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

Arctic Melt To Cost Up To $24 Trillion By 2050: Report

Date: 08-Feb-10
Author: Timothy Gardner, Reuthers

WASHINGTON – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

“Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs,” said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report, called “Arctic Treasure, Global Assets Melting Away.”

He said the report, reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monetize the cost of the loss of one of the world’s great weather makers.

“The Arctic is the planet’s air conditioner and it’s starting to break down,” he said.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice and snow cover is already costing the world about $61 billion to $371 billion annually from costs associated with heat waves, flooding and other factors, the report said.

The losses could grow as a warmer Arctic unlocks vast stores of methane in the permafrost. The gas has about 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun’s energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

While much of Europe and the United States has suffered heavy snowstorms and unusually low temperatures this winter, evidence has built that the Arctic is at risk from warming.

Greenhouse gases generated by tailpipes and smokestacks have pushed Arctic temperatures in the last decade to the highest levels in at least 2,000 years, reversing a natural cooling trend, an international team of researchers reported in the journal Science in September.

Arctic emissions of methane have jumped 30 percent in recent years, scientists said last month.

Thin ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said this week.

And early findings from a major research project in Canada involving more than 370 scientists from 27 countries showed on Friday that climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice.

Goodstein’s study did not look at worst-case scenarios Arctic melting could have, such as warmer temperatures that trigger massive releases of crystallized methane formations in Arctic soils and ocean beds known as methane hydrates. It also did not look at sea ice erosion troubling people in the Arctic.

A trio of House lawmakers yesterday introduced a bill to block U.S. EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, marking the latest in a string of bipartisan attacks against forthcoming climate rules.

The measure from Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Missouri Reps. Ike Skelton (D) and Jo Ann Emerson ® would amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gases based on their effects on global climate change.

The bill would also advance several of the farm state lawmakers’ other priorities by stopping EPA from calculating land-use changes in foreign countries for determining U.S. renewable fuels policy, and broadening the definition of renewable biomass.

“It appears the clean energy bill moving through Congress is stalled,” Skelton said. “Let us set that bill aside and pass this scaled-back energy legislation.”

This bill, Skelton said, “represents a responsible way to move forward on energy legislation, gets the EPA under control, provides good things for American farmers and builds upon bipartisan objectives that will help curb climate change and make our nation more energy independent.”

The effort comes as EPA prepares to begin regulating greenhouse gases next month with its final tailpipe standard. That rule will trigger stationary source regulations, and the agency is expected to continue crafting greenhouse gas standards for other sectors.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The bill is the latest congressional efforts to stall EPA climate rules. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is planning to seek a vote next month on a disapproval resolution that would effectively veto EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.

In the House, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced a separate bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions unless it receives explicit authority to do so by Congress.

————-

Indirect land use, biomass:

In addition to blocking climate regulations, the new bill seeks to block EPA from considering greenhouse gas emissions from international “indirect” land-use changes when implementing the renewable fuel standard, or RFS.

The 2007 energy bill expanded the RFS and increased goals for the use of ethanol and other biofuels in U.S. transportation fuels, reaching 36 billion gallons a year in 2022. The standard requires EPA to assess the “lifecycle” emissions of biofuels — weighing the emissions from growing crops, producing fuels made from them, and distributing and using the fuels.

EPA proposed last year to measure emissions from indirect land-use changes associated with biofuels — such as land that is deforested in other countries because of increased crop growth in the United States. The agency concluded, depending on the time frames modeled, that traditional corn ethanol could have a slightly larger emissions footprint than gasoline when land-use changes are factored in.

But those draft regulations drew the ire of biofuels advocates and farm-state lawmakers — including Peterson and Emerson — who maintained the agency was unfair to ethanol.

Last summer, Peterson reached an agreement with the Democratic authors of energy and climate legislation to include language to bar EPA from considering including emissions from indirect land-use changes abroad for five years (E&E Daily, June 24, 2009). But that bill has languished as climate talks have stalled in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the White House completed its review of EPA’s proposal for implementing the RFS earlier this week, paving the way for the agency to finalize the rule (E&ENews PM, Feb. 2).

“I’m proud to help sponsor this bill because if Congress doesn’t do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own,” Peterson said in a statement yesterday.

Emerson has also sought to bar EPA from measuring emissions from indirect land-use changes as part of the overall calculation of biofuels emissions. During consideration of the EPA fiscal 2010 appropriations bill last year, Emerson introduced a failed amendment that would have blocked EPA from considering the indirect emissions (E&E Daily, June 19, 2009).

The new measure would also expand the definition of what classifies as “renewable biomass” that can be used for biofuels under the RFS.

The definition largely mirrors an amendment that Peterson negotiated to include in the House-passed energy and climate bill, although language barring the use of components of federal forests and conservation areas was notably absent in the bill introduced yesterday (Greenwire, June 25, 2009).

Peterson and Skelton voted for the House climate and energy bill (H.R. 2454); Emerson voted against it.

US Oil Imports From Western Hemisphere Countries To The US Are Dropping:

Mexico Petroleum Supply, Exports to U.S. and Net Exports. Source: EIA. Chart by Chris Nelder.

= = = =

Venezuela Petroleum Supply, Exports to U.S. and Net Exports. Source: EIA. Chart by Chris Nelder.

= = = =

Combined Annual Net Oil Exports From Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. Source: Jeffrey J. Brown, Samuel Foucher, PhD, Jorge Silveus.

= = = =

The Oil Export Crisis Has Unofficially Arrived.
By Chris Nelder | Friday, February 5th, 2010

Last March, his study of the effect of peak oil on U.S. imports had
brought Mexico to the forefront. “As our #3 source of imports, the
crashing of its supergiant Cantarell field had put the future of our
oil supply in serious jeopardy.”

The possibility that Mexico’s oil and gas exports to the U.S. could go
to zero within seven years looked very real.

As I explained in that piece, rising domestic consumption coupled with
declining supply puts an ever-tightening squeeze on imports. I have
found no evidence that policymakers are paying any attention to this
critically important dynamic, but it is the very point of the peak oil
spear.

Were it not for the market meltdown and recession, it would have
pierced our vital organs. Instead we felt a pinprick. Hardly anybody
realized what it really was, and most ran off on a wild goose chase
for evil oil speculators.

Now Venezuela has appeared on my radar for similar reasons… only
this time, we’re really going to feel it.

Let’s begin with a review of Mexico’s exports.

Mexico:

Shortly after publishing that article, I casually remarked to my
friend and fellow energy analyst Gregor Macdonald that Cantarell’s
production could fall to under 0.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) by
the end of the year.

I arrived at this somewhat startling conclusion by calculating the
effect of its decline rate — 38% at the time and accelerating — on
production of 0.77 mbpd in January, down precipitously from its 2.1
mbpd peak in 2003.

Gregor’s recent data sleuthing on Cantarell found its production in
December 2009 was 0.527688 mbpd, just a hair above my estimate.

To update the data on Mexico, it’s now our #2 source of imported
petroleum because Saudi Arabia has fallen from #2 to #4.

As of November 2009 (the latest data available) the U.S. imported 1.08
mbpd of crude and finished petroleum products from Mexico. Its exports
to the U.S. peaked at 1.46 mbpd in 2004, the same year as its
production peaked. Net exports (production minus consumption) fell to
1.06 mbpd in 2008.

For the years 2005-2008, Mexico’s exports to the U.S. declined by 0.51
barrels per day. In 2010, supply is expected to fall to 2.5 mbpd —
nearly half a million barrels per day less than 2009.

Mexico nationalized its petroleum operations in 1938 in a
constitutional amendment and handed over total control to the state
oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), with predictable results.

Oil now provides more than 40% of the country’s revenues, which have
been used to pay for a vast array of public services and line the
pockets of the oligarchy while starving investment in both upstream
activities (new oil supply) and downstream (finished products).

Consequently, Mexico’s oil reserves have decreased by more than 75% in
two decades (owing partly to the correction of a previous,
ridiculously inflated figure), production has begun to decline and
exports are falling fast.

It now imports $4.5 billion a year worth of gasoline, $10 billion a
year in petrochemicals, and 25% of its natural gas, mostly from the
U.S. This despite having nearly 13 billion barrels of proven oil
reserves and more than 50 billion barrels of (unproven) reserve
potential.

Mexico would be in a far better position, were it not for its hostile
stance on foreign participation. PEMEX simply lacks the technical
ability to develop its more difficult, remaining resources —
particularly deep water.

Venezuela:

As of November, the U.S. was importing 0.9 mbpd from Venezuela, making
it our #3 source. Its exports to the U.S. peaked at 1.8 mbpd in 1997,
the same year as its production peaked. Net exports (production minus
consumption) have fallen 38% from the 1997 peak of 3.1 mbpd to 1.9
mbpd in 2008.

Venezuela’s oil exports to the U.S. have been declining markedly since
2004, after a long period of relative stability. From 2004 through
2009, Venezuelan petroleum exports fell 0.7 mbpd.

Like Mexico, Venezuela is endowed with enormous energy resources and
could be producing at a far higher level. Estimates of its oil
reserves range from 153 billion barrels of certified proven; to 513
billion barrels technically recoverable in the USGS’ January estimate;
to 1.5 trillion barrels in offshore potential, if you believe the
effervescent Dr. Marcio Mello of Brazil.

Most of it is heavy oil, a low-grade which must be upgraded to synthetic crude.

And like Mexico, President Hugo Chavez has exiled the Western oil
companies who might have made the investment to bring those resources
to market.

A Nation in Free Fall

The good times rolled for Chavez in the first years after his election
in 1998. His socialist programs to rebuild the country and raise its
standard of living were popular but expensive, and soon began to fail
under the crush of declining energy supply.

Oil revenues make up 90% of Venezuela’s foreign earnings, so its
dependence on oil exports is extreme.

Billions of dollars in profits from the national oil company,
Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) were diverted to welfare programs
and into the pockets of oligarchs, while investment in future
petroleum and power supply languished.

The precipitous drop in oil prices since mid-2008 only compounded the
revenue shortfall.

