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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 20th, 2013 We kept the April 12, 2013 New York Times article as a draft because we basically found it very one-sided and know very little about “Berkeley Earth” or Elizabeth Muller (*), but with information about the Koch Brothers professed skepticism of progressive ideas. Now we decided to post this because of Fareed Zakaria, someone we hold in high esteem, saying this Sunday on CNN/GPS, that in order to start putting a limit to the emission of CO2 globally, the best step for the US would be to share, what he called safe technologies of Shale Fracking and gas production, this in order to replace the reliance on burning coal as it is done now in China. We know this to be the wrong advice: (1) there is no technology of “fracking the shale” that is safe to the ground water reservoirs. (2) fracking and shale-gas will slow down the commercialization of truly positive renewable energy technologies, and (3) the worse of all – it starts looking like “The Rhinoceros” of World War II Eugene Ionesco – the slow developing of a takeover by an aggressive wrong and obnoxious ideology – and the Koch Brothers are versed in technologies in this respect. So – let us say: Fareed Zakaria expressed the idea that Shale Gas is a step in the right direction, but we do not think so – and thousands of scientists agree with us but have suspicions about the proponents of the fracking myth. Op-Ed ContributorChina Must Exploit Its Shale Gas.By ELIZABETH MULLER Published, The New York Times on-line: April 12, 2013BEIJING IF the Senate confirms the nomination of the M.I.T. scientist Ernest J. Moniz as the next energy secretary, as expected, he must use his new position to consider the energy situation not only in the United States, but in China as well. Mr. Moniz, a professor of physics and engineering systems and the director of M.I.T.’s Energy Initiative, sailed through a confirmation hearing Tuesday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But some environmentalists are skeptical of Mr. Moniz. He is known for advocating natural gas and nuclear power as cleaner sources of energy than coal and for his support of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from shale deposits. The environmental group Food and Water Watch has warned that as energy secretary, he “could set renewable energy development back years.” The criticism is misplaced. Instead of fighting hydraulic fracturing, environmental activists should recognize that the technique is vital to the broader effort to contain climate change and should be pushing for stronger standards and controls over the process. Nowhere is this challenge and opportunity more pressing than in China. Exploiting its vast resources of shale gas is the only short-term way for China, the world’s second-largest economy, to avoid huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal. China’s greenhouse gas emissions are twice those of the United States and growing at 8 percent to 10 percent per year. Last year, China increased its coal-fired generating capacity by 50 gigawatts, enough to power a city that uses seven times the energy of New York City. By 2020, an analysis by Berkeley Earth shows, China will emit greenhouse gases at four times the rate of the United States, and even if American emissions were to suddenly disappear tomorrow, world emissions would be back at the same level within four years as a result of China’s growth alone. The only way to offset such an enormous increase in energy use is to help China switch from coal to natural gas. A modern natural gas plant emits between one-third and one-half of the carbon dioxide released by coal for the same amount of electric energy produced. China has the potential to unearth large amounts of shale gas through hydraulic fracturing. In 2011, the United States Energy Information Administration estimated that China had “technically recoverable” reserves of 1.3 quadrillion cubic feet, nearly 50 percent more than the United States. The risk is that what is now a nascent Chinese shale gas industry may take off in a way that leads to ecological disaster. Many of the purchasers of drilling rights in recent Chinese auctions are inexperienced. Opponents of this drilling method point to cases in which gas wells have polluted groundwater or released “fugitive” methane gas emissions. The groundwater issue is worrisome, of course, and weight for weight, methane has a global warming potential 25 to 70 times higher than carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas that results from the burning of coal. Moving away from fossil fuels entirely may make sense in the United States, where we can potentially afford to pay for more expensive renewable sources of energy. But developing countries have other priorities, like improving the education and health of their people. Given the dangers that hydraulic fracturing poses for groundwater pollution and gas leaks, we must help China develop an approach that is environmentally sound. Mr. Moniz has warned of the need to curb environmental damage from the process. But he has also stressed the value of natural gas as a “bridging” source of energy as we strive to move from largely dirty energy to clean energy. Extracting shale gas in an environmentally responsible way is technically achievable, according to engineering experts. Accomplishing that goal is primarily a matter of engineering and regulation. That is where we need the engagement of environmental activists. At home, they can push the United States to set verifiable standards for clean hydraulic fracturing and enforce those standards through careful monitoring. Internationally, American industry can lead by showing that clean production can be profitable. We need a solution for energy production that can displace the rapid growth of coal use today. Switching from coal to natural gas could reduce the growth of China’s emissions by more than 50 percent and give the world more time to bring down the cost of solar and wind energy to levels that are affordable for poorer countries. ——————————————– * Elizabeth Muller is the co-founder and executive director of Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization focused on climate change. Elizabeth Muller Elizabeth is the co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, and CEO of Muller & Associates LLC. Previously, she was Director at Gov3 (now CS Transform) and Executive Director of the Gov3 Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 she was a policy advisor at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Elizabeth has advised governments in over 30 countries, in both the developed and developing world. She has extensive experience with stakeholder engagement and communications, especially with regard to technical issues. She developed numerous techniques for bringing government and private actors together to build consensus and implement action plans, and has a proven ability to deliver sustainable change. She has also designed and implemented projects for public sector clients, helping them to build new policies and strategies for government reform and modernization, collaboration across government ministries and agencies, and strategies for the information society. Elizabeth holds a Bachelors Degree from the University of California with a double major in Mathematics and Literature, and a Masters Degree in International Management from the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris. Email: liz The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team includes statisticians, physicists, climate experts and others with experience analyzing large and complex data sets. They say: Our main scientific effort continues to be the study and exploration of our huge database and the results of our temperature analysis. Because the oceans exert a moderating effect, their inclusion is important for estimating the long-term impact of human-caused climate change. We have begun a study of the variability of temperature, and the rate of occurrence of extreme events. Extreme events include heat waves, which are expected to become more frequent due both to global warming and to the urban heat island effects. Such an event occurred in Chicago in 1995 and led to an excess of about 750 heat-wave related deaths. Equally important may be the effects that global warming will have on cold waves. City planners need to understand what to expect at both extremes. Although warming is expected to lead to more heat waves, it is not clear whether the variability – difference between high temperatures and low temperatures – will change. Although some prior studies have suggested that it does, our preliminary work shows that the range of temperature extremes (difference between hottest and coldest days) is remaining remarkably constant, even as the temperature rose over the past 50 years. Memos describing these preliminary results were posted on our website in early 2013. Additional analysis will test these initial conclusions and we expect to be able reduce the error uncertainties and reach stronger conclusions. We will continue with exploratory data analysis (a statistical method developed by John Tukey), and we will share our results with the public in the forms of memos posted online and of papers submitted to peer reviewed journals. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Study has created a preliminary merged data set by combining 1.6 billion temperature reports from 16 preexisting data archives. IT ALSO SAYS SOMETHING THAT WORRIES US TREMENDOUSLY – THIS BECAUSE THE KOCH FAMILY IS BEING MENTIONED: The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project is an effort to resolve criticism of the current records of the Earth’s surface temperatures by preparing an open database and analysis of these temperatures and temperature trends, to be available online, with all calculations, methods and results also to be freely available online. BEST is a project conceived of and funded by the Novim group at University of California at Santa Barbara.[1] BEST’s stated aim is a “transparent approach, based on data analysis.”[1] “Our results will include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.”[2] BEST founder Richard A. Muller told The Guardian “…we are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious, ….we are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find. We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close.”[3] The BEST project is funded by unrestricted educational grants totalling (as of March 2011) about $635,000. Large donors include Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER),[4] and the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation.[5] The donors have no control over how BEST conducts the research or what they publish.[6] The team’s preliminary findings, data sets and programs were made available to the public in October 2011, and their first scientific paper was published in December 2012.[7] The study addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics including urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias. The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05°C, and their results mirrors those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies.[8][9][10][11] Berkeley Earth team members include:[12]
============================================================== the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER). Charles de Ganahl Koch (pron.: /?ko?k/; born November 1, 1935) is an American businessman and philanthropist. He is co-owner, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer of Koch Industries. His brother David H. Koch also owns 42% of Koch Industries and serves as Executive Vice President. The brothers inherited the business from their father, Fred C. Koch, and have since expanded the business to 2,600 times its inherited size.[citation needed] Originally involved exclusively in oil refining and chemicals, Koch Industries has expanded to include process and pollution control equipment and technologies; polymers and fibers; minerals; fertilizers; commodity trading and services; forest and consumer products; and ranching. The businesses produce a wide variety of well-known brands, such as Stainmaster carpet, Lycra fiber, Quilted Northern tissue and Dixie Cup. In 2007, Koch’s book The Science of Success was published. The book describes his management philosophy, referred to as “Market-Based Management”.[5] Koch provides financial support for a number of public policy and charitable organizations, including the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He co-founded the Washington, DC-based Cato Institute. Through the Koch Cultural Trust, founded by Charles Koch’s wife, Elizabeth, the Koch family has also funded artistic projects and creative artists.[6] Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company by revenue in the United States according to a 2010 Forbes survey[7] and as of October 2012 Charles was ranked the 6th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $34 billion – according to the Bloomberg Billionares Index -[8] and was ranked 18th on Forbes World’s Billionaires list of 2011 (and 4th on the Forbes 400), with an estimated net worth of $25 billion, deriving from his 42% stake in Koch Industries.[3].
