in shaping the course of history.

Since the release of my book, I have been conducting interviews in the financial and main stream press. I invite you to visit ( www.georgesoros.com/interviews) to listen to and watch these interviews some of which are highlighted below:

NPR Morning Edition: Financial Crisis Stems from ‘Super-Bubble’

TheStreet.com: Soros Breaks Down BSC, Bernanke

Charlie Rose: A Conversation with George Soros

Finally I want to let you know that I will be discussing my book with Howard Davies, the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science next Wednesday the 21st. This Forum, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means will be available via simulcast on GeorgeSoros.com May 21st starting at 12 noon eastern US standard time. “

Please check the Soros’ site for more details.

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GeorgeSoros.com
888 7th Avenue
New York City
NY 10106
United States

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Further e-mail received May 20, 2008

Dear Colleague,

I will be discussing my recent book “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means” at the London School of Economics with LSE Director Howard Davies on Wednesday May 21.

The event is sold out here in London so we have made arrangements to allow viewers to watch it live via the web.

London School of Economics: http://www.lse.ac.uk/LSELive
The Washington Note: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/videost…

Please log in on Wednesday May 21st at 12 noon EST, 5pm BST, to watch my discussion with Dr. Davies as we discuss the current financial crisis, my theories about its causes and the outlook for financial markets going forward.

I am also enclosing a review of the book that appeared in the Financial Times Monday. For more review and interviews, visit www.georgesoros.com.

Thank you for your attention,

George Soros

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A successful prophet of the markets - article by John Authers.
Published in The Financial Times on May 19 2008

This was a book that George Soros badly wanted to write. It is probably not what many of its readers expect to read. But it shows that in his deeper thinking about the way markets operate, Soros was several decades ahead of his time.

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets includes Soros’ verdict on the credit crisis. He thinks, as has been widely reported, that it is the most severe since the 1930s, and that it marks the end of a 25-year “era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency”.

He also offers some solutions, which centre on new regulation for markets, and how to avoid forced sales for US homeowners. A highly entertaining diary recounts his investment moves in the first three months of this year, culminating with the confusion surrounding the fire sale of Bear Stearns.

His insights are clear and concisely expressed. They are worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. But what is most interesting, and obviously engages Soros at an emotional level, is the idiosyncratic philosophy he has developed to explain the metaphysics of how markets work. Even before the emergence of the efficient markets hypothesis, which has dominated academic thinking on markets for at least three decades, Soros had devised his own theory to prove markets were not efficient. He acted on this philosophy as an investor with spectacularly successful results.

That philosophy derived from his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper. The “relationship between thinking and reality”, Soros calls “reflexivity.” It fills the book’s centre in chapters which he admits many will find “heavy going”. In markets, Soros says, participants’ thinking plays a dual function: they try to understand the situation (the “cognitive function”), and to change it (the “manipulative function”). The two functions can interfere with each other; when they doso the market displays “reflexivity”.

So an investor’s misperception of reality can help to change that reality, begetting further misperceptions. When market actors’ decisions affect outcomes, patterns emerge. If a lot of people are bullish about internet stockstheir price goes up. Soros used the theory to predict, and profit from, a series of “initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating boom-bust processes, or bubbles”. Each bubble “consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner”.

A key implication of this is that markets do not tend towards “equilibrium”, as predicted by modern portfolio theory. And they will not move in the “random walk” promulgated by efficient markets theory, which holds that prices always incorporate all known information and so move randomly in response to new information.

This is important, as the architecture of modern capital markets depends on these theories.And it begins to look as though the credit crisis was the tipping point at which academics and practitioners decided a new paradigm was needed to replace the efficient markets hypothesis. Alternative theories borrow from experimental psychology, advanced mathematics and evolutionary biology and have been built in response to experience in the markets.

The theory of “adaptive markets” - that markets follow trends until they become overblown and then start building up other trends - seems to be gaining ground as an alternative paradigm. Soros’ title is a bid for his own theory of reflexivity to become the new paradigm. What is fascinating is how much modern thinking is in line with the theory he developed decades ago.

How does it help explain the credit crisis? Soros believes that a “super bubble” has been formed as the result of a “long-term reflexive process” over the last 25 years. Its hallmarks include credit expansion (boosted by the belief that inflation has been vanquished), and a prevailing misconception, which Soros unsurprisingly blames on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that markets should be given free rein.

There have been numerous financial crises in this period. According to Soros, these “served as successful tests which reinforced the prevailing trend and the prevailing misconception”. Thus the current crisis grows in severity because it marks “the turning point when both the trend and the misconception have become unsustainable”.

Many will dislike Soros’ politics. Others will find the book self-indulgent. He calls himself a “failed philosopher” and badly wants his theory to reach a broader public. It is hard to imagine it would have been published were he not so famous and successful. But his restless intellectual curiosity commands respect. So does his ability to foresee the debate in theoretical finance. He may have been a failed philosopher, but he was a successful prophet.

The writer is the Financial Times investment editor.