Oil production has fallen 25% since Chavez was elected, and a long,
devastating drought has cut into its hydropower supply, of which 73%
comes from the massive Guri Dam.

Chavez responded by nationalizing most of its petroleum operations and
its grid in 2007.

In 2009, another 76 oil services companies on the Maracaibo Lake were
taken over. The projects now sit abandoned, waiting for PDVSA to
compensate the displaced operators and put them back into operation.

Almost half a million hectares of land were seized in 2009 with the
rationalization that it was underused.

Measures to counter the declining hydro supply have been implemented
in a haphazard fashion, resulting in frequent, unscheduled blackouts,
including seven national blackouts since 2007. Malls and government
offices have had their hours of operation cut and water rationing has
been imposed.

“Some people sing in the bath for half an hour,” Chávez cried at a
cabinet session in October. “What kind of communism is that? Three
minutes is more than enough!”

In January, a wave of public protest erupted, prompting Chavez to
implement a rapid series of desperate measures.

Rolling blackouts were imposed in the capital city of Caracas. After a
few days of protests, Chavez lifted the blackouts and fired the
electricity minister. Blackouts are expected to be reinstated in an
effort to keep hydro reservoir levels from falling to the point of
collapse.
A recent report gave the power shortage a paradoxical twist,
indicating that power from one of the state refineries may have to be
diverted to the grid, cutting distillate output by 200,000 barrels per
day — or more. This will result in less heating oil for China, who
will make up the loss by burning more coal.
Chavez devalued Venezuela’s bolivar currency by half; the president
went on to nationalize a chain of French-owned supermarkets over
alleged price gouging.
He ordered cutbacks in the operation of state-run steel and aluminum
manufacturing operations, which account for up to 20% of the country’s
power demand.
This week he turned to Cuba for help on how to cope with the power
shortage, since Cuba has been through similar problems. The island
nation is providing tens of thousands of energy-efficient lightbulbs
and cloud-seeding technology to Venezuela.
Last weekend, he forced six television channels off the air for
failing to broadcast one of his speeches — up to six hours in length —
in a continuation of his campaign for “communicational hegemony.”
Since December, all radio and television networks are required by law
to broadcast his speeches live, whenever he chooses to make one.
Nationwide student marches have been met by troops armed with rubber
bullets, and at least two deaths have been recorded.
Chavez has said he’s prepared to take “radical measures” should the
situation worsen, begging the unsettling question of what could be
more radical than what he has already done.

Looking East, Not North

Now Chavez is turning east for help in developing his nation’s oil and
gas resources. Recent agreements include a $20 billion joint venture
with Russia to develop the Junin 6 field in the Orinoco oil belt, with
a potential top production rate of 450,000 barrels per day.

China has agreed to build a refinery and develop the Orinoco heavy oil
fields, and Venezuela has guaranteed 560,000 barrels per day to China
this year.

Venezuela has launched its first major auction for drilling rights in
more than a decade, for access to areas east of the existing
operations in the Orinoco. Developing the leases will be expensive
because of their distance from the existing infrastructure, and
winning bidders are expected to make offers in the $10 billion-plus
range including early payments of at least $1 billion, financing
plans, and commitments to build the necessary roads, pipelines, ports,
and upgraders. Potential bidders include Spain’s Repsol, Japan’s
Mitsubishi, the UK’s BP, and Chevron.

Given the sheer size of its resources, it’s too soon to declare the
end of Venezuela’s glory days in the oil patch. However, it does seem
likely that the new barrels it brings to market will be headed east —
not north — and Western producers will have very little stake in the
projects.

Chavez will put exports to the U.S. on a short path to zero the first
chance he gets.

—————–

Oh Imports, Where Art Thou?

The combined decline in imports from Mexico and Venezuela for 2005
through 2008 is 0.89 mbpd. If the trend continues in 2009, then over 1
mbpd will have disappeared from the U.S. import stream in the last
five years — a decline of 8% from 2004 levels.

Since 2007, the loss of production from Cantarell alone was 0.7 mbpd,
but the recession cut U.S. demand by 2 mbpd, effectively masking the
decline. This raises the question: If U.S. demand rises from here,
where will those barrels come from… and how much will they cost?

The U.S. is not only in first place worldwide in its demand for oil,
but in paying the market rate for it. Nobody else buys 8.5 mbpd of
crude at retail.

Drivers in Venezuela are still filling up for 25 cents a gallon, even
as their exports decline.

Mexico’s gasoline prices are more on par with the U.S., but its
consumption has been rising steadily since 1997 and continues to cut
into exports.

Saudi Arabia’s domestic consumption is currently growing at the rate
of 7% per year, following a trend of more than three decades. It uses
a whopping 1.5 mbpd — 1.8% of total world oil supply! — to desalinate
water, at the equivalent of 7 cents a gallon.

Before the OPEC cuts of 2009, its exports to the U.S. had essentially
flatlined at 1.5 mbpd since 2004.

Exports from our #5 source, Nigeria, have also declined — from 1.17
mbpd in 2005 to 0.98 mbpd in 2008.

In fact, of the top five oil exporting countries to the U.S.,
representing 63% of our crude imports, only Canada posted an increase
(of 0.2 mbpd).

The combined annual net oil exports from our top three exporting
countries — Canada, Mexico and Venezuela — illustrate our situation:

Given the very modest increases from unconventional domestic production and Canada, the decline of imports from Mexico and Venezuela means the U.S. will be increasingly forced to depend on suppliers farther afield — the very same suppliers that China has been buying into in size. The “collision course with China” that I wrote about in July 2005 has nearly reached the point of impact.

It also means that when oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

The oil export crisis has arrived… We just haven’t felt it yet.

Production, consumption, and export data herein is the latest available from the EIA.

Until next time,
Chris

Thanks to the following individuals for their contributions to this
article: Venezuelan oil expert Carlos Rossi for sharing excerpts from
his forthcoming book, The Completion of the Oil Era: The Economic
Impact; Gregor Macdonald for sharing his data on Cantarell; and
Jeffrey Brown and Samuel Foucher, for their work on net exports data
and the Export Land Model.

Investor’s Note: While declining oil imports from Mexico and Venezuela
paint a nightmare scenario for meeting future U.S. demand, all hope
isn’t lost… In fact, one U.S. oil play is developing at a breakneck
pace. You’re likely aware of the Bakken oil formation. But you may not
realize fully how the Bakken has single-handedly thrust North Dakota
into the international investment spotlight.

Of course, members of the $20 Trillion Report know how profitable the
Bakken oil formation is. So far, they’ve raked in gains of 305%, 249%
and 130%! We want you to share in their success.

—————————-

Our reaction to the above goes in two directions:

To every straights there is also the possibility for an answer that provides for new opportunities. in this case:

(1) it becomes even clearer that the US has here an opportunity to make policy accommodations with its neighbors to the south.

(2) the US does not have to – and will not – continue its dependence on oil alone as its source for energy. The US can go for novel and mostly renewable sources of energy, then the Saudis might also discover sun and wind as good replacement for this insanity of using 25% of their oil to provide their water needs. Whatever – energy independence – or at least oil imports reduction for the US – is not an excuse for  a “drill baby drill” US energy policy. Actually, put a carbon tax on the use of oil in the US as a good way to tell the world that the US is capable to detoxify from its addiction to oil imports.

From:   Al Gore,  REPOWER AMERICA.

Dear Pincas,

It’s an outrage. 2010 should start in a way that reflects our movement’s amazing accomplishments from last year — moving the ball forward to passage of comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. Instead, our elected leaders are proposing policies that would set us back decades and let the worst polluters completely off the hook.

Despite the chorus of alarm bells sounding the need to address the climate crisis and stop polluting the air our families breathe and the water we drink, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and her allies are attacking the Clean Air Act — for the second time in six months.

And it gets worse. Last night, news broke that the original version of the amendment was literally drafted with lobbyists for the oil and coal industry.*

We can’t let this attack succeed. Write your Senators right now and tell them to vote NO on Senator Murkowski’s proposal.

We defeated this same effort once already, just six months ago — but the fossil fuel lobby is at it again. The amendment would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate most carbon pollution, letting the worst polluters completely off the hook.

Efforts like this are designed to do one thing and one thing only — slow our transition to a clean energy economy that will create millions of new jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and solve the climate crisis.

Help flood your Senators with messages to vote NO on this attack on the Clean Air Act.

The very last thing we should do in the fight to end the climate crisis is throw away tools that we already know are effective at reducing pollution. But that’s exactly what Senator Murkowski’s proposal does.

For decades, the Clean Air Act has kept millions of tons of pollutants out of our air and water. Senator Murkowski’s proposal would create an Alaska-sized loophole in the Clean Air Act, giving a pass to the biggest carbon polluters.

Email your Senators now and tell them to vote NO on Senator Murkowski’s amendment — and protect our air, water and climate:
 http://cpaf.repoweramerica.org/cleanair

In 2010, our movement to solve the climate crisis will face its biggest test yet — passing comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. But if Senator Murkowski’s amendment passes, some in Congress will use it as an excuse to keep stalling — and the long overdue promise of progress toward a 21st century clean energy economy will be lost.

You helped stop this toxic amendment once before. Together, we can and must stop it again.

Thank you,

Al Gore

Tell your Senators to do the right thing for our clean energy future,
not the fossil fuel lobby.

Dear Senator:
“I urge you to oppose any attempt to undermine the Clean Air Act.
Instead of undermining the Clean Air Act’s authority to limit harmful
carbon pollution, please work to pass comprehensive clean energy and
climate legislation this year.”

Protect our clean air!

Instead of working to address the climate crisis, Alaska Senator Lisa
Murkowski and her allies are proposing to let the biggest polluters
completely off the hook.

Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire is Hiring Sarah Palin for its FOX NEWS. They already have Karl Rove and Mike Huckabee – bank on The News Corporation to become the USA Anti Environmental – Effective Anti-America Power House. That is – if caterring for the right fringe will not eventualy help catalyze the awakening of the middle.

Palin signs on with Fox News.
By Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, January 11, 2010
Sarah Palin, who regularly rips the media, is becoming a television pundit at a place where she’s likely to feel at home.