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berkeleyearth.org
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 20th, 2013
Programme
Day 1-
28 May 2013
Tuesday, 28 May 2013
08.45 – 09.00
Welcome Address
H.E. Mr. Michael Spindelegger, Vice Chancellor and
Foreign Minister of Austria
Mr. Pavel Kabat, Director,
IIASA
Mr. Kandeh Yumkella, Director General, UNIDO
09.00 – 09.15
Two pieces of music
presented
by a
String
Quartet of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
,
IIASA Goodwill Ambassador
09.15 – 09.45
Opening Speeches
Mr. Chad Holliday, Chairman, Bank of America
Ms. Renate Brauner, Vice-Mayor and Vice-Governor of
the City of Vienna
Message from the United Nations Secretary
-
General, Mr. Ban Ki
-
moon
09.30
Press Conference (in parallel)
09.45 – 11.15
Ministerial and High-Level Dignitaries Segment
Moderator
Ms. Nisha Pillai
, BBC
H.E. Mr. Suhail Mohamed Almazroui, Minister of Ener
gy of the United Arab Emirates
H.E. Mr. Heikki Holmås, Minister of International D
evelopment of Norway
H.E. Mr. Edison Lobão, Minister of Mines and Energy
of Brazil
H.E. Mr. Lihua Liu, Vice Minister of Industry and I
nformation Technology of China
H.E. Mr. Anatoly Yanovskiy, Deputy Minister, Minist
ry of Energy of the Russian Federation
H.E.
Mr. Peter Thomson, Permanent Representative of Fiji
to the United Nations New York and
Chairman of the G77
11.15 – 12.45
High Level Panel I:
Energy in the Post-2015 Agenda
Moderator Ms. Nisha Pillai,
BBC
Panelists
Mr. Sven
Alkalaj
, Under
-
Secretary
-
General and Executive Secretary of the United Natio
ns
Economic Commission for Europe, UNECE
Mr. Adnan Amin, Director General, IRENA
Mr. Jose Goldemberg
, Board Member, Sustainable Energy Institute
Ms. Maria van der Hoeven, Director General, Interna
tional Energy Agency
Ms. Rachel Kyte, Vice President, Sustainable Develo
pment, The World Bank
Mr. Gerhard Roiss, CEO, OMV
Ms. Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Coordinator for t
he UNCSD Rio + 20 Conference
Mr. Halil Yurdakul Yigitgüden,
Coordinator, Co
-
ordinator of Economic and Environmental
Activities, OSCE
12.45 – 14.30
Lunch hosted by OFID and IIASA (by invitation only
at Dachfoyer)
Day 1-
28 May 2013
14.30 – 16.00
High Level Panel II:
A New Action Agenda – High Level Group on Sustainab
le Energy for All
Moderator Ms. Nisha Pillai,
BBC
Panelists
Mr. Alexander Bychkov, Deputy Director General, IAE
A
Mr. Jérôme Ferrier, President, International Gas Un
ion
Mr. Victorio Oxilia, Executive Secretary, OLADE
Mr. N.P. Singh, Adviser, Ministry of New and Renewa
ble Energy of India
Mr. Andrew Steer, President and CEO, World Resource
s Institute
Mr. Mohammed Taeb, Environmental Coordinator, OPEC
14.30 – 15.30
Special Event: Launch of the SE4ALL Global Tracking
Framework (parallel at Radetzky
Appartment II)
Moderator Mr. Kandeh K. Yumkella
, Director General, UNIDO
Panelists
Ms. Rachel Kyte, Vice
President, Sustainable Development, World Bank
Ms. Maria van der Hoeven, Director General, Intern
ational Energy Agency
Ms. Vivien Foster, Sector Manager, Sustainable Ener
gy, World Bank
Mr. Simon Trace, Executive Director, Practical Acti
on
16.00 – 16.30
Coffee and Tea Break
16.30 – 18.00
Special Event: Thematic Consultations on Energy (pa
rallel at Rittersaal)
16.30 – 18.00
Plenary Session 1:
Framework for Action – High Impact Opportunities
Moderator Mr. Albrecht Reuter
, Member of the Board, Fichtner IT Consulting
Panelists
Mr. Albert Binger, Energy Science Advisor, Caribbea
n Community Climate Change Centre
Mr. Christoph Frei, Secretary General, World Energy
Council
Ms. Helen Mountford, Deputy Director, OECD
Mr. Nebojsa Nakicenovic,
Deputy Director, IIASA and Professor of Energy Econ
omics,
Technical University of Vienna
Mr. Ebrima Njie, ECOWAS Commissioner for Infrastruc
ture
Ms. Leena Shrivastava, Executive Director, The Ener
gy and Resource Institute
Mr. Arthouros Zervos, Chair of REN21and CEO and Pre
sident Public Power Corporation
18.00
Reception hosted by
EnDev and Partnership
Day 2-
29 May 2013
Wednesday, 29 May, 2013
08.30 – 09.00
Summary of the Previous Day
by
Ged Davis,
Co-President, Global Energy Assessment
09.00 – 10.00
Ministerial and High Level Segment
H.E. Mr. Marcin Korolec, Minister of Environment, P
oland
H.E. Mr. Sospeter Muhonga, Minister of Energy and M
inerals of Tanzania
H.E. Mr. Ahmed Mostafa Emam, Minister of Electricit
y and Energy, of Egypt
H.E. Mr. Sok Siphana, Advisor of the Royal Governme
nt of Cambodia
Ms. Datuk Loo Took Gee, Secretary General of the Mi
nistry of Energy, Green Technology
and Water of Malaysia
Mr. Raúl García Barreiro, Deputy First Viceminister
of the Ministry of Energy and Mining
of the Republic of Cuba
10.00 – 11.30
Plenary Session 2:
Energy and Green Growth
Moderator Mr. Paul Hohnen
, Founder and Managing Director, Sustainability Str
ategies
Panelists
Ms. Jacqueline Cramer, Director, Utrecht Sustainabi
lity Institute
Ms. Naoki Ishii, CEO and Chairperson, Global Enviro
nment Facility
Mr. Lambert Kuijpers, Co
-
Chair, Technology and Economic Assessment Panel of
the Ozone
Secretariat
Mr. Heinz Leuenberger, Director, Environmental Mana
gement Branch, UNIDO
Mr. Mark Radka, Head of Energy Branch, UNEP
Mr. Arthur Reijnhart, General Manager, Alternative
Energy Strategy, Shell
11.30 – 13.00
Plenary Session 3 –
Planning for
Sustainable Cities
Moderator Mr. Joan Clos
, Executive Director, UN HABITAT
Panelists
Mr. Eddie Bet Hazavdi,
Director, Department of Energy
Conservation at Ministry of Energy
and Water of Israel
Ms. Brigitta Huckestein, Senior Manager, Communicat
ions & Government Relations
Energy and Climate Policy, BASF Group
Ms. Carina Lakovits, Advisor, International Financi
al Institutions, Austrian
Ministry of
Finance
Mr. Raj Liberhan, Director, Indian Habitat Centre
Mr. Thomas Madreiter, Director of the Urban Plannin
g, City of Vienna
Mr. Franz
-
B. Marré, Head of Division of Water, Energy, Urban
Development and the
Geoscience Sector, Federal German Ministry for Econ
omic Cooperation and Development
Mr. Marcos Pontes, UNIDO Goodwill Ambassador
13.00 – 14.30
Lunch hosted by GEF and UNIDO (by invitation only a
t Dachfoyer)
Day 2-
29 May 2013
14.30 – 16.00
Parallel Session 1 –
Energy Access
Moderator Mr.
Vijay Modi
, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia Uni
versity
Panelists
Mr. Jan Dictus, GOJA Consulting for Environment and
Sustainable Development
Mr. Wolfgang Engshuber, Chairman, Principles for Re
sponsible Investment
Mr. Michael Kelly, Deputy Managing Director, World
LP Gas Association
Ms. Richenda Van Leeuwen, Director, Energy Access I
nitiative, United Nations Foundation
Mr. Pradeep Monga, Director, Energy and Climate Cha
nge, UNIDO
Mr. Lucius Mayer-Tasch, Energy Advisor, GIZ
Ms. Mary Robinson, UN Special Envoy for the Great L
akes Region of Africa
14.30 – 16.00
Parallel Session 2
– Energy Efficiency
Mr. Luis Gomez-Echeverri
, Senior Research Scholar, Transition to New Techno
logies, IIASA
Panelists
Mr. Mark Hopkins, Energy Efficiency Expert, United
Nations Foundation
Ms. Doris Österreicher,
Head of Business Unit Sustainable Building Technolo
gies, Austrian
Institute of Technology
Ms. Marina Ploutakhina, Industrial Energy Efficienc
y, Unit Chief, UNIDO
Mr. Jigar V. Shah, Executive Director, Institute fo
r Industrial Productivity
Mr. David Shropshire, Section Head, Planning and Ec
onomic Studies Section, IAEA
16.00 – 16.30
Coffee and Tea Break
16.30 – 18.00
Parallel Session 3 –
Renewable Energy as a Tool for Sustainable Developm
ent
Moderator Ms. Christine Lins,
Executive Director, REN 21
Panelists
Mr. Gábor Baranyai, Deputy State Secretary, Ministr
y of Foreign Affairs of Hungary
Mr. Martin Hiller, Director General, REEEP
Mr. Mahama Kappiah, Executive Director, ECREEE
Mr. Diego Masera, Unit Chief, Renewable and Rural E
nergy Unit, UNIDO
H.E. Ms. Brigitte Öppinger-Walchshofer, Managing Di
rector, Austrian Development Agency
Mr. Jorge Samek, Director General, ITAIPU Binaciona
l
Mr. Peter Traupmann, Managing Director, Austrian En
ergy Agency
16.30 – 18.00
Parallel Session 4–
Technology Transfer and Innovation
Moderator Mr. Omar El Arini,
Honorary Chief Officer, Multilateral Fund Secretari
at
Panelists
Mr. Giovanni Federigo De Santi, Director of the Ins
titute for Energy and Transport of the Joint
Research Centre of the European Commission
Mr. Martin Krause, Regional Practice Leader for Env
ironment, UNDP
Mr. David Rodgers, Senior Energy Specialist, Global
Environment Facility
Mr. Sidi Menad Si-Ahmed, Director of Montreal Proto
col Branch, UNIDO
M.R. Mr. Pongsvas Svasti, Associate Professor, Tham
masat University
Mr. Sven Teske, Director of Renewable Energy, Green
peace International
18.00
Reception hosted by REEEP
Day 3-
30 May 2013
Thursday, 30 May 2013
08.30 – 09.00
Summary of the Previous Day
by
Ged Davis,
Co-President, Global Energy Assessment
09.00 – 10.00
Ministerial and High Level Dignitaries Segment
10.00 – 11.30
Plenary Session 4 :
Financing the Energy Future We Want
Moderator tbc
Panelists
Mr. Robert Dixon, Team Leader of Climate Change and
Chemicals Team, GEF
Mr. Faris Hasan, Director of Corporate Planning and
Economic Services, OFID
Ms. Georgina Kessel, Partner, Spectron
Mr. Venkata Ramana Putti, Senior Energy Specialist,
Sustainable Energy Department, World Bank
Ms. Wang Yuan, Senior Advisor, China Development Ba
nk
11.30 – 13.00
Plenary Session 5:
Public and Private Partnerships
Moderator Ms. Irene Giner-Reichl
, President, Global Forum on Sustainable Energy
Panelists
Mr. Günter Maier, Managing Partner , MG Energy
Mr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman, IPCC and UNIDO Goo
dwill Ambassador
Mr. Janez Podobnik, Director General, International
Centre for Promotion of Enterprises
Mr. Alexei Shevlyakov, Acting Director General, Rus
sian Energy Agency
Mr. Thomas Stelzer, Assistant Secretary
-
General, Policy Coordination and Inter
-
Agency
Affairs, United Nations Department of Economic and
Social Affairs
Mr. Harry Verhaar, Head of Global Public and Govern
ment Affairs, Philips
13.00 – 13.30
Coffee and Tea Break
11.30 – 13.00
Parallel Session 5:
Green Mini-Grids Africa –
Sector Transformation Towards Sustainable
Energy For All
Moderator Mr. Steven Hunt
, Energy Advisor, Low Carbon Development Team, DFID
Panelists
Mr. Ryan Anderson, Head of Section for Renewable En
ergy Advisory Services, Norplan
Mr. Theophillo Bwakea, Principal Engineer, Tanzania
n Rural Energy Agency
Mr. Dean Cooper, Energy Finance Programme Manager,
UNEP
Mr. Bertrand Deprez, European Affairs Manager, Schn
eider Electric
Mr. Mike Enskat, Senior Programme Manager, GIZ
Mr. Patrick Theuret, Access to Energy Programme, ED
F
13.30 – 14.30
Adoption of VEF 2013 Declaration: Energy Goals Beyo
nd 2015
Moderator Ged Davis
, Co-President, Global Energy Assessment
Closing remarks by Co-organisers
——————————
Side Events ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA: Business Partnerships – An effective instrument for development cooperation How innovative cooperation supports the development of markets for renewable energy Date – 28 May 2013 Time – 14:30 to 16:00 Location – Rittersaal This side-event discusses innovative forms of cooperation between the private sector and established structures of development cooperation to develop new markets. Examples from the renewable energy sector show how both recipient countries and companies can utilize the opportunities of business partnerships. Traditional development cooperation faces many challenges, so alternative approaches are required. As business and development belong together, partnerships with the private sector are getting more and more important. Join the discussion on business partnerships and the development of renewable energy markets!
 European Commission Joint Research Centre: Creating and sharing knowledge together on African Renewable Energy Sources Date: 28 May 2013 Time: 16:00 – 17:30 Location: Mittlere Lounge On the occasion of the Vienna Energy Forum 2013, JRC will release findings from the newest report “The availability of Renewable Energies in a changing Africa”. This report follows and extends the 2011 JRC report “Renewable energies in Africa” and focuses on the climatic, demographic and technological changes expecting to involve Africa in next decades and how they will impact the Renewable Energy production and deployment opportunities in the continent. This side event will explore to what extent climate change has affect the ability of the renewable energy sources to deliver their important resources to this goal and will look at the potential of the available options. Come and join the second report presentation, discuss issues with authors, and test the latest online tool developed to visualize off-grid electricity production options in Africa.
 GFSE: Sustainable Energy Solutions for All: Made in Austria Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 09:00 to 11:00 Location – Trabantenstube Austrian know-how and technologies have a lot to offer to make inclusive sustainable energy solutions a reality. In this side event, the Austrian experience in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency will be presented. The event also seeks to facilitate the identification of cooperation opportunities for different actors in the context of SE4All. It will also highlight the value-added of multi-stakeholder networks in enabling joint action. We would be delighted if you could join the discussion.
 IIASA: Multiple Benefits of the Global Energy Transformation Recent Research Findings Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 09:30 to 13:00 Location – Künstlerzimmer The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is organizing the VEF side event “Multiple Benefits of the Global Energy Transformations: Recent Research Findings”. The main global problem areas of research at IIASA – energy and climate change, food and water, and poverty and equity – are among the greatest challenges facing humanity today. The side event will present recent research findings – focusing on energy and technology – and their relevance to the Post 2015 Development Agenda. The Global Energy Assessment (GEA), completed in 2012, was an important component of the energy-related activities at IIASA and some of the new research activities at IIASA are building upon the findings of GEA.
 IAEA: Promoting a Sustainable Energy Future: the Role of the International Atomic Energy Agency Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 10:00 to 12:00 Location – Mittlere Lounge The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supports its Member States in their efforts towards a sustainable energy future. In this side event, IAEA representatives will showcase the successful contribution of the Agency to build capacity, disseminate information, raise awareness and foster cooperation within and among Member States to help them make informed decisions regarding the most appropriate energy strategies. Topics discussed will include the sustainability of nuclear power as a clean energy solution, capacity building activities, the role of innovative technology solutions and the critical steps to introduce or expand a nuclear power programme.
EUEI PDF: Africa-EU Private Sector Cooperation: Matchmaking for win-win business opportunities in the renewables sector? Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 11:30 to 13:00 Location – Trabantenstube The Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) is a multi-donor and multi-implementer programme that aims to accelerate the use of renewable energy in Africa. It was launched by more than 35 African and European Ministers at the First High-Level Meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP) in Vienna in September 2010. While the programme has already launched a number of support interventions in the area of policy advisory services, this side event aims at reflecting on the types of support interventions necessary to foster an active exchange and linking of African and European private sectors actors, as well as highlighting some of the positive examples where European and African actors have successfully worked together.
Launch of the SE4All Global Tracking Framework Date – 28 May 2013 Time: 14:00 to 14:45 Location – Radetzkysaal II Prepared by a team of energy experts from 15 agencies under the leadership of the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, the report provides a comprehensive snapshot of over 180 countries’ status with respect to action on energy access, energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as energy consumption. As the Millennium Development Goals process has clearly demonstrated, measurable goals that enjoy widespread consensus can mobilize commitments to action, strategic partnerships and widespread support from key stakeholders and whole societies. For many, the Sustainable Energy for All initiative is an illustration of what a Sustainable Development Goal for the energy sector would look like. However, it is well known that measure progress is critical to achieving goals and getting results. The Global Tracking Framework Report is the answer to the challenge of measuring and reporting progress towards achieving the Sustainable Energy for All goals and objectives.. The report’s framework for data collection and analysis will enable us to monitor progress on the SE4ALL objectives from now to 2030.
The Energy Future We Want – Including Water & Food in the Energy Debate Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 14:30 to 16:00 Location – Radetzky II The side-event will provide a global platform to discuss recent international undertakings and progress on the water-energy-food nexus. The side-event will stimulate contributions and insights from institutions and individual experts on strategies to include water and food in the energy debate as nations around the world develop new energy policies and evaluate the options they want to follow in response to the SE4All initiative. Contribute to the nexus debate by sharing your experience and expertise with representatives from the private sector, researchers, policy makers and water/energy experts around the world on the intricate links between water, energy and food.
Regional Sustainable Energy Centers in Africa: Creating Regional Markets to Support the Decade of Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL) Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 14:30 to 18:00 Location – Trabantenstube The Energy and Climate Change Branch of UNIDO, in close collaboration with the ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) and the Global Forum on Sustainable Energy (GFSE), are organizing the VEF side event “Regional Sustainable Energy Centers in Africa: Creating Regional Markets to Support the Decade of Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL)”. The side event will facilitate discussions on the added value and possible actions of a south-south cooperation network between regional sustainable energy promotion centers in Africa. It will highlight the roles of the Centers as part of the institutional structure of the SE4ALL initiative. In a learning event, the ECOWAS Observatory for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECOWREX), one of the flag-ship programs of ECREEE will be introduced to the audience. Finally, a new publication on Renewable Energy Status and Trends in West Africa will be presented.