A Fox News executive says the network will shortly announce that the former vice-presidential nominee is signing on as a contributor.

Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska last summer, will appear as a commentator on various Fox shows. She will also host an occasional program that will examine inspirational tales involving ordinary Americans.

Palin will join Mike Huckabee as a Fox contributor who was also involved in the 2008 campaign. The exposure can only help Palin if she decides to pursue a 2012 presidential bid.

At the moment, Palin makes pronouncements mainly through her Facebook page. The Fox connection would give her a platform on the nation’s top-rated cable news channel.

Palin is extremely popular with her conservative base, which has fueled the sales of her best-selling memoir. But she is a divisive political figure who not only draws the ire of liberals but some Republicans, including staffers who deal with her during her run as John McCain’s running mate. Steve Schmidt, a top McCain strategist, said on “60 Minutes” last night that “there were numerous instances that she said things that were — that were not accurate that ultimately, the campaign had to deal with.”

Hiring Palin could further boost the popularity of Rupert Murdoch’s network among conservative viewers. The network already employs former Bush White House aide Karl Rove and former House speaker Newt Gingrich as highly visible commentators.

The above and the bellow  are about reformulation and reformation of the American Republicans.

The following is another amazing piece of information about the way the Republican party is attempting to come back from the boondocks.

Indeed, there is an increasing noise being heard from the various Dick Cheney compadres. This article focuses on the Sarah Palin American phenomenon and her nebulous advance towards the 21st US Tea Party version that she would like to see made up of all right wingers of the nation; but this article just shows that not all right is equal – so now what?

 http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/14502…

Tea Party Split Between Libertarian Faction and Religious Right? This tension matters a great deal — the former wants smaller government; the latter wants bigger government to discriminate against people they don’t like.

Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly  on January 8, 2010.

After a series of bizarre, and often offensive, rallies in D.C., the Teabaggers are apparently going to get together in about a month for a convention.

The Tea Party Nation is gearing up for its first ever convention, to be held at the famed Opryland Hotel in Nashville next month. It’s a confab designed to help the tea parties from across the country organize, with an agenda that sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.

Organizers ask for local groups to “select their best to meet with their peers from across the nation” and who “have the most desire to move this process of organizing to the next level.”

They’ll have a workshop about “the importance of becoming Precinct Committee Chairs.”

“Please join us, make and form strong bonds, network, and make plans for action. We are doing what we could not do alone, to preserve that which we value,” organizers write.

The three-day event scheduled for the first weekend in February is already rubbing some conservative activists the wrong way — the Tea Party Nation gathering is charging $549 per person. That’s significantly more expensive than tickets to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — traditionally the biggest right-wing event of the year — which will be held two weeks later just outside D.C.

Of course, one explanation for the steep costs is Sarah Palin — the former half-term governor will reportedly receive as much as $100,000 to speak to Tea Party Nation, while CPAC does not pay any of its speakers. (Palin was invited to appear at CPAC, but declined, perhaps because there was no money in it.)

And speaking of Palin, the guest list for Tea Party Nation is what drives home just how radical a group we’re talking about here.

In addition to Palin, attendees will hear from, among others:

* World Net Daily’s Joseph Farah

* Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)

* Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore

* Religious right leader Rick Scarborough

This is not a group of mainstream Americans. Farah’s conspiracy-driven website has taken the lead in peddling Birther nonsense; Bachmann is mad as a hatter; Moore is a theocrat who doesn’t believe the Bill of Rights applies to the states and was removed from office for ignoring federal court orders he didn’t like; and Scarborough is a radical preacher best known for being a Jerry Falwell acolyte, writing a book called Liberalism Kills Kids, and trying to establish his own mini-theocracy in Texas several years ago.

With that in mind, the speakers’ list offers some hints about the direction of this “movement.” There have been fissures between the libertarian-minded factions and religious-right-style theocrats whose agenda expands well beyond taxes and “socialized medicine.”

Indeed, the tension between the factions matters a great deal — the former wants smaller government in all instances; the latter wants bigger government to prevent abortions and discriminate against minority groups right-wing activists don’t like.

It appears Tea Party Nation and its high-profile participants are signaling the success of the religious-right contingent in taking the lead. But that’s likely to make the fissures more pronounced in the coming months.

——————-

Steve Benen is “blogger in chief” of the popular Washington Monthly online blog, Political Animal. His background includes publishing The Carpetbagger Report, and writing for a variety of publications, including Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, the Huffington Post, and The Guardian. He has also appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” Air America Radio’s “Sam Seder Show,” and XM Radio’s “POTUS ‘08.”

========

But please do not think that all religious people from the heart of America belong to the Tea Party. Please see what I also got today – and this from my friend Gail who sent me material from the EDF – The Environmental Defense Fund.

Religion and Climate Change

January 8, 2010

The president of a religious institution isn’t the first person you think of as a likely EDF spokesperson. But in a recent television ad sponsored by EDF, Dr. Dan Boone, the president of Trevecca Nazarene University in Tennessee, made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass climate change legislation. “Please somehow find a way to let this global concern rise above partisan politics,” Dr. Boone said.  He’s descended from frontiersman Daniel Boone—clearly the pioneering spirit lives on.

The conflict between politics, religion and science has been with us for centuries; think of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin. Today there is rampant confusion between faith, something you believe in, and science, something that requires only connective leaps between hypotheses and demonstrable evidence. We seem to have lost our trust in the authority of scientists, no matter how impressive their level of training and achievement. A fascinating new Pew poll showed that Republicans are overwhelmingly less likely to “believe” the science of climate change than Democrats, who aren’t entirely persuaded either.

With every passing week, the scientific data gets more precise, and more frightening. Yet this has proven insufficient to move people to action. All the more fascinating, then, to watch the growing movement among religious leaders who use their pulpits to venture into environmental action. More than 10,000 congregations of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and other faiths are working in 30 states as members of Interfaith Power & Light (IPL). These religious leaders are clearly having an impact on people across the country who would never call themselves environmentalists.

IPL sees climate change as a profound moral issue, a matter of values—something many environmentalists have been wary of addressing, preferring to focus on technological or economic solutions as being less politically charged and ultimately more effective. But no matter what our approach, we all have something to learn from faith communities about how to bridge divisions and instruct, inspire and mobilize people.

— — —

Portrait of a Preacher (mind you – she is no Sarah Palin! – a PJ comment): The powerful message of Interfaith Power and Light—one that unites all faiths—is that people have a duty to be stewards of the earth. In loving God, we must love his creation. This is not, as some critics claim, about turning environmentalism into a religion; that is a perversion of what is actually happening. The fact is, in order to succeed in significantly altering the global course of climate change, we are going to have to harness all the power we have, whether it is the power of the market, the power of technology, or the power of heart and soul.

IPL is the brainchild of the Reverend Sally Bingham, a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of California. Bingham is also a trustee of EDF. She founded The Regeneration Project whose mission is to deepen the connection between ecology and religion. IPL is the primary campaign and is a religious response to global warming. State chapters respond to a call to action: they agree to give sermons that explain the danger of climate change, reduce their own emissions, support public policy that cuts greenhouse gases, and promote the adoption of renewable energy technologies.

“Most people want to do the right and moral thing,” Bingham wrote to me recently in an email. “They just don’t sometimes know what that is. It is for that reason that religious leaders have such an important role. We need to take this issue out of the hands of the politicians and get it into the hands of the people at the grass roots level. Clergy can do this.”

Communities of faith, in other words, can provide moral leadership, something we desperately need amplified from many quarters. Think of the two major moral issues in America’s past – civil rights and slavery; the fight over these issues was led by communities of faith, united on moral grounds. “There are millions of people who don’t listen to politicians and who are skeptical of science, but who will listen to their clergy,” notes Bingham.

“The powerful message that unites all faiths is that people have a duty to be stewards of the earth.”

GLOBAL WARMING IGNITES BORDERS AS WELL

By Manuel Manonelles, BARCELONA, (IPS) Posted by Other News January 3, 2009.

Little by little, it is being confirmed that the melting of the polar ice caps, whether in Antarctica or the Arctic, is happening significantly faster than initially predicted. The consequences of this for peace, one of the main victims of climate change, are enormous.

Glaciers and areas of high-altitude mountains that were previously considered zones of perpetual snow are now melting. A paradigmatic case is that of the alpine border between Switzerland and Italy where during a recent routine verification, certain sections of ice or perennial snow that had been on the map since 1861 were found to be missing. In this case, the two countries have enjoyed long periods of peaceful coexistence and are approaching the problem in a logical and cordial fashion, forming a commission to find a technical solution.

However, the possible implications of cases like this in other geographical areas are very worrisome. The destabilising potential of a similar development on the India-Pakistan border would be enormous, particularly in the zone of Kashmir or the Siachen glacier, where more than 3000 soldiers of both countries have died since 1984. The same is true of the tense China-India border, or the deeply problematic border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will grow increasingly porous with melting, contributing to a rise in destabilisation in what are already two of the most unstable countries on the earth.

Another major effect of global warming is the gradual opening of major global shipping lanes in areas that had previously been impassable because of ice. The Northeast Passage along the north of Russia, used recently for the first time in history, shortens travel between the ports of China, Japan, and Korea and Hamburg, Rotterdam, and South Hampton by 4,000 kilometres. With the Northwest Passage along northern Canada, travel between the China and the ports of the eastern United States is similarly shortened.

The opening of these new routes will completely change the dynamics of intercontinental trade and might render irrelevant places that until now were considered geostrategically essential, such as the Panama and the Suez Canal.

Add to this the draw of massive reserves of raw materials expected to be present in the Arctic, ever more accessible as the ice recedes, which is provoking a race for control of the area – including an arms race – and is stoking tensions particularly between Russia, Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The Russian news agency TASS has calculated oil reserves in the area at over 10 billion tonnes. Last year Canada approved an extraordinary 6.9 billion dollar arms bill to strengthen its military presence in its arctic zone, while Russia has resumed tactical flights of nuclear bombers in its polar region, triggering the protests of numerous countries.