 UNIDO: Women’s Leadership on Energy Justice in Productive Sectors Date – 29 May 2013 Time – 15:00 to 17:00; Networking Drinks from 17:00 Location – Künstlerzimmer Increasing energy access for productive use will generate opportunities for women to earn a living for themselves and their families, but the debate thus far has been mainly focused on women’s domestic needs. At this side-event, we will look beyond the household door and discuss how to empower women to become active producers, managers, promoters, sellers and leaders of modern energy services for a truly sustainable solution to energy poverty. We would be delighted if you could join us to share your experiences and expertise in this debate. Register for the event Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 12th, 2013
United Against Pipelines, Forward on Climate! Tomorrow, Monday May 13th, New Yorkers will march and rally to greet President Obama when he attends a fundraiser in NYC––his first visit since his post-Sandy inspection. In his Inaugural Address just a few months ago, Obama promised “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
Join us if you stand against fossil fuel pipelines, against fracking, against tar sands, and FOR a country powered by wind, water and solar.
Gather in Bryant Park starting at 5 (meet near the fountain off 6th avenue at 41st Street). Reverend Billy and his choir will lead us off with a rousing blessing and song. We’ll begin to march at 5:30, then rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6:30. If you can, please wear yellow and orange (the colors of Occupy Sandy) to demonstrate your support for a clean energy future. Event Partners: 350 NYC, 350 NJ, 350.org, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP), CREDO, CUNY Divest, Food & Water Watch, Global Kids Inc., Green Party of NY, Human Impacts Institute, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYU Divest, Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, Restore the Rock, Sane Energy Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club National, United for Action, World Can’t Wait, WESPAC, YANA (You Are Never Alone).
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 3rd, 2013
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 2nd, 2013 FROM MOJO (MOTHER JONES):
Why Do Conservatives Like to Waste Energy?{Please read on and you will see that it is only because they hate green. — our comment - SustainabiliTank.info editor} | Mon Apr. 29, 2013
 Back in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) declared war on energy-efficient light bulbs, calling “sustainability” the gateway into a dystopic, Big Brother-patrolled liberal hellscape. When the lights went off during Beyoncé’s halftime set at the last Superbowl, conservative commentators from the Drudge Report to Michelle Malkin pointed blame (erroneously) at new power-saving measures at New Orleans’ Superdome. And one recent study found that giving Republican households feedback on their power use actually encourages them to use more energy. Why do conservatives, who should have a natural inclination toward conservation, have a beef with energy efficiency? It could be tied to the political polarization of the climate change debate. A study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least. The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to “buy” either an old-school light bulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL’s packaging that says “Protect the Environment,” and “we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option,” said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The chart below, from the report, shows how much liberals and conservatives value each argument for efficiency: While liberals (gray) valued all three equally, conservatives (white), were significantly less moved by and most at odds with liberals over the carbon-saving argument. 
Courtesy Gromet
Gromet said she never expected the green message to motivate conservatives, but was surprised to find that it could in fact repel them from making a purchase even while they found other aspects, like saving cash on their power bills, attractive. The reason, she thinks, is that given the political polarization of the climate change debate, environmental activism is so frowned upon by those the right that they’ll do anything to keep themselves distanced from it. “When we’re given an option where the choice is made to represent a value that we don’t identify with or that our ideological group doesn’t value,” she said, “this can turn the purchase into something undesirable. By making [the environment] part of the choice, even though they might see the economic benefit, they no longer want to put their money toward that option.” This graph, lifted from the report (on the x-axis, -1 is liberal and 1 is conservative), shows the damage the wrong messaging can do: With no messaging, roughly 60 percent of all participants picked the CFL; a pro-environment message boosted support in liberals but cut it sharply in conservatives: 
Courtesy Gromet
That gap could represent real lost opportunities in the private sector: the EPA’s Energy Star label, for example, perhaps the most prominent label for energy-efficient products, puts greenhouse gas savings front and center in its packaging, and proudly boasts that products with the label helps Americans “protect our climate.” “It’s always important to speak to people where they are.”
This isn’t just a problem for businesses trying to push energy-efficient products, but also for environmentalists and policymakers pushing to write efficiency or other climate-friendly policies into law, said Jessica Goodheart, director of RePower LA, which advocates for energy-saving practices in the Los Angeles power utility. Goodheart said while tackling climate change is driving force behind her lobbying, she more often finds herself talking about jobs and the economy, especially when addressing small business owners. “It’s always important to speak to people where they are, and with energy efficiency there are so many positive messages you can use,” she said. And there’s no shortage of opportunities to roll those messages out: Last week, Energy Department researchers found that rules requiring utilities to use renewable energy were under attack in over half the states they exist in; such laws might have better luck fending off Bachmann-esque fusillades if they re-focus their rhetoric around their cost-savings, energy independence, or other benefits, Gromet’s research suggests, especially in conservative states. That doesn’t necessarily mean green advocates need to somehow cover up the environmental benefits of a policy or product: A study from Stanford psychologists released last December found that re-framing environmental messaging in terms of preserving the “purity” of the natural world resonated morally with conservatives. “There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all message that will appeal equally,” Gromet said. “It’s important to know the market you’re appealing to; there are some messages you may want to avoid.”
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 30th, 2013 When Mayor Bloomberg took over the day to day running of New York City, he cancelled all recycling programs because he thought their bottom line was in the red. Eventually he accepted the fact that paper recycling was suffering because there was actually theft of the paper put out for hauling by the city – so it was clearly profitable to move them to the recycler. He gave in, and only papers were recycled. Then he was told that metal and plastic containers have to be collected separately because there was no landfill space and hauling them out of State was a bigger loss then collecting them – so he decided to collect them in separate containers but they were never sorted out to become primary material for a world-wide growing recycling industry. Oh well – the latest news tell us that he decided before ending his third term in office to collect plastic. We still are not convinced that he saw the “City-Light” – that is the fact that running a city is a service and not a business. —————————————————————————————–
New York Times Editorial – April 30, 2013.
The Mayor Rethinks Recycling
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published on-line: April 29, 2013
On recycling in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come a long way. After taking office 11 years ago, Mr. Bloomberg eliminated a major chunk of the city’s recycling program to save money. Many New Yorkers were outraged. He was, they said, littering the earth as well as missing a chance to convert waste to energy.
Related: City Room: City Expands Recycling Program to Include Hard Plastics (April 24, 2013)
He has since become a passionate convert. With about 20,000 tons of garbage hauled from the city every day, Mr. Bloomberg has been working hard recently to restore the city’s recycling program to its pre-2002 levels. On Wednesday, he announced that any rigid plastics including toys, yogurt cups, food containers and such can finally go in clear recycling bags. It is the city’s biggest expansion in recycling in more than two decades. A day later, he announced that 100 restaurants in the city, ranging from the sophisticated Le Bernardin to the boisterous Chipotle eateries, have promised to start reducing their food waste by 50 percent. Some of it will be donated to food kitchens or charities like City Harvest. But a lot will go to commercial composting centers outside the city. There, the discarded leeks and potato peels can be turned into energy or compost that, ideally, could help farmers produce more leeks and potatoes. Tackling organic waste is a big task. Every year, the city adds mountains of watermelon rinds, coffee grounds and other organic plate scrapings to the waste stream. Most of it goes to landfills where it festers and sends methane pollution into the atmosphere. As alternatives, city officials are experimenting with organic recycling at 68 schools and one Manhattan apartment building. Green markets across the city accept bags of leftovers, and a new system of curbside recycling of organic garbage is scheduled to start soon in Staten Island. The city’s recycling rate has yet to reach the pre-Bloomberg level of 20 percent. But the mayor wants the city to reuse 70 percent of its waste by 2030. That’s a big challenge for his successors, but at least these latest efforts finally move in the right direction.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 23rd, 2013
In responding to Terror Attack, Boston Doctors Benefitted Greatly from Israeli Training.
Though condemning the Boston Marathon bombings in which 3 people were killed and more than 100 wounded, Iran also criticized U.S. drone attacks in the Middle East. Some online Jihadis expressed happiness over the Boston attack. Photo: Wikimedia Commons via Aaron Tang. Several Boston hospitals have been thrust into the spotlight with recent events in that city, and along with them so too have the medical staffs. Everyone wants to know how they have so successfully responded to a crisis of such proportions. The answer to some extent is this: Israel. Aish.com recently interviewed Dr. Alasdair Conn, Chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General. He described how Israeli doctors played a prime role in the successful medical response following last week’s terror attack. Collaboration began after 9/11 when staff at Massachusetts General realized they wouldn’t be prepared for an attack of that magnitude closer to home. “We could manage to treat patients from a multiple car crash – with three or four or five patients – pretty well,” recalls Dr. Alasdair Conn, Chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine, “but what would happen if we had many more patients, simultaneously and with very little warning?” Dr. Conn and his colleagues looked to Israel for advice, and turned to Dr. Pinchas Halpern, Chief of the Emergency Department at Tel Aviv Medical Center. A world-renowned expert on trauma care, Dr. Halpern had helped make Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center one of the world’s leaders in emergency medicine. Halpern came over in 2005, when Israel was experiencing a wave of terror attacks. For the doctors at Massachusetts General, the visit would prove tremendously important 8 years later. “To this day I remember a comment,” Dr. Conn recalls. “One of the Israelis said that here in the United States we have a terrorist event every few years, but ‘unfortunately, in Israel,’ he said, ‘we have a situation where a bomb is put on a bus once every three weeks. We have no notice, and we get 50 or 60 or 70 casualties with no warning.’” Logistics was a focal point of the training process. Israeli doctors taught their American colleagues lessons they’d learned in organizing responses to large-scale disasters. “Only a small part of dealing with such an event is medical, much of it is logistical,” Tel Aviv’s Dr. Halpern explained. He and his colleagues developed a unique triage system, moving casualties indoors as soon as possible and streamlining processes to make it more rapid. “We did away with a lot of the structure that was in the textbook that was never really tested,” Dr. Halpern said. They developed protocols like doing extra CT scanning to detect small pieces of shrapnel from bombs designed to cause maximum damage. Israeli trauma doctors had learned to alter their lab testing procedures, to streamline the way they identified victims after terror attacks, and to not discharge blast victims right away, because often their injuries don’t show symptoms until later. Mass. General’s Dr. Paul Biddinger noted that “we improved our plans for triage, site security, reassessment and inter-specialty coordination” after consulting with the Israelis. Another lesson the Israelis learned was to call up large numbers of staff as soon as the hospital hears of a terrorist attacks in case they are needed. This proved particularly beneficial last week. “As soon as we heard about the blasts we didn’t let any anesthesiologists or general or trauma surgeons or pediatricians leave the hospital,” said ER head Dr. Alasdair Conn. “We learned that from the Israelis. I remember walking through the emergency department two hours after the bomb victims arrived. Many of the acute patients had already been moved, and it looked like there were more staff than patients in the ER. If there had been a third or a fourth bomb that day – we could have managed.” Over 30 blast victims arrived at the hospital following last Monday’s attack. Each victim had their own dedicated team attending to them. “We’re not smarter than other doctors,” Dr. Halpern told Aish.com. “But we have two things going for us. One, unfortunately, is the high level of terrorism Israel faces. The other factor is Israel’s advanced medical system. In general, countries with lots of terrorism have a lower level of academic research and writing; countries with sophisticated medical systems have lower levels of terrorism. Israel combines both.” Noting that Israelis had been first on the scene at disasters across the globe, Dr. Halpern said, “We can help, so we feel we have a moral obligation. We respond very quickly and efficiently. We think out of the box, not dogmatically, and we are often first on the scene… There’s a very strong sense to apply the skills we’ve gained morally. I choose to live in Israel in the face of much adversity, and I believe it is incumbent upon us as Jews and Israelis to help whomever we can.” “When we were preparing for mass casualties we realized the Israelis had the expertise in this type of situation,” Dr. Conn said, “and we turned to them. This week it really paid off.” Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 12th, 2013
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 5th, 2013 Search Results
 Reports of Saudi Paralysis Sentence (Taken Question)Taken Question Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
April 5, 2013
Question: What is the U.S. response to reports that a Saudi judge gave a court order for a prisoner to be surgically paralyzed? Answer: If these reports are true, they would be incredibly disturbing. We expect the Saudi Government to respect international human rights norms. We regularly make this point as part of our bilateral dialogue.
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Texas Refinery Is Saudi Foothold in U.S. Market. By CLIFFORD KRAUSSThe Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, the largest in the United States, ensures a bigger market for Saudi crude and a stronger global voice for the kingdom.
============================== www.timesofisrael.com/
This can now be seen in context!
Jewish Times // The Times of Israel ‘Shell to dump energy firm over its ties to Israel’Australia’s Woodside Petroleum has a 30-percent interest in Israel’s Leviathan natural gas fieldApril 5, 2013, 3:28 pm 2
Related TopicsTHE HAGUE (JTA) – Royal Dutch Shell declined to comment on reports that it will divest its stake in an Australian energy firm because of that firm’s investment in Israel’s gas fields. According to the RTL Dutch television network, a spokesperson for Shell said on Wednesday that he had no comment on a report by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia which said Shell would likely dump its 23.1-percent stake in Australia’s Woodside Petroleum. The report said Shell planned the move to avoid the risk of boycott by Arab countries following Woodside’s agreement to purchase a 30-percent interest in Israel’s Leviathan natural gas field. RTL reported that Shell’s stake in Woodside is worth more then $7 billion. Last year, Shell said that involvement with Woodside was “incompatible” with Shell’s “long-term plans.” Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 31st, 2013
Dear Rightwing Catholic Islamophobes.By Professor Juan Cole on his blog 31 March 13
CNN reports,
Pope Francis’s willingness to wash the feet of a Muslim woman shows his concern for the very lowest stratum of society. Europe has millions of Muslims, and some are well off and well integrated into society. But many Muslims who immigrated into France and Italy for work got caught when the jobs dried up, and live in poor areas of the cities, being excluded from mainstream society or much hope of betterment. Women have lower status than men in such communities, so a poor Muslim woman in jail is just about the bottom of the social scale. Pope Francis is from Argentina, which has a large, successful Arab-heritage community that includes Muslims, and he is said to have deeply disagreed with his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, over the latter’s Regensburg speech in which he said things that Muslims found insulting. The thing that strikes me about all this is that there is a small strand of American Catholic conservatism that frankly despises both the poor and Muslims, and is one of the pillars of prejudice against Muslims (some call it Islamophobia) in the United States. Most Catholics in opinion polls have a more positive view of Islam and Muslims than is common among evangelical Protestants, but the rightwingers among them have a thing about Muslims (and about poor people). An example is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Rep. Peter King of New York also comes to mind. Robert Spencer has made a career of defaming Islam and Muslims. Then there is professional bully Sean Hannity of Faux News. Paul Ryan uses the insulting language of “Islamic fascism” (fascism is a Western invention; most fascists in history have been of Christian heritage; and it has nothing to do with the Muslim faith). Ryan, far from serving the poor, wants to cut social services to them by savaging the government budget, and openly boasts of following prophet of selfishness Ayn Rand. These purveyors of hate speech against Muslims claim to be Catholics, and some of them are annoyingly Ultramontane, insisting on papal infallibility and trying to impose their values on all Americans. Yet the person they hold to be the vicar of Christ has just given humankind a different charge, of humility and of service to the least in society, many of whom are Muslims. So when will we see Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity and the others go to a prison to comfort inmates, and serve the Muslims among them? When will we see them kiss a Muslim’s feet? Or are they cafeteria Catholics, parading only the values that accord with their Ayn Rand heresy? ===================
Since 2007 we have posted quite a few of the events Prof. Juan Cole expressed an opinion about them.
UPCOMING EVENT Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture “Statelessness as the Core of the Palestinian Issue” with Dr. Juan Cole The Palestine Center
The Israeli-Palestinian issue makes the area one of the world’s longest-running geopolitical hotspots. It has been characterized as a territorial dispute, or a refugee problem, or even a problem of terrorism. It has been the subject of negotiations and agreements that always seem to fall apart. Dr. Juan Cole argues that the core of the issue is the statelessness of the Palestinians and that all the other problems stem from this condition. He will explore the meaning of statelessness for human and civil rights, property rights, and standing in negotiations, as well with regard to international regimes of law and diplomacy. Dr. Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (2009), and his Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East was published in 2007. Cole was the recipient of the Hudson Research Professorship in 2003, the National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1991, and the Fulbright-Hays Islamic Civilization Postdoctoral Award in 1985-86. In November 2004, he was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and in 2006 was the recipient of Hunter College’s James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Since 2002, he has published the blog Informed Comment. Permalink | | ### |
ope Francis on Maundy Thursday declined to address enormous crowds. Instead he went to a prison to emulate Jesus’s act of humility before his crucifixion in washing the feet of his 12 disciples. The pope washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women and two of them Muslim (one of the women was Muslim). It is reported that some of the prisoners broke down in tears.|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 31st, 2013
Sustainable Table Film Shows What’s On Your Plate Posted on Green Prophet: 30 March 2013
Miriam has been covering a series of sustainable meal recipes from the Middle East region, from countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran to help people reconnect with their local food (click the countries to get some great local recipes). We know that food industry is shaping the future of our own bodies and planet earth, and not in the best way. When you last tucked into dinner, did you pay any attention to where the ingredients came from? What’s on your plate? Where does it come from? The documentary Sustainable Table: What’s On Your Plate looks into the food we eat. While the film covers what’s going on in America the lesson can be applied to our global village, patterning itself on the West. For Sustainable Table: What’s On Your Plate, director Mischa Hedges traveled along America’s west coast to learn more about our food system, and his findings apply globally. Modern agriculture is waging a war against the planet, attacking nature with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, monoculture and genetically modified organisms. Learn what you can do to help stop it. The film serves up these unsavory stats:
Modern methods of commercial food production don’t consider environmental or human health costs when calculating bottom line. Monoculture is the practice of continually growing on the same land a single, high-yield crop: corn, soybeans and wheat are common monoculture crops. Sure it’s efficient and a better bang for your farming buck, but over the past century, massive monoculture has:
Polyculture (rotation of livestock and crops) evolved over centuries to meet a local community’s complete food needs. It can naturally replenish what’s consumed in the growing process by re- using byproducts of animal husbandry. When manure is direct-deposited onto fields by livestock, or purposely gathered and spread by farmers, the enriched soils help fertilize crops which are then consumed by humans and animals alike. This eat/poop process returns critical phosphorus returned to the soil, a natural continuum. Modern agriculture treats animals as commodities rather than living beings, exposing livestock to mental and physical anguish, dosing them with growth hormones and antibiotics and raising them in overcrowded conditions. Large scale animal breeding facilities (called concentrated animal feeding operations – CAFOs) generate foul emissions, which are linked to heart disease, neurological problems and asthma in nearby human populations. Animal waste runoff from these facilities is a leading contaminant of drinking water. CAFOs are promoted as the best route to large-scale food production, but their “efficiency” comes by replacing pasture-grazing with meal made from government-subsidized crops, completely altering the animals’ natural diets, with negative consequences for both animal and human health. According to health website Mercola.com, farm subsidies underpin our unhealthy modern diet by supporting high-fructose corn syrup, fast food, animal factories, and monoculture. Non-profit watchdog U.S. PIRG issued a stunning report translating federal subsidies of junk food versus fresh produce into easily understood terms: if you received the same annual subsidy a s Big Food Business, you’d get $7.36 to spend on junk food and 11 cents for fresh produce. We vote every day when we choose our food. Will you vote for the system that is systematically destroying your health, animal welfare and the planet? Or will you opt for sustainable change? What can you do to help? This film tries to find some of the answers. Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 29th, 2013
 David RobertsEnergy, politics, and moreIMF says global subsidies to fossil fuels amount to $1.9 trillion a year … and that’s probably an underestimate.By David Roberts, with www.Grist.org Brad Plumer has a typically lucid summary on the report’s conclusions, but I want to dig in a little on one part, because believe it or not, the IMF’s conclusion may be too conservative. The real truth about global fossil fuel subsidies may be more eye-popping yet. So, where does that $1.9 trillion come from? Around $480 billion of it comes from direct subsidies, i.e., government handing out money. This is what people usually think of when they hear “subsidies.” Contrary to popular opinion, the developed world does very little of this kind of thing. Direct fossil fuel subsidies (“pre-tax” subsidies) are overwhelmingly concentrated in the developing world and mostly devoted to making petro-products affordable for poor people:  Those direct subsidies are a) a growing problem for the budgets of those countries, and b) a fraught and delicate political issue. Needless to say, people don’t like suddenly losing a big pot of financial assistance. They often retaliate by rioting or, you know, starving. The report contains a big section on ways that countries can wind back those subsidies without unduly hurting the poor. It’s interesting. —————————————– But my focus here is on the other $1.4 trillion, which is IMF’s tally of “the effects of energy consumption on global warming; on public health through the adverse effects on local pollution; on traffic congestion and accidents; and on road damage.” These are the “externalities” you’re always hearing about, and by failing to make fossil fuel companies pay for them, governments are implicitly subsidizing those companies. IMF says calls this under-taxing of fossil fuels “mispricing,” but it’s easier to think of them as indirect subsidies. Indirect subsidies are much larger than direct subsidies — a point I have made before — and are concentrated in developed countries:  Among these externalities are the damages wrought by climate change. How much damage does a ton of carbon do? How large is that particular indirect subsidy? Climate damages are calculated based on the “social cost of carbon” (SCC). The IMF uses an SCC of $25 per ton, derived from the work of the U.S. Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon [PDF]. So, for every ton of carbon that is emitted but not taxed, there is a $25 implicit subsidy. However! There are good reasons to think that the real SCC is considerably higher than $25 a ton. I don’t want to bore you, but here are a few nerdy things to read if you want to dive in on the subject:
I don’t want to pretend this is a settled matter — it is the subject of lively, ongoing academic debate — but I’m pretty convinced that the SCC used in the IMF’s report is hugely, misleadingly conservative. So what would happen if it weren’t? Ackerman and Stanton write:
So, just for the sake of argument, say the IMF adopted an SCC of $83 — more than three times the figure it actually used. What would happen? It’s hard to say precisely, since the IMF paper is not clear what portion of the indirect subsidies are carbon-related. (Or at least, I lack the fortitude to dig that info out.) I suspect it’s well over half, but to be conservative, let’s just say half. Based on my back-of-napkin calculations, if carbon were responsible for half the indirect subsidies, and the SCC were $83 instead of $25, the grand total of annual global fossil fuel subsidies would rise from $1.9 trillion to around $3.5 trillion. Three and a half trillion dollars a year. That’s about 5 percent of global GDP. Crazy. As enviro hero Paul Hawken is fond of saying, “we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.” I can’t think of a better description of these fossil fuel subsidies. And when we use a more realistic cost for carbon damages, we get a better sense of just how much we are stealing from our descendents — trillions and trillions of dollars a year. The heedless radicalism and grotesque immorality of it are breathtaking. Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 23rd, 2013
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 20th, 2013 Saddam Hussein
Former President of Iraq
 Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. Wikipedia
Books  ———————————————————————————————————— People also search for  Uday Hussein, Son  ============================================================== New York Times Editorials of March 20, 2013 – The Print Version:
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 16th, 2013
Op-Ed ColumnistA Real Carbon Solution{please allow for www.SustainabiliTank.info Chutzpah – we tend to put a question mark at the end of the title. (?) } By JOE NOCERAPublished: March 15, 2013 /// 121 CommentsSometime this summer, in Odessa, Tex., the Summit Power Group plans to break ground on a $2.5 billion coal gasification power plant. Summit has named this the Texas Clean Energy Project. With good reason. Part of the promise of this power plant is its use of gasified coal; because the gasification process doesn’t burn the coal, it makes for far cleaner energy than a traditional coal-fired plant. But another reason this plant — and a handful of similar plants — has such enormous potential is that it will capture some 90 percent of the facility’s already reduced carbon emissions. Some of those carbon emissions will be used to make fertilizer. Let us count the potential benefits if plants like this became commonplace. Currently, some 40 percent of carbon emissions come from power plants. The carbon-capture process Summit will employ “is the only technology that can reduce CO2 emissions from existing, stationary sources by up to 90 percent,” said Judi Greenwald of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Second: Environmentalists could call off their war against the coal industry, thus saving tens of thousands of jobs, as climate-destroying coal-fired plants were replaced by clean coal gasification plants. Third: Gas-fired power plants, which already emit 50 percent less carbon than coal-fired plants, could become even cleaner if they included the carbon-capture technology. Fourth: Using carbon emissions to recover previously ungettable oil has the potential to unlock vast untapped American reserves. Last year, ExxonMobil reported that enhanced oil recovery would allow it to extend the life of a single oil field in West Texas by 20 years. Fifth: China. Too often, American environmentalists ignore the reality that the Chinese are far more concerned with economic growth than climate change. (And who can blame them? All they want is what we already have.) The Chinese are relentlessly building coal-fired power plants, which Western environmentalists couldn’t stop even if they tried. But if power plants like Summit’s — which will turn CO2 into profitable products — were to gain momentum, that would likely catch China’s attention. A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it? — blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The Summit executive most closely associated with the Texas Clean Energy Project is Laura Miller. Her environmental credentials are unimpeachable. As the mayor of Dallas in 2006, Miller founded the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition to fight a plan by TXU Energy, a big power company, to build 11 new coal-fired plants. During a trip to Europe, she saw both coal gasification and carbon-capture technologies being used. When she left the mayor’s office, she signed up with Summit and became a passionate advocate of the Odessa plant. Eric Redman, the president and chief executive of Summit Power, describes her as “the public face of the project.” (As a young man, by the way, Redman wrote one of the classic works about Congress, “The Dance of Legislation.” It’s still worth reading.) So who could possibly be against coal gasification and carbon capture? Ratepayers, for one, mainly because carbon-capture technology is so expensive. In 2011, American Electric Power, or A.E.P., canceled a big carbon-capture project, in part because it was clear that state regulators were not going to allow the company to pass on the additional costs to its customers. To help make the project economically viable, the Texas Clean Energy Project is getting a $450 million grant from the Department of Energy. (Absurdly, the Internal Revenue Service is requiring Summit to pay taxes on the federal grant, which means that a third of it will go right back to the government.) But if the plant proves successful — as I believe it will — and others replicate it, the costs will inevitably come down, and federal help won’t likely be needed. And the other opponent? None other than Bill McKibben, Mr. “Stop Keystone” himself. When I e-mailed him to ask whether he supported carbon-capture for enhanced oil recovery, he replied that if carbon were sent back into the ground “the worst possible thing to do with it is to get more oil above ground.” He continued, “It’s time to keep oil in the earth, not to mention gas and coal.” To me, at least, his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem. The enemy is not fossil fuels; it is the damage that is done because of the way we use fossil fuels. If we can find a way to create clean energy from fossil fuels, then they can become (as they used to say) part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Thankfully, Laura Miller and Eric Redman understand that, even if Bill McKibben doesn’t. ———————————————————————————————————————————————–
Laura Miller (born 1958) served as mayor of Dallas, Texas (U.S.) from 2002 through 2007. She did not run for re-election in the 2007 mayoral race. She was the third woman to serve as mayor of Dallas.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Miller attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and spent the early part of her career as a journalist. As a journalist, Miller worked as a staff writer for The Miami Herald and The Dallas Morning News and then as a columnist for the New York Daily News and the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald. In 1991, Miller became an investigative reporter for the Dallas Observer and then a columnist for D Magazine.