This also explains, in part, the speed with which the European Union is processing the application for EU membership of bankrupt Iceland, which would place the body in the best possible position for future negotiations and territorial claims in the area with regard to future access to the “Arctic banquet”.

The melting of the ice caps is also the major cause of rising sea levels, which have other irreversible territorial, social, and economic consequences, such as the physical disappearance -partial or total- of certain small island states of the Pacific likely to occur within a few years -the Maldives, Samoa, Kiribati, among others. Obviously the implications are vast, including – in addition to the personal, environmental, cultural, and national trauma – the political and legal status of future states that have no territory. The principal components of the global infrastructure, from ports and refineries to airports and nuclear plants, are also seriously at risk, and will find themselves near or at or even below sea level.

It is important to note in this context that the majority of the global population lives in areas close to the sea, starting with megacities like Mumbai, London, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and densely-populated areas like the Ganges delta in Bangladesh, where rising sea levels are already wreaking havoc in the form of water pollution and related effects. Recent studies indicate the possibility of some 200 million new environmental refugees in coming years -refugees who would only increase the already considerable humanitarian pressures and tensions in these areas and exacerbate existing or latent conflict.

The Global Humanitarian Fund issued a report this year that shows unequivocally that climate change today is responsible for some 300,000 deaths per year. Numbers for the medium and long-term are even higher. In this context, the urgency of fighting climate is a pre-condition for a peaceful future. Therefore, the international community has no other option, specially after the fiasco in Copenhagen, to spring into action as soon as possible. It is about climate, but also about peace and human lives.

—————-

This and all “other news” issues edited by Roberto Savio can be found at http://www.other-net.info/index.php

A New York Times article of November 20, 2009 – “New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step” starts:

“Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.”

see please: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/busine…

We contend that the debate misses the center of honesty. The facts are that President Reagan set out to dismantle government, and following him there was no government able to tackle the real needs of the Nation and to respond to the needs of a shrinking globe.

It is the globalization of commerce and environmental disasters – the addiction to fossil fuels including the addiction to oil imports and the fact that those imports, and the exports of high polluting jobs, pushed the US into a terribly dangerous down-slide of the balance of trade, and the reliance on foreign Sovereign Funds buying up US treasury bonds – read putting in hock the US dollar and US independence to boot.

America lived on the high and that high reached an apex when President G.W. Bush passed the baton to President Obama. It was under Bush that the stimulus package was created to save the old elites, and when Obama took over he was locked into it – or otherwise the whole souffle pie would have collapsed. What that article talks about was not Obama’s doing. It was the Republican backers that prepared the pie and Obama was forced to save what they prepared. He did not bake the pie. In effect the dis-ingenuity of the Republicans has just pushed the forces that back Obama to create a $500,000 fund to prepare to react to the predictable new onslaught that will result from the Sarah Palin new-book country-side tour. I just read an e-mail that told me so – and that was what pushed me to write this posting.

If one wants to save the Nation’s economy – and the Nation from itself on top of that – the way would have been to jump-start the new Obama Age with new jobs that come from new industries, that are based on efficiency and new fuel systems and having first allowed for the US workers to reach a peaceful state of mind that comes with knowledge that some of their basic needs – like the promise of health care – are being cared for.

The above needs the expedient passing of the health care and energy and climate bills. Without legislation, doing things just by Presidential fiat, opens up the President to more criticism and makes the passing of those bills even harder, the country will not be saved from itself and there is thus no reason to be happy from what the “liberal-leaning” economists say, and we can just be furious of what the “conservative” economists say in the above quote.

The truth is that spending money as stimulus, to keep General Motors and Financial institutions – those entities that are not interested in change – continue in a mode of business-as-before sure does not merit the money that was spent on them. Throwing more money in their direction is not a bright idea, but spending more money and front-loading it while changing direction is the way to go. Will both – Republicans and reluctant Democrats – read reluctant Americans in general, understand that the country’s independence is at stake? Will they understand that building an economy on wars is not feasible in the 21st century? Will they have learned from Obama’s correct bowing to the country’s creditors was not of his making – but theirs?

Both groups of economists in the NYT article are wrong in what they are saying – there is probably the need for a third group of economists – let’s call them progressive economists!

Voyage to the Plastic Frontier: the Alguita sails the Pacific
By Jan Lundberg of CultureChange.org

Captain Charles Moore is today one of several men of the hour. But if there
are people on this planet hundreds of years from now, surrounded by all the
non-biodegradable, toxic petrochemical plastic saturating the oceans, he
will be spoken of as the man of the hour — a Cassandra that people started
to seriously heed.

On the tenth anniversary of his findings establishing
the Northern Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Capt. Moore and his crew are out
there now sailing again.

Before the update on Captain Moore’s voyage for his Algalita Marine
Research Foundation, that started June 10 on the Oceanographic Research
Vessel Alguita, watch his riveting seven-minute mind-blowing presentation
at the TED talks. This is followed by the voyage’s description and blog,
ending with more resources and background. Help stop the plastic plague!
…
To go to the complete article, see photos and get links, go to
 http://culturechange.org/go.html?488

Polar Bear Appearances Grow on Oil Fields
Wednesday 24 June 2009
by: Alex DeMarban   |   Visit article original @ The Arctic Sounder

Polar bear sightings along the southern Beaufort Sea coast in Alaska have jumped, signaling a possible migration from shrinking ice. (Photo: Paul Nicklen / National Geographic)

Polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years, a sign that increasing numbers of the white giants may be prowling on land because the sea ice they prefer is shrinking, scientists said.

Oil field sightings along the southern Beaufort Sea coast jumped to 321 in 2007 and 313 in 2008, said Craig Perham, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Anchorage.

That’s more than double the 15-year average of 138. It’s also a sharp rise from 232, the previous high in 2005.

Oil companies are legally required to report a polar bear encounter to Fish and Wildlife that involves any change in the animal’s behavior, even if the bear simply lifts its head to sniff the air, Perham said.

The measure is designed to protect polar bears and humans by providing information on the bears’ whereabouts and behavior. Increased sightings might also be up because new exploration work has taken place on the near-coast areas where polar bears are usually found, he said.

For example, ships doing seismic exploration in the Beaufort Sea have waited out storms on barrier islands those years, giving workers the chance to spot polar bears numerous times, sometimes the same animal.

Perham hasn’t “teased out” the data to find out exactly what it means, he said.

“Truth be told, we don’t know,” he said.

But the rising encounters are in line with what scientists expect to find – as sea ice shrinks, polar bears spend more time on land, he said.

Polar bears prefer the ice because it provides access to ringed and bearded seals, he said. But the seals are harder to find when the ice recedes so far – more than 70 miles off the coast – that it no longer sits over the shallower and biologically productive continental shelf.

The sea ice has shrunk to record levels in recent summers. One day last August, there were 400 miles of open water between the Alaska coast and pack ice.

Interestingly, the majority of oil field sightings have come in August and September, Perham said. In September, the sea ice is farthest from shore.

In those two months, oil field workers have reported spotting polar bears more than 240 times in 2007 and 2008.

During the winters of 2007 and 2008, oil field workers reported seeing polar bears no more than 14 times.

In the past, most sightings took place in the winter.

Despite the increased sightings, the oil industry hasn’t reported killing a polar bear since 1993, Perham said.

If bears come too close, workers might shoo them away by shouting or slamming a car door. If that doesn’t work, they might scare it away by firing off loud cracker shells.

Scientists believe the shrinking sea ice has lead to declining numbers of polar bears. If sea-ice loss continues as forecasted, the bears could someday disappear from large areas, including Alaska’s coastal waters, said Eric Regehr, a federal wildlife biologist. “It’s pretty grim,” he said.

He said the Fish and Wildlife Service tentatively estimates the southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population at 1,526 in 2006, a drop from the previous estimate of 1,800.

The world population of polar bears is estimated between 20,000 and 25,000, he said.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Two-Degree Rise Ever More Likely, Scientists Warn
By Stephen Leahy

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 30 (IPS) – Climate scientists are calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels because humans are now pumping so much carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere that the ‘2-degree-C climate balloon’ will burst otherwise, new studies show.

That 2-degree C climate balloon has a maximum capacity of less than 1,400 gigatonnes of CO2 total emissions from the year 2000 to 2050, Malte Meinshausen and colleagues report in the current issue of Nature. The European Union and others consider a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees C as dangerous and potentially catastrophic. Temperatures are already 0.8 C warmer than the pre-industrial period.

The reality is that global emissions for the last seven years amounted to almost 250 gigatonnes of these long-lived greenhouse gases, meaning that the current and growing rates of fossil fuel emissions would burst the balloon in about 20 years – or less. Even if emissions are held to 1,400 gigatonnes maximum for the next 40 years, there is still a 50-percent probability of exceeding 2 degrees C, said Meinshausen, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Indigenous peoples from around the world also called for a phase-out of fossil fuels at the conclusion of the first Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change in Anchorage, Alaska, that concluded last week.

“That call is well-supported by the evidence in this study,” Meinshausen told IPS.

However, the world’s future global carbon budget is likely less than 1,400 gigagtonnes. When other short-term warming gases like methane are included, then the total ‘forcing’, i.e. warming, could be 10 to 40 percent greater by the year 2100, said Meinshausen.

And some climate feedbacks – changes that will amplify or accelerate the warming – are absent from computer models. “Our modeling cannot account for emissions in methane from melting permafrost,” he said.

Permafrost – permanently frozen bog and peatland – contains enormous amounts of organic carbon, perhaps enough to triple the amount currently in the atmosphere.

“Only a fast switch away from fossil fuels will give us a reasonable chance to avoid considerable warming,” said Meinshausen. “We shouldn’t forget that a 2-degree C global mean warming would take us far beyond the natural temperature variations that life on Earth has experienced since we humans have been around.”

This will be a serious challenge, he said, because there is plenty of carbon left in the ground. Proven reserves of oil, gas and coal represent four times the amount of carbon that would burst the 2-degree climate balloon. Burning just one quarter of what’s left in the ground will bring humanity to the 50-50 point of tipping into dangerous climate change.

Delay is not an option when it comes to the fossil fuel phase-out, scientists stress. Even though a tonne of carbon is a tonne of carbon, whether released today or in 50 years’ time, there is only so much the atmosphere can take before a 2-degree rise or more is inevitable, Meinshausen, Myles Allen of the University of Oxford and others write in a Nature Reports Climate Change commentary.

“Emitting CO2 more slowly buys time, perhaps vital time, but it will only achieve our ultimate goal in the context of a strategy for phasing out net CO2 emissions altogether,” they conclude.

“Climate policy needs an exit strategy: as well as reducing carbon emissions now, we need a plan for phasing out net emissions entirely,” Allen said in a release.

So what are the targets for the negotiators United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the Copenhagen this December?

If negotiators heed the scientific evidence, then a new global agreement’s goal will be to reduce global emissions by 50 percent compared to 1990 and do that by 2050. To achieve this, the current three-percent annual growth in carbon emissions must flatline by 2015 and start the decline by 3 percent per year, reports Martin Parry of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London in another Nature study.

“If we do this it leaves an even chance of exceeding 2-degree C of warming,” Parry and colleagues write.

If mitigation efforts are not substantial enough and emissions peak in the year 2025, then a 3-degree C rise in temperatures will likely occur. The damage from this level of warming could be substantial, placing billions more people at risk of water shortage and millions more at risk of coastal flooding. To avoid such damage will require massive investment in adaptation, such as improving water supply and storage, and protecting low-lying settlements from rising seas.

A final cautionary note: “The true sensitivity of the Earth system may well be higher, implying that any temperature-based target will become progressively harder to maintain as slower feedbacks kick in,” write Gavin Schmidt, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and David Archer of the University of Chicago in short article in Nature Wednesday.

“The bottom line? Dangerous change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid,” they said.

Like an oil spill, it is far better and cheaper to avoid making the mess in the first place, they conclude.

Indigenous Wisdom Against Climate Change

By Stephen Leahy*
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 28 (Tierram̩rica) РWhile industrialised countries like Canada continue to emit ever-higher levels of greenhouse-effect gases, indigenous peoples around the world are working to survive and adapt to an increasingly dangerous climate.

Over millennia, indigenous peoples have developed a large arsenal of practices that are of potential benefit today for coping with climate change, including some holistic and refreshingly practical ideas.

“Why not give automobiles and planes a day of rest? And then later on, two days of rest. That would cut down on pollution,” suggested Carrie Dann, an elder from the Western Shoshone Nation, whose ancestral lands extend across the western United States.

Dann, winner of the 1993 Right Livelihood Award – known as the Alternative Nobel Prize – for her efforts to protect ancestral lands, made her proposal before the 400 delegates gathered in Anchorage, Alaska, Apr. 20-24 for the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change.

Dann warned that Mother Nature is getting warmer and the “fever” needed to be cured. “We see many range (grassland) fires in my territory, it is getting so hot,” she said.

To prevent similar uncontrolled wildfires that have burned up large portions of Australia and killed hundreds of people in recent years, the Aborigines of Western Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, are using traditional fire practices to reduce such wildfires.

Preventing these fires also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and, for the first time in the world, these Aborigines have sold 17 million dollars’ worth of carbon credits to industry, generating significant new income for the local community, according to a report presented in Anchorage.

Australia’s Aborigines have traditionally used controlled burning following the rainy season to create barriers to stop the intense wildfires later during the dry season.

Wildfires account for a substantial portion of Australia’s carbon emissions and have been very destructive. However, in recent years few Aborigines live on the land any more so there have been fewer controlled burns. But now there is a new role to play in the fight against global warming.

According to Sam Johnston, of the Tokyo-based United Nations University, a summit co-sponsor, it is in the world’s best interest to take into account indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge.

In Asia, indigenous people are developing diverse crop varieties and utilising different cropping patterns, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Filipina leader and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, told the delegates.

They are also involved in sustainable agro-forestry and energy production based on small-scale biomass and micro-dam projects.

On the Indonesian island of Bali, indigenous peoples are doing reef rehabilitation work and protecting mangroves. In the Philippines, they are mapping ancestral waters and developing an integrated management plan.

“Many are doing these things on their own, with no support,” said Tauli-Corpuz.

In Honduras, faced with increasing hurricane strikes and drastic weather changes, the Quezungal people have developed a farming method that involves planting crops under trees so the roots anchor the soil and reduce the loss of harvests during natural disasters.

Indigenous peoples in Guyana have adopted a nomadic lifestyle, moving to more forested zones during the dry season, and are now planting manioc, their main staple, in alluvial plains where it was previously too moist to grow crops.

Farmers in Belize are returning to traditional agricultural practices and moving up to higher ground, other delegates reported.

In Africa, the Baka Pygmies of southeast Cameroon and the Bambendzele of Congo have developed new fishing and hunting methods to adapt to a decrease in precipitation and an increase in forest fires.

Although indigenous peoples have great capacity to adapt, many treaties and international laws guarantee their rights to food and traditional livelihoods, but climate change threatens all of this, according to Andrea Carmen, a member of the Yaqui Indian Nation, of the U.S. southwest.

When the chiefs of the tribes in the western Canadian province of Alberta declared that there should be no more oil production from tar sands, they were ignored, said Carmen who is also executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council.

Alberta’s tar sands oil projects are the major reason why Canada’s latest greenhouse gas inventory increased four percent from 2006 to 2007. That increase puts the country 33.8 percent over its commitments established in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, in force since 2005.

But indigenous peoples are also wary of recent actions by governments and industries undertaken in response to climate change, such as building wind farms and biofuel plants, because these are often located on or directly affect their lands and livelihoods, says Gunn-Britt Retter, of Finland’s Saami Council.

“We have the knowledge of how to live through these climate changes. We need to use traditional knowledge to help all our cultures live through these changes,” Retter said.

“Our message to the world is that we need full and effective participation at the national and international levels in order for our cultures to survive these changes,” he added.

It has been 17 years since the first U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings were held to solve the climate crisis, said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.

“We must act quickly… This is the last chance to take control,” she told the delegates by videoconference from her home in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. “The world needs the wisdom of our cultures.”

(*Correspondent Stephen Leahy’s travel to Alaska was financed by the United Nations University and Project Word, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation for media diversity. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

From:      beledeles at yahoo.com
Subject: Rush Limbaugh Wants to Know Why Women Don’t Like Him
Date: February 27, 2009
To:      pj at sustainabilitank.com

Recently, Rush Limbaugh said he’d convene a “summit” to determine why he’s not popular with the ladies. Rush, however, is a guy thing, and here’s why:

Everyone has known an older person who longs for simpler days when up was up and down was down, when life was slower and gentlemen wore hats and you would hold the door open for a lady and she wouldn’t think you were a chauvinist. It was a time when everyone understood who the bad guys were, and someone didn’t get it, well, they were the misfits.

They were the misfits and everybody knew it. It was a time when people obeyed the boss, and the boss was white.

The boss was white, and the boss was a man.  

You know that old saying, “You learn something new every day.” Well, there was a time, so the legend goes, that you didn’t have to learn something new every day. You could stick with what you had always known, the things you’ve known since you were a young white boy, and as such, it was understood that people like you, people who looked like you, were going to get the biggest piece of cake. That was your world, and that’s how it had always been.

And suddenly that saying, “You learn something new every day,” is everywhere you go.   Nowadays, you can’t count on anything. This Indonesian guy named Osama Hussein is President of the whole f**king United States. Not Vice President, but President. Suddenly, that pantsuit-wearing baby killer wife-of-a-cheat Hillary is Secretary of State. So you want to wake up in the morning and start the day by screaming “Stop. Just stop, right now.” There was a time that a white man of means could stand up and say “Shut the f*** up” and get some respect.

Not long ago, the men who did the work, the men who built this country, who drove the trucks and laid the pipes and built the cars and fixed the roads and fixed the toilets – we got respect. We didn’t have to wade through all this political correctness just to get what was ours without some pinhead whining about it.

And there was a time when you knew where the communists were. They were in Russia, not in the White House.

And you could count on the respectable people to ferret out the rest. Now you got socialists and communists running everything, telling us we have to spread the wealth, telling us that what is ours is not really ours. Who the f*** let them in, anyway?

The above rant is the product of a mind who cannot grasp that black-and-white, us-and-them viewpoints no longer work. The world of simple questions (“Are you for America or against it?” “Do you love free enterprise or hate it?”), has been replaced by shades of grey. Now you have to deal with people that say, “I love my country enough to criticize it, I love my country, but can’t support it when its wrong.” The Rush Limbaugh mind rejects these equivocations as signs of moral laxness. You either love America or you hate it.

The rush Limbaugh mind does not have to participate in the world of nuance, the world of qualified support, the Limbaugh mind despises the politics of “yes, but except….”, or anything that reeks of compromise. The rush Limbaugh mind lives in the bliss of absolute certitude. Certitude is a powerful anesthetic. Certitude provides almost a physical “high” because all of one’s energies can work towards pushing a cause, rather than having to rethink it, or having to pause long enough to consider you might be wrong about something. The Rush Limbaugh mind never has to stop to consider much of anything. The Rush Limbaugh mind can scream and yell and rant and swear at its enemies because it is very clear who the enemies are.

In Rush’s world, the enemies never “have a good point or two.” They are always wanna-be politically-correct socialist commie cowards with pussies for dicks. The Rush Limbaugh brain embraces a type of certitude that never lets any air in. It is a closed system. If you question one of the basic tenants, for example, thinking that in some cases, higher taxes might be needed, or that, in some cases, a Democrat might have a good idea, then according to the Rush Limbaugh mind, you are showing weakness. Self-questioning is not seen as a healthy way to check your facts, to improve and mature your viewpoint, but rather, as sign of a weak will, of being contaminated by the vacillation of little men. To the Rush Limbaugh brain, if you are a leader, then you never question.

———-

(As editor of www.SustainabiliTank.info I did not change even a coma in this article, all what I do is to break up paragraphs and use highlighting for emphasis. I hope that both – the author and Rush Limbaugh – who years ago ranted for a whole day against a letter of mine printed in the New York Times – dealing with ethanol as the octane enhacer of choice to gasoline – and on taxing the use of oil products – will find that our representation of their views is completely accurate.