In 1998, Miller was elected to the Dallas City Council representing Oak Cliff and southwest Dallas. In 1998, Miller was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatments which effectively eradicated the cancer. In 2002, Miller was elected as Mayor of Dallas, replacing Ron Kirk who left the post to run for the United States Senate position vacated by retiring Texas Senator Phil Gramm. She fought for and won approval of a strengthened smoking ban, an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, a revamped public housing system, a $23 million homeless assistance center, major changes to the city’s Trinity River Corridor improvement plan and a taxpayer-funded downtown redevelopment effort. She participated in an agreement between American Airlines, the City of Fort Worth, DFW Airport and Southwest Airlines to revise the federal flight restrictions at Love Field Airport, which involved: replacing geographic limitations on Love Field service with: flight caps determined by a limitation on the number of gates allowed at Love Field, restrictions on the rights of any new air carrier to service North Texas via any airport other than DFW Airport, and banning international commercial air travel at Love Field. The unique agreement and resulting oligopoly required an exemption from federal antitrust laws, which Miller also successfully helped obtain. David Levey, executive vice president for Forest City Enterprises, credited Miller for reviving a $250 million deal to renovate downtown’s long vacant Mercantile National Bank Building. During her term, the Dallas Cowboys announced plans to build Cowboys Stadium and many citizens hoped it would be built in Dallas. The city and the Dallas Cowboys, however, failed to reach a deal and the stadium was built in Arlington. She announced parade plans for the Dallas Mavericks championship in 2006, prior to the Mavericks losing four straight games and ultimately the NBA championship to the Miami Heat in six games. Miller was succeeded in office by Republican Tom Leppert. Laura Miller serves as Director of Projects, Texas,[3] for Summit Power Group, a Seattle-based developer of wind, solar and gas-fired power plants. Summit was recently selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive a $350 million cost-sharing award to build the world’s first IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) clean-coal power plant located near Odessa, Texas. The low-emissions project, called the Texas Clean Energy Project, is projected to capture just under 3 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, which will be used for enhanced oil recovery in the West Texas Permian Basin.[4] Miller’s other environmental accomplishments included the formation and co-leading (with former Houston mayor Bill White) of the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition, made up of 36 cities, counties and school districts in Texas that opposed the construction of 11 coal plants (which would have used older technology) by TXU, a Dallas-based energy company. Ultimately, TXU (now called Energy Future Holdings) officially suspended its plans to build eight of the eleven plants.[5] As a result of these efforts, Miller won a 2008 Climate Protection Award from the Environmental Protection Agency for this nationally-recognized effort,[6] which has been memorialized in a documentary film, produced and narrated by Robert Redford, and entitled “Fighting Goliath: The Texas Coal Wars.” Miller is married to Dallas attorney and former Texas State Representative Steven D. Wolens, is Principal at McKool Smith, Dallas, TX U.S.A., and was described by Texas Monthly as the “House’s most dreaded foe, and most welcome ally,” He was best known for ushering in Senate Bill 7, deregulating Texas energy markets. His legal practice areas are given as “Government/Cities/Municipalities (70%), Business Litigation (30%)” which seem to have overlapped his wife’s activities – but surely – in Texas everything is possible. He is one of the Texas “Super-Lawyers” and was called one of the ten best legislators in Texas. They have two daughters, Alex and Lily, and a son, Max. ——————- Eric Redman, (born 1948, Palo Alto, California), is an a businessman with experience on Capitol Hill. Redman was legislative assistant to the late Senator Warren G. Magnuson, Democrat of Washington State, who was with the Senate Commerce Committe, and served most of his years in the Senate along with Senator Henry Jackson, his friend, and fellow American Nationalist. Redman worked with Magnuson for two years circa 1971.[1] He wrote then the book “The Dance of Legislation”, a descriptive account of a single bill establishing the National Health Service Corps along its two-year trip through Congress.[2] The book was initially published in 1973, with a second edition in 2001. Redman has also written for a variety of other publications such as the New York Times,[3] the Washington Post,[4][5] Open Spaces,[6] and others, and was once a Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone.[7] His article on the climate effects of soot, “A Dirty Little Secret,” appeared in the May–June 2005 issue of Legal Affairs.[
His interest in the effects of SOOT - which he called A Dirty Secret, are a give away when the issue is man caused Climate Change - it seems he was eager finding other reasons for global warming like the speakers for the Heartland Institute used to do. No, the issue is not that black particles of man caused soot are not a source of global warming, but that they are the reason to displace CO2 emissions as a suspect, are the reason for our comment. Redman studied at Harvard College (1966–1970), was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford University (1970–1971),[1] then he experienced work on Capitol Hill, after which he and obtained a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1975.[9] He joined the law firm Heller Ehrman LLP in 1983, and founded the firm’s Energy Practice Group.[10] Redman left the legal practice for business after specializing in public policy and energy law for more than 30 years. He is currently President of Summit Power Group Inc,[11][12] a Seattle-based developer of wind, solar, gas-fired, and carbon-capture power plants. Summit is currently developing the Texas Clean Energy Project in Odessa, Texas. That is obviously the reason of his present advocacy. ————————————————————————————————————————– Joseph “Joe” Nocera ( 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island) is a sterling American business journalist and author. He became a business columnist for The New York Times in April 2005. In March 2011, Nocera became a regular opinion columnist for The Times’ Op-Ed page, writing on Tuesdays and Saturdays.[2] Nocera is also a business commentator for NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Prior to joining The New York Times, Nocera worked at Fortune from 1995 to 2005, in a variety of positions, finally as editorial director. Nocera was the “Profit Motive” columnist at GQ from 1990 to 1995, and wrote the same column for Esquire from 1988 to 1990. In the 1980s, Nocera was an editor at Newsweek; an executive editor of New England Monthly; and a senior editor at Texas Monthly. In the late 1970s he was an editor at The Washington Monthly. Go to Columnist Page » /// Joe Nocera’s Blog » /// Related in Opinion: More on the Environment » /// Read All Comments (121) »Mr. Nocera is a clear profit motive journalist with connections to Texas – we do not doubt his writing skills, but we wonder if the subject at hand got the full investigative scrutiny it deserves. A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 16, 2013, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: A Real Carbon Solution. Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 16th, 2013 This Coming Week President Obama’s trip to the Middle East, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s cancelled meetings in Afghanistan may tell some that this is US new policy – we rather believe that like the new Israeli government – true policy starts with cleaning home – thus we suggest that the following news are the real US news: Elizabeth Warren vs. the NRA Jason Sattler, The National Memo —————————– Sen. Bernie Sanders: Democracy Is for People Amendment Sanders.Senate.gov —————————— Michael Tomasky | This Just In: GOP Won’t Negotiate Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast —————————– And A New York Times Editorial of Saturday, March 16, 2018 sees:Senate Democrats Finally Take a Stand {If this is necessary procedure for President Obama’s Secondary Administration’s moves, is debatable, but it surely is good self-preserving necessary policy, if in tended to show that progress is possible also with a Congress that does not think about the good of the country. – (our comment)} By THE EDITORIAL BOARDTheir 2014 budget is a strong counterweight to the reckless House proposals from Paul Ryan. Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 16th, 2013
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 10th, 2013 Fareed Zakaria, the anchor of the CNN/GPS Global Public Square Program – a journalist and much more – whose program we credited many times as the only program we recommend watching as a religious commitment to the tube, has a very clear view of the world.
He knows that the dependence on Middle Eastern oil is at the base of all US problems – economical, social, and political – internal and external. From the gauging at the pump – to the political antics of the Brothers Koch.
He knows that the world is changing and US attention must switch to Asia from Europe, and secure its backyard by finding more ways to cooperate with Latin America. To be able to do that, the US must start by cutting its umbilical cord to the Middle East. Yes, he knows this raises a lot of howls – from the Arabs who think they do a great favor to the US by selling their oil, and eventually from pro-Israel friends in the US that think Israel is still the baby that must be spoon fed rather then credited that it has matured and can be counted upon as a grown up ally. All this even before global warming/climate change is mentioned.
So far so good – and this seems completely correct. But Fareed may tend to forget the advice scientists – his friends and my friends – give him.
They say – keep away from all fossil fuels, not just the Arab oil – and develop an infrastructure that is based first on energy that was not spent – the cheapest way to enlarge the resource base – and then do everything possible to introduce renewable sources of energy that are long term sustainable. You will find – we say – that you do not have to wait for the long range, the so called externalities by the fossil fuels industry, when taken into account as expenditures, as they should be, assure us that the alternatives to burning oil and coal make already for sound economics in the medium range.
This weekend Fareed Zakaria backed the Keystone pipeline and the Canada tar-sand oil extraction in Alberta – which will supply that pipeline – this without taking into consideration that this simply plays into the hands of the US oil industry but is a total NO-NO to the seekers for a true alternative. If the idea is simply jobs – it might be reasonable perhaps just to give money to the unemployed without causing the environmental destruction that goes with that pipeline and with the extraction of the Canadian oil.
The moment he leaves the Keystone topic – Fareed returns to his best – the analysis of the evolving China, and of the new opportunities that opened up in Latin America with thr death of Hugo Chavez. Without Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, the US can attempt now a total reconfiguration of its strategy for its own hemisphere-base. Then, with its back more secure – it can extend a friendly hand to a changing China – a continental size, 1.3 billion people large State that is building with maximum speed the largest middle-class the world has ever seen. This new Chinese want quality of life and that they can achieve only by working in tandem with a secure United States. Everybody knows now that there is only one G-2 situation – disturbed now by the US in-fighting – but evident nevertheless to the incoming new Chinese leader.
The days that China had a tremendous labor cost advantage over the US seem to be over, instead they feel water and energy shortages that they must handle in ordr not to slip from their path of growth. They do a lot to phase in renewable energy at a pace that is reasonable to them and would appreciate the breezing space that the US leaves behind when the US decreases imports of oil from Western Asia.Chavez as a devil figure but judges him in context of his country and the region and is able to see the positive aspects of Chavez having taken over leadership in a continent that US governments totally neglected and US business helped destroy. Each Latin country has its own US business excesses to tell about, as coincidentally Iran does. That does not mean that anyone North of the Border will have anything good to say about Chavez or Ahmadi-Nejad, but here we talk needed policy and not sentiments – and Fareed always was ahead of the Washington decision-makers in this non-technical areas.