My thanks to Barry Edeles for his contribution – Pincas Jawetz, editor SustainabiliTank.info)

The original article continues:

———

In the post-consumer age, which is where we are headed, hierarchical thinking is doomed. The mindset of “I am right and you are wrong, I am high and you are low,” is not compatible with the epoch we are entering. Our problems are universal, and not limited by boundaries. The crises we must solve are never again going to stay on one side of the tracks. Fortress America cannot hide from overproduction of manufactured goods, global warming and deforestation, a dwindling oil supply and overpopulation. Everyone will have to weigh in, everyone will have to participate, and everyone will have to feel vested in and be part of the solutions.   Leaders in today’s world must view themselves as the center of a web, like the hub of a bicycle wheel with spokes moving outward. This mindset is vastly different from the traditional hierarchical style of leadership. Hierarchical leadership, with power imposed from the top downward, is no longer a good model for solving the world’s problems. Rush Limbaugh’s thinking resembles the out-of-control male parent who comes home from work, says to the family “My word is law. If you don’t like it, then get the hell out.” The leadership we need today is more maternal, recognizing that what matters in family disputes is the outcome, what matters is that the next morning, people can still look each other in the eye and live peacefully under the same roof. To the maternal mind, “winning” a dispute is measured only by the degree to which family members are able to cooperate after the dispute is over. Such is the kind of leadership required for human survival in an age of dwindling resources, which is our future. Leadership Limbaugh-style is a vestige from a soon-to-be dead age, the age of consumption, and much like the early hominids you see on those ape-to-man evolutionary charts, as transitional as an ape with a spear.

Rep Don Young (R-Alaska)   was the top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee and has been either the chairman or ranking member of either that panel or the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee since 1994. But that streak came to an end, when Young bowed out of the running for the top Resources post in the 111th Congress. Though he nominally stepped down of his own volition, Young got a solid push from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who was opposed to the Alaskan’s keeping the job and made sure Young knew that.

Young is under federal investigation   on multiple fronts, including his relationship with the oil services company VECO, part of the same probe that led to the October conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens (R).

Alaska voters decided to give Stevens the boot on Election Day but — surprisingly — reelected Young to his 18th term in the House. That won him the prized cover photo of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s “Most Embarrassing Reelected Members of Congress” report.

But just because Alaskans seem to want Young to keep his job doesn’t mean his Republican colleagues feel the same way. GOP leaders have been intensifying their efforts to paint the Democratic majority as corrupt, with a months-long focus on Rangel now supplemented by the Blagojevich scandal. That effort has been somewhat complicated by the fact that Republicans are dealing with some ongoing scandals of their own. How, for example, could they plausibly call for Rangel (who faces an ethics committee probe but no federal investigation that we know of) to step down from his Ways and Means chairmanship if Young was allowed to remain in his committee post?

Boehner and his fellow leaders pushed Young out the door, and most of the other Republicans currently in ethical trouble either lost (Rep. Tom Feeney) or are retiring (Reps. Rick Renzi, John Doolittle and Jerry Weller). In addition to Young, a few other returning Republicans, including Appropriations ranking member Jerry Lewis (Calif.), appear to be under federal investigation. So it may not be possible for the GOP to clear its ethical decks completely, but throwing Young overboard was a definite start.

A Holiday Treat from Alaska Wilderness League Dear AlaskaWild Activists, Last month, we launched our “I am” campaign. After the nonstop barrage of “Drill, baby, drill” in 2008, we knew we needed to battle back with a positive message that reaffirms the American value of conservation. What better way to do that than to amplify the voices of Americans who believe that Alaska’s wild places have a value worth protecting that goes beyond their exploitable resources. Throughout the hundreds of very personal stories of passion for wilderness, we found the most frequent words and themes – beauty, Earth, future, protect – alluded to a grand reverence for the timelessness of nature’s creation and the need for its preservation. This is our holiday treat for you! The stories below are but a cross section of the hundreds we received. Many have experienced Alaska’s splendor first-hand, many want to protect it for their children and grandchildren – but all know it is their duty to help protect our shared natural treasures in Alaska. Get ready to be moved. These stories will inspire.  Afterward, please visit our “I am” webpage for four full pages of activist testimonies.

I am a retired FAA Radar technician. I first came to Alaska in 1957 when the company I was working for sent me on a one-year assignment. I really didn’t want to come, but I let them talk me into it with a promotion and financial incentives. Before that year was over, I decided that “Alaska is the place for me,” as I told my mother in a letter she saved and reminded me of later. I liked it the way it was when I got here, and I’d like to keep it as close to that – wild, natural, and unspoiled – as I can. – Gerald B., Alaska I am a pediatric chaplain at a large hospital. The places I go to restore my soul and my hope are the wild and peaceful places. They are better than medicine for my heart’s sorrow. We need to keep these wild places WILD and pristine. Please let the Alaska wilderness remain wild. Thank you. – Nan S., Minnesota I am a retired Merchant Marine officer who worked on oil tankers for many years. I have witnessed firsthand the devastation and destruction caused by oil companies and the U.S. government when left to their own devices in the world’s oceans. Illegal discharging of ’slop’ oils into the seas was common practice (you’d lose your job if you didn’t do it) and still is to a certain extent today. The destruction of our environment by corporations, with government head-nodding approval, has been boundless and well documented. I have seen this in my 66 years of living in this country. As I get older I find my love for all wildlife and all of our wonderful wild places grows deeper and deeper. We must not lose these things; we must shepherd them properly. This is our responsibility to all life on this little planet. – Paul P., Massachusetts I am a professor at a business school who understands both the economic value of oil and the need to preserve national treasures. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge deserves permanent protection. The arguments for allowing drilling there are simply not compelling economically, nor do they reflect responsible environmental management. It’s bad enough that flawed, short-term decision-making has saddled our future generations with debt; it would be worse if that same flawed, short-term decision-making deprived them of one of the greatest natural ecosystems in the world. – Leonard G., New Hampshire I am a secretary in a Manhattan financial firm. As a secretary in the ‘concrete jungle,’ I would like to know that we are striving to save habitats for all wildlife. I’d like to know that my future grandchildren can learn about animals in the present tense and not in museums housing stuffed replicas of extinct species. – Lorraine S., New York I am a lifelong Alaskan, retired Anchorage firefighter, now living in a small Haida village. It is time to leave a legacy of wilderness for others to enjoy and to live from. – Michael Q., Alaska If these stories moved you as they moved us,  check out our “I am” webpage to read more. Thanks, Matt Reading Online Communications Coordinator Alaska Wilderness League www.AlaskaWild.org

Natives Hope Obama Will Be Their President, Too.

By Haider Rizvi from IPS

NEW YORK, Nov 24 (IPS) - During his election campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly said that he cared about the issues facing Native American communities and insisted that they could trust him — pledges that Native leaders are now watching closely as the president-elect appoints a new cabinet and fills other key federal posts.

So far, Obama has named six native political figures to his transition team — half of them assigned to assist in Interior Department policy, budget and personnel changes.

“We’re lucky to have such stellar representatives with people with whom Indian Country has really good relationships,” said Jacqueline Johnson-Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, a nonprofit organisation that represents more than 250 tribes.

Native advocates Mary Smith, Mary McNeil and Yvette Robideaux have been assigned to work on justice, agriculture and health issues, while three current and former attorneys with the Native American Rights Fund — John Echohawk, Keith Harper and Robert Anderson — will advise Obama on changes proposed within the Interior Department.

The Natives, also known as “American Indians”, have their own sovereign governments, which the United States recognises in accordance with its constitution and under treaty obligations. However, as the Native leaders observe, their communities have always suffered from inattention during the transition and early years of past U.S. administrations.

“If appointments and major policy decisions are delayed for extended periods, the long-term issues in Indian Country are left unaddressed and handed on to the next administration,” said Johnson-Pata. .

In her view, “any significant reform efforts must be planned during the transition and start at the beginning of an administration if they are to succeed.”

As he continued to reach out to new voting blocs past summer, Obama made a campaign stop at an Indian reservation in Montana, where he told the audience that, as an African-American, he identified with their struggles.

“I know what it’s like to not always have been respected or to have been ignored and I know what it’s like to struggle and that’s how I think many of you understand what’s happened here on the reservation,” Obama said.

In his speech, Obama added: “A lot of times you have been forgotten, just like African-Americans have been forgotten or other groups in this country have been forgotten.”

Statistics show that the indigenous communities, which constitute about one percent of the U.S. population, are among the most marginalised sections of society with regard to health care, education and employment.

In March 2006 and again in March 2008, a panel of U.N. experts analysed the U.S. government’s treatment of indigenous Americans and ruled that it was guilty of racial discrimination.

In its 2008 report, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) also urged the U.S. to sign onto the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the current administration has continued to reject despite the fact it has been approved by a vast majority of the U.N. member states.

Indigenous rights activists say they hope that the Obama administration would endorse the declaration, which recognised the rights of the indigenous peoples around the world to control their lands and resources and be able to freely practice their belief systems and traditional values without interference from outside forces.

During the Nov. 4 presidential election, a vast majority of Native people voted for Obama, according to Frank LaMere of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, who led the American Indian delegation to the Democratic Convention.

“Obama has stood with us and it is now time that we stand with him,” he said in a statement, describing the Natives’ interest in the political process as unprecedented. “Indian country has responded to the Democratic message of change and the need for urgency.”

“We have many who go without because our leaders have failed us. This election means much to them. Obama understands this while others remain oblivious. Let us, as Native people, help him.”

On the campaign trail in Montana, Obama was adopted as an honourary member of the Crow tribe, a ceremony that native activists say is reserved for special dignitaries. On that occasion, he was given a new name, “Barack Black Eagle”.

Many activists fighting for the rights of indigenous people say they are hoping that the Obama administration would also re-examine the case of Leonard Peltier, the legendary hero of the American Indian Movement who has been behind bars for nearly four decades.

Peltier was arrested after a shootout between American Indian militants and federal agents in Pine Ridge in 1975. Some 60 natives were killed along with two FBI agents. Peltier has consistently refused to claim his innocence and considers his imprisonment an act of racism.

Over the years, a number of world-renowned figures, including the South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have called for Peltier’s release, but in vain. According to Amnesty International, Peltier is a “prisoner of conscience”.

Just three months before the election, Peltier sent a letter to the president-elect from his jail cell, expressing his interest in Obama’s candidacy. “Your election as president of the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race relations in the United States,” he wrote.

However, at the same time, he did not hesitate to warn Obama against opportunism. “Symbolism alone will not bring about change,” wrote Peltier. “Our young people, black and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling.”

“I am, however, concerned that your recent statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law,” said Peltier.

On April 26, when asked to explain his views on the case, Obama said: “Well, look, obviously there was a tragedy in New York. I said at the time, without benefit of all the facts before me that it looked like a possible case of excessive force. The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.”

That is not how the hero of the indigenous peoples of the land looks at how the U.S. political and legal system works.

“Until the law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes functioned to sustain and legitimise an inhuman institution,” Peltier wrote in the letter.

***

Still, Obama has reached out more to the Native community than most others with presidential aspirations.

“We will never be able to undo the wrongs that were committed against Native Americans, but what we can do is make sure that we have a president who’s committed to doing what’s right with Native Americans, being full partners, respecting, honouring, working with you,” Obama told the Native crowd back in May.

“That’s the commitment that I’m making to you, and since now I’m a member of the family, you know that I won’t break my commitment.” he said. The question many Natives are now asking is: Will he?  

Commission green-lights industrialisation of Arctic.

LEIGH PHILLIPS – EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS, November 20, 2008.

The rapidly melting Arctic is a bonanza of oil, gas, fish and mineral wealth waiting to be exploited – so long as it is done in a sustainable manner, the European Commission believes.

Faster transit routes, including the fabled Northwest Passage sought by explorers for centuries, and expanded possibilities for polar tourism also provide exciting opportunities for businesses, according to the EU executive, which on Thursday (20 November) adopted a communication outlining Europe’s first ever policy towards the Land of the Midnight Sun.

“We cannot remain impassive in the face of the alarming developments affecting the Arctic climate and, in consequence, the rest of our planet,” said fisheries commissioner Joe Borg, while speaking to reporters after the publication of the policy document.

“The Arctic is an essential and vulnerable component of the Earth’s ecosystem,” echoed his colleague, external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Walder. “The effects of climate change are more advanced and more evident in the Arctic than in any other area of the world.”

But this is no reason not to exploit the region, they both argued.

“On the other hand, the combination of the climatic changes and the recent technological developments opens up new opportunities interlaced with challenges,” said Mr Borg.

“There are significant mineral resources, in particular hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic located under the sovereign territories or inside the exclusive economic zones of the Arctic states,” said Ms Ferrero-Waldner.

She added that there is already exploration for fossil fuels going on and so there was no point in trying to put a halt to such activity.

“Exploitation is already going ahead in some places and could be profitable. But it must be sustainable and comply with strict environmental standards.”

The document has three main thrusts – the protection of the Arctic environment and its people, the sustainable exploitation of resources, and the improvement of multi-lateral governance of the region.

Ms Ferrero-Walder described these elements as the three pillars of EU Arctic policy.

The fisheries commissioner also noted that the retreating ice opens new fishing grounds, but warned that considerable parts of the Arctic ocean are not covered by regional fisheries management organisations.

“The boundaries of these pristine waters need to be regulated to avoid overfishing,” he said. The commission believes the best authority to oversee such a process is the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Council and will take initiatives to widen the scope of this body.

The commission is to apply for observer status with the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that brings together the Arctic nations: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US.

Additionally, in order to improve maritime surveillance, the commission is working with the European Space Agency to explore the development of a polar orbiting satellite system. This would permit better knowledge of shipping traffic and co-ordinate faster reactions during emergencies.

***

Law of the Sea

The commission strongly backs developing the governance of the region, which has until now has been very weak as a result of the inhospitable environment that left few humans interested in the Arctic.

In May this year, the five Arctic Ocean coastal states – Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway and Denmark – adopted a declaration supporting the maintenance of the existing legal framework that covers the region: the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

However, in October, the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of the negotiation of an international Arctic treaty to protect the high north.

Although the parliament’s resolution also supports the sustainable development of the Arctic, including for fossil fuel extraction, some environmental groups would like to see an Arctic treaty that mirrors the Antarctic Treaty, which set aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, banned territorial claims and prohibited military activities.

The commission however rejects the parliament’s perspective.

“I back the views of the Arctic states that an Arctic Charter is not the way forward,” said Mr Borg. “The bedrock for action in the Arctic Ocean remains the Law of the Sea.

He encouraged those countries present in the Arctic that are not signatories to the convention to sign on “as soon as possible.” The United States is not a party to the Law of the Sea.

The Liberal grouping in the European Parliament largely welcomed the communication but criticised the failure to support the euro-deputies’ position on a new treaty.

“If there is one disappointment with the communication, it is that the commission has not taken up the parliament’s call to open international negotiations designed to lead to the adoption of an international treaty for the protection of the Arctic,” said UK MEP Diana Wallis.

***

Potential for catastrophe:

Environmental groups are horrified at the commission’s support for the industrialisation of the Arctic, and are extremely sceptical that many proposed activities can be done in a sustainable fashion at all, particularly fossil fuel development, shipping goods across the Arctic Ocean and expanded fisheries.

“Increasing human activities could significantly accelerate the threats facing the Arctic, which would have cascading effects all over the world,” warned Oceana, an oceans campaign group.

“Irresponsible development in the Arctic ecosystem holds the potential for catastrophe”, said Xavier Pastor, the director of the group’s European division.

Oceana says that there must be a comprehensive scientific assessment before any development can take place, followed by principles of precautionary management.

The commission says it does indeed support the precautionary principle for the Arctic and plans to open a dialogue with environmental groups about the Arctic.

The fisheries commissioner said he indeed supports such thinking.

“I think the prudent way forward is the precautionary approach,” Mr Borg said. “If it turns out that the environmental damage caused by certain activities is too high, then we will take the necessary action.”

Oceana is doubtful.

“Yes, they say they’re going to take a precautionary approach, but they also say that about fisheries, so that doesn’t bode well,” said Julie Cator, the group’s policy director.

“If the environment is so important in their thinking, why wasn’t the environment commissioner there [to present the communication] as well?”

The environment directorate-general was not involved in the drafting of the communication.

The commission said that environment commissioner was unable to attend as he was in Strasbourg.

=========

European Commission

• Arctic Communication

Press Release

• The Arctic merits the European Union’s attention – first step towards an EU Arctic Policy

Website

• The EU and the Arctic region

Melting ice in the Arctic, but the lure of resources is just too strong. Europe’s Arctic adventure – The new cold rush for resources.
LEIGH PHILLIPS, the EUobserver, November 7, 2008. THIS ARTICLE FROM TROMSO, NORWAY.

EUOBSERVER / TROMSO – PART ONE – There’s this grizzled old guy in the hospital with worsening lung cancer. The doctors can’t tell him whether it’s fatal yet, but each new test shows a rapidly deteriorating condition.

He’s been a heavy smoker all his life, although he’s trying to quit, but one day, while he’s wandering the corridors, he comes across a long-abandoned storeroom and it’s rammed to the gills with cigarettes, cigars, roll-your-own tobacco of every brand and region. There are Cuban cigars, Moroccan apple-flavoured nargileh tobacco, Swedish snus and jars of aromatic pipe shag. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of tobacco left over from the days when hospital cafeterias still sold cigarettes, and the nurses and security staff are nowhere to be seen.

The man briefly thinks that he should just forget he ever opened the storeroom door and get back to the business of quitting, but he’s dazzled by the hoard and instead stuffs as much of it into his pyjamas as he can to take back to his bed and puffs his nicotine-addled brains out.

There’s no tobacco hoard in a cupboard somewhere in the Arctic, but there is however a quarter of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas now within reach as a result of the far north rapidly melting.

Like the old man in the hospital, the European Union and countries on the shores of the Arctic sea have said to themselves: “There may be a chance that we can slow down and reverse global warming, so we really should give up our addiction to fossil fuels. But how can we turn our backs – and our wallets – on such a bonanza, even if it’s full of the very stuff that caused the problem in the first place?”

Or is such an environmentalist caricature unfair to the people of the northern regions, for the most part long shut out from the industrial development and the wealth of the more southerly parts of Europe, Canada, Russia and the United States?

Many of those living in the Arctic are aboriginal people, who have historically borne the double burden of underdevelopment in their regions and racial prejudice. And until recently very little has been available to anyone up north apart from far-from-bountiful farming and the occasional mine that inevitably closes down.

Can we really say “No” to improving the standard of living in the north through development, especially if it can be done sustainably?

With recent months in particular seeing both a cascade of truly alarming news on how fast the Arctic is changing and pronouncements from the European Union and other circumpolar powers on plans for exploitation of newly accessible resources, the EUobserver decided to visit Europe’s patch of the Arctic, the northernmost tip of mainland Norway – still outside the EU, but very much Brussels’ advance guard up in the high north – to find out the reality behind the headlines about the coming “scramble for the Arctic”, and look at all sides in the debate over the Arctic’s future.

***

Methane burps:

The situation at the top of the world has taken a sharp turn for the worse just in the last few weeks.

On 6 September, leading European and American ice specialists at the US National Ice Center reported that for the first time, a ring of navigable waters around the Arctic ice cap opened up the fabled Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic archipelago – the maritime Holy Grail of a faster trade route from Europe to Asia sought for centuries by explorers – and the Northern Sea Route, also known as the Northeast Passage, over Eurasia, at the same time.

Then, in late September, Swedish and Russian scientists found the first evidence that millions of tonnes of methane – a gas that is 20 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – is bubbling up from beneath the Siberian Arctic seabed.

The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is greater than the world’s remaining global stores of coal and it is now rising up from the bottom of the ocean through “methane chimney” discovered by scientists aboard the research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.

Days later, British scientists aboard the James Clark Ross found hundreds of plumes of methane burping up from the Arctic seabed to the west of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, says that the release of methane clathrates from permafrost regions and beneath the seabed will unleash powerful feedback forces that could produce runaway climate change that cannot be controlled – the so-called methane time bomb – a prediction of radical environmental transformation far worse than the worst-case scenarios theorised by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Then on Tuesday (28 October), the European Space Agency reported that Arctic sea ice was thinning at a record rate, with the thickness of sea ice in large parts of the Arctic having declined by as much as 19 percent last winter compared to the previous five winters.

***

Last days of the ‘ice bear:’

“The Arctic is warming at two times the rate of the rest of the world,” says Nalan Koc, a senior scientist with the polar climate programme at the Norwegian Polar Institute, in Tromso, explaining why all of this is happening.

Tromso, in the far north of Norway and home to the world’s northernmost university, at the same time is preparing itself for the economic bonanza that the melting will bring.

Nalan Koc, however, is not as excited as other Tromso inhabitants. In a Power Point presentation of this Arctic apocalypse, she starkly lists the myriad ways in which the environment is fundamentally altering. “Amplified by positive feedback, the Arctic is seeing increased precipitation, declining snow cover, rising river flows, thawing permafrost, melting glaciers, retreating summer sea ice, rising sea levels, and ocean salinity changes making the water less saline.”

The talk, despite its subject, is deceptively banal. Where are the four horsemen? A moon turned blood-red? Instead, the end of days is being announced not by skeletonous biblical heralds but in bullet points and embedded videos that take three minutes to load.

The permafrost is melting under tundra that previously was stable, she explains, buckling roads and highways as the ground beneath them gives way.

In the marine environment, sea temperatures are rising and the ice cover is melting. Ice-dependent species such as the polar bear, which the Norwegians more accurately call “isbjorn” or “ice bear,” as well as the walrus and the ringed seal all face an uncertain future. Some scientists believe the polar bear will be extinct by mid-century.

“When you’ve been around up here for as long as I have, you begin to see it with your own eyes from year to year,” she says. “You can feel it in your bones.”

Last year saw a record low extent of Arctic sea ice cover – 4.3 million square kilometres – more than 40 percent below averages in the 1980s and more than 20 percent below the previous record low in 2005. “But more important than the extent is the volume of the ice. Most of the older thicker ice is not surviving from one summer to the next. As of 2007, most of the ice was three or four-year-old ice. As of 2008, most ice is just one year old.”

The massive ice loss and thinning is forcing scientists to quickly ratchet lower even their worst expectations – the 2007 melting came some 30 years ahead of model predictions.

In 2004, it was predicted that the ice would have melted sufficiently to allow commercial traffic in the Arctic Ocean by 2090. In 2007, it was predicted that commercial traffic would be able to cross by 2040. As of 2008, the predictions are for some time in the next five years, with the first start-up possibly in 2009. Models now predict an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer some time between 2013 and 2040.

The last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in the summer was over a million years ago.

Her colleague, Kit Kovacs, the Biodiversity Research Programme leader at the institute says: “The changes are happening so rapidly that scientists are having trouble processing it all. From initial tests to publishing papers takes at a minimum months or a couple of years, but change is happening much faster than that.

“The biodiversity loss is just as profound as if there were a loss of the Amazon rainforest within the space of five years.”

***

Oil and gas bonanza:

What looks like the end for the polar bear, however, looks like Christmas for resource companies and European energy security concerns.

Johan Petter Barlindhaug, the chair of North Energy, a northern-Norway-based oil-and-gas start-up currently exploring energy sources on the Norwegian continental shelf, says the melting Arctic could offer northern peoples, who have historically lived in a very much underdeveloped region, a chance to have similar standards of living as those who live in the cities and towns further south.

“Climate change poses lots of threats, but it also opens up a range of possibilities,” he says.

Oil companies like North Energy and Norwegian energy giant Statoil Hydro believe the Arctic holds as much as 25 percent of the worlds undiscovered oil and gas deposits – as much as the combined reserves of Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Russia’s Gazprom already has approximately 34 trillion cubic metres (113 trillion cubic feet) of gas under development in the Barents Sea and Moscow is claiming territory in the Arctic that contains an estimated 586 billion barrels of oil.

Mineral resources may also abound, particularly coal, iron, lead, copper, nickel, zinc and sulphides, as well as precious minerals such as gold and diamonds. Recent diamond discoveries in the Canadian Arctic have made the country, which previously didn’t produce any of the stones, the third biggest exporter of diamonds in the world.

On maps that place the North Pole at the centre of the world, instead of the equator, Mr Barlindhaug shows how a melting Arctic also opens up three different shortcuts for shipping goods between Europe and Asia – routes that will save shipping firms, exporters and importers, and the world’s navies and smugglers – billions of euros.

The shipping industry is hoping for a 20 percent saving, he enthuses, with still greater savings for the megaships that cannot fit through the Suez or Panama canals and have to sail round the tips of Africa or South America.

Although Mr Barlindhaug believes that the third shortcut – straight across the pole – offers the most potential.

“The Northwest and Northeast Passages aren’t as important as building ports on Iceland and in Norway and Russia,” he says. “This is because the Canadians view the Northwest Passage as domestic, and there’s something of the same with the Northeast Passage, which is within Russian borders.

“In any case, international waters closer to the North Pole provide routes that are much shorter. But it’s also a matter of speed and cost. Between the Canadian or Russian islands, you can’t pick up much speed while you’re navigating through them. It’s too narrow.

“But at 20-25 knots across the pole, then you’re really saving some money. It would take just five days to cross from the Bering Sea to the Barent Sea. It doesn’t need to be completely ice free.”

He then moves on to the expanded fishing opportunities and potential for discoveries of new medicines derived from invertebrates living in extreme polar environments that round out the economic bounty becoming available as the climate warms up.

Some 10 percent of global white fish stocks swim through the waters of the Barents Sea, the Bering Sea, and near Iceland, offering catches worth billions of euros.

Nonetheless, “bio-prospecting” for new medicines is by far the greater catch, believes Mr Barlindhaug: “These invertebrates are chemical factories that will produce the next generation of medicines. They’re far more important than the fish that is up there.”

In a visit to brand-spanking new labs at the University of Tromso, Jeanette Andersen, of Mabcent-SFI, a public-private bio-prospecting outfit launched last year with €20.5 million (180m NOK) in funding, explains the potential for new treatments and cures coming from molluscs that poison passing fish or colourless mini-starfish that love the cold.

“The marine environment in the high Arctic is unparalleled with respect to combination of temperature and light regimes,” she says. “This implies evolution of organisms with unique physiological and biochemical adaptations.”

She says that the potential is enormous, from antibiotics, chemotherapy, and painkillers to anti-bacterials, anti-oxidents, anti-inflammatory medicines, but Mabcent also hopes to discover creatures that have cosmetic and industrial applications, and even better food and drink preservation.

“But all high-profit,” she enthuses, describing how her biologist and chemist colleagues dive off into the depths of the Arctic Ocean like a team of submariner Indiana Joneses, before they race back to the university to freeze the hundreds of different specimens. They then grind them into a pulp that is investigated by viking boffins at stupidly expensive machines who identify the wild new molecules produced by the exotic biochemistry of these nigh-on alien creatures.

“Living in environments that range from 1.8 to 8 degrees celsius, these organisms are adapted to cold temperatures. As you warm up the metabolism, you speed up the effectiveness of enzymes, so the thinking is that enzymes existing at these temperatures will work faster in warm humans.”

However, some of the different industries opening up as Arctic waters open up pose a threat to others.

Pooh-poohing the idea that oil and gas exploration threatens the environment, North Energy’s Mr Barlindhaug reckons it’s a massive expansion of unsustainable fishing practices and illegal fishing that pose the greatest threat, particularly to bio-prospecting.

“Bottom trawling is much more damaging than oil and gas exploration, as the you find oil all over the rocks and sand on the sea bed. These creatures are used to it – there’s nothing to worry about from oil and gas exploration.

“Bioprospectors should be more scared about increased fishing activity. That’ll damage these organisms much more,” he insists.

Jeanette back at Mabcent is not so sure: “We need to be worried about oil and gas exploration. What Mr Barlindhaug said is too easy an answer to the question of oil spills. Some organisms will adapt, yes, but others are very vulnerable.”

In the second part of the EUobserver’s look at the politics and business of the melting Arctic, appearing on Monday, we look at Kirkenes, a small harbour town sometimes called ‘Little Murmansk’ for its 10 percent Russian population, and how it is set to be transformed by the oil and gas bonanza opening up as the ice disappears.

Friday, Nov. 7, 2008

Japan asked to join new Arctic shipping regime.

By KEISUKE OKADA, Staff writer, The Japan Times online.
Japan should join hands with the United States and other Arctic states in ongoing multilateral efforts to create a new shipping regime in the Arctic Ocean, a U.S. official said Thursday in Tokyo.

International cooperation is vital to ensure that shipping in the Arctic is “safe, secure and reliable,” according to Mead Treadwell, chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, an advisory body to the president and Congress.

As a result of receding sea ice, caused by global warming, the Arctic is expected to open up for global shipping in the future. This will present strategic options for Japan’s industry in light of shorter shipping routes from Japan to Europe via the Arctic Ocean, Treadwell said at a media conference in Tokyo.

The eight-nation Arctic Council, established in 1996 as a high-level intergovernmental forum to promote cooperation among Arctic states, is currently working on an Arctic marine shipping assessment, due to be completed in 2009, according to Treadwell.

The council’s member states are the U.S., Russia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway.

Trans-Arctic sea routes could be as important to global shipping as the Panama and Suez canals in the near future.

Aware of the strategic importance, China and South Korea have already joined the Arctic Council as observers and Treadwell recommended that Japan do likewise.

Aside from its potential for shipping, the Arctic is surfacing as a new battleground for energy resources. In August 2007, Russia stunned the world by planting its national flag in a titanium capsule on the seabed beneath the North Pole, causing other Arctic states — the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway — to scramble for a share of a potential new oil bonanza.