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March 9th, 2013
11:41 PM ET
Why U.S. should back KeystoneBy Fareed Zakaria Watch the video for the full Take. Later this year, the Obama administration will have to make a decision on whether to green light the Keystone pipeline – the 2,000-mile pipeline that would bring oil from the tar sands of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. I’m sure you’ve heard all the dire warnings about it. But another way to look at it is to ask what would happen if the project does not go forward. The U.S. Department of State released an extremely thorough report that tries to answer this question. It concludes, basically, that the oil derived from Canadian tar sands will be developed at about the same pace whether or not there is a pipeline. In other words, stopping Keystone might make us feel good, but it wouldn’t really do anything about climate change. Why? Well, given the need for oil in the U.S., Canadian producers would still get Alberta’s oil to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. There are other pipeline possibilities, but the most likely method of transfer is by train. The report estimates that it would take daily runs of 15 trains with about 100 tanker cars each to carry the amount planned by TransCanada…And remember, moving oil by train produces much higher emissions of CO2 (from diesel locomotives) than flowing it through a pipeline. For more on this, read the TIME column here.
Topics: GPS Show March 9th, 2013
12:47 PM ET
On GPS Sunday: Debating Keystone, and what comes after Chavez?“Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN On GPS this week, should the Keystone pipeline be allowed to go ahead? Fareed presents his take on the proposed oil pipeline, and then invites a dissenter onto debate the issue: Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. What does the future hold for Venezuela and the region with the passing of President Hugo Chávez? And what does it mean for U.S.-Venezuela relations? Fareed convenes a panel of thinkers including Moises Naim, a former minister of trade and industry in Venezuela, Rory Carroll, author of the new book Comandante, and Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the United States. “In the next few months and perhaps years, they would need to find international external scapegoats and scapegoats at home,” Naim says. “Someone will have to explain to the people that are now addressing President Chavez why the situation, their standard of living, has declined so dramatically. Someone will have to explain why, without Chavez, life is not as good as it used to be.” And, China’s new president: How Xi Jinping will manage the world’s most important relationship – that with the United States? Fareed speaks with China watcher Evan Osnos.
Topics: GPS Show March 8th, 2013
11:12 AM ET
Meet China’s hardline new presidentBy François Godement, Special to CNN Editor’s note: François Godement is a senior policy fellow and head of the China program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. The views expressed are his own. This week’s National People’s Congress will complete China’s once-in-a decade leadership change, with Xi Jinping becoming the country’s new head of state. China’s partners, and above all Americans, want a China that is a predictable and reliable. After all, huge business interests require stable relations with China. And there is no doubt, China is becoming more powerful – it is not only present in most parts of the world, but has also become a determining factor in the international arena. We would all therefore love to see Mr Xi as a Chinese Gorbachev. But getting to know Xi’s real personality, and his likely style of governing, feels like Kremlinology. And what is emerging is worrying. Xi is reputedly a charmer with an engaging and easygoing style. His wife is a famous singer, his daughter is quietly studying at Harvard. It is reported that he is even reluctant to embrace a luxurious lifestyle (although this does not appear to prevent some of his relatives from doing so). In public, Xi refrains from making controversial statements – an exception of course being the 2009 remark about the “full stomach” and the “constant finger pointing of Westerners” during a trip to Mexico.
Topics: Asia • China • Foreign Policy  What comes after the ‘Great Unifier?’By Mark P. Jones, Special to CNN Editor’s note: Mark P. Jones is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and the Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University in Houston. The views expressed are his own. Hugo Chávez was a great unifier. Not of all Venezuelans, as even the most casual observer of Venezuela realizes, but rather of the two polar political camps into which Venezuela divided during Chávez’s 14 year reign. Within the Bolivarian movement he created, Chávez was the unquestioned leader, bringing together the disparate factions that together made up the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Cliques, distinct ideological groups, varied regional-based interests, and a new wealthy business class (the Boliburguesía, whose members experienced a rise from rags to riches due to their ties to the government) were all united by their support – both principled and self-interested – for Chávez. On the opposition side, the one common thread that tied together a heterogeneous opposition alliance (the Democratic Unity Roundtable, or MUD) was the goal of removing Hugo Chávez from power. This vibrant and often passionate opposition to Chávez provided the glue that held together such diverse actors as socialists, conservatives, state-based parties, recently established parties, and parties linked to the country’s discredited pre-Chávez political system.
March 7th, 2013
09:34 PM ET
What we’re readingBy Fareed Zakaria U.S. wages have fallen from 53 percent of GDP in 1970 to less than 44 percent last year, notes Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. “The most succinct way to measure how corporate earnings have fared vs. workers’ wages is to examine their share of the U.S. economy — that is, gross domestic product. From 1950 through the 1970s, corporate profits hovered in the range of 5 percent to 7 percent of GDP. They dipped as low as 3 percent in 1986, but since then have staged a long-term ascent that has brought them to 11 percent today, their highest level since World War II. (That’s as far back as Federal Reserve figures go.)” “China’s large pool of surplus labor has fueled its rapid industrial growth. Now this demographic dividend may be almost exhausted,” argue Yukon Huang and Clare Lynch in Bloomberg. “College graduates are four times as likely to be unemployed as urban residents of the same age with only basic education, even as factories go begging for semi-skilled workers. Given the underdeveloped service sector and still-large roles of manufacturing and construction, China has created a serious mismatch between skills of the labor force and available jobs.” Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 4th, 2013 Recovery in U.S. Lifting Profits, Not Adding JobsBy NELSON D. SCHWARTZExperts estimate so-called budget sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, but Wall Street doesn’t expect the cuts to substantially alter corporate profits or threaten stock markets. —————– OpinionatorA Sneaky Way to DeregulateBy STEVEN RATTNERIt’s called a jobs act, but it’s really a con job for small investors. —————— A Jester No More, Italy’s Gadfly of Politics Reflects a MovementBy LIZ ALDERMAN and ELISABETTA POVOLEDOIn a rare interview, Beppe Grillo said his goal was to do away with a system that had “disintegrated the country” and build “something new.” —————— Permalink | | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 23rd, 2013 We posted this for the first time on October 25, 2012, and because we get stats that this posting is being opened lately —
I decided to Re-post it – and I am doing this without changes. ====================================================
News & Politics on Alternet
Salon / By David Sirota
5 Signs Racism Still Rules PoliticsHave you noticed no one ever calls Joe Biden a Marxist? Just one of many double standards Obama faces regularly.
October 24, 2012
David Sirota writes : The angry response to my Salon article last week on White Privilege was as swift as it was predictable. To sum up the wave of bigoted blowback in my email box and on my Twitter feed, the argument from denialists seems to be that race is no longer a factor in American politics, and that therefore, those who mention bigotry in the context of President Obama are, in the ugly retrograde vernacular of the 1980s, “race hustlers” engaging in an unseemly ploy to change the subject from the current administration’s policies. It’s certainly true that bigotry is not automatically synonymous with criticism of the Obama record. For instance, many liberals (including me) who question the substantive gap between candidate Obama’s policy promises and his policy record are not doing so out of any racial animus; they are doing so out of a sense of democratic citizenship. Similarly, many honest conservatives who oppose the Obama administration’s civil liberties atrocities and Drug War are doing so on principle rather than because of prejudice. That honest, non-racialized dissent, however, does not mean racism has ceased to be a factor in politics. As I showed a few weeks back, other parts of the conservative movement are running an explicitly bigoted campaign against President Obama. Just as troubling — and arguably, even more pervasive — is the racist double standards that continue to stealthily define our politics in ways that are difficult to see in the day-to-day grind of election campaigns. For those who pretend otherwise, here are five ways to know those double standards persist. 1. Joe Biden Is almost never called a socialist or a Marxist.Despite a Senate voting record and presidential policymaking record that align him with moderate Republicans from a mere decade ago, Obama is regularly derided as a socialist, a communist or a Marxist. By contrast, Obama’s own white running mate, Joe Biden, has as liberal — or at times even more liberal — a voting record as Obama, but (save for the occasional Newt Gingrich outburst) is almost never referred to in such inflammatory terms. Indeed, in a rare interview that brought that term up to Biden, it was framed as a question to him about Obama, not about his own policies. Considering the fact that Biden is, by definition as vice president, carrying the same economic message but isn’t given the same label, this is solid proof that the radical terms applied to Obama are Lee Atwater-esque methods of using euphemisms for racial epithets. 2. Romneycare is Obamacare, yet the latter is criticized. It’s a well-known, undisputed fact that Romneycare was a conservative health insurance model constructed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and that it was Massachusetts’ state-level model for the federal healthcare bill ultimately championed by President Obama. Nonetheless, under the first African-American president, the very same healthcare model the GOP championed is now being held up by the GOP as a redistributionist boondoggle. Is it merely a coincidence that the primary difference between Romneycare and Obamacare is that the former was championed by a white guy and the latter championed by a black guy? Almost certainly not, according to social science research. As Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker notes:
3. A white president would never be criticized for these statements about Trayvon Martin. No white president has ever been blamed for the varied and disparate transgressions committed by white folk. However, Obama is routinely blamedby conservative pundits for any violent or criminal incident involving any black person anywhere at any time in America — because, in their bigoted minds, Black America is a monolith, and all black people know each other. If this isn’t proof enough of a racist double standard, then behold the GOP establishment’s reaction to Obama’s heartfelt comments about the tragic killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. After the incident, Obama said “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together.” As the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates noted:
Ask yourself: Had these comments been made by a white president of either party after such a tragedy, would anyone denounce that president, to the point of accusing him of supporting the killing of white kids? 4. America would neither ignore nor laugh off a young black male relative of Obama publicly fantasizing about violence against a presidential candidate. As I reported last week, Romney’s son, Tagg Romney, cheerily riffed on his fantasies about committing an act of violence against a sitting president of the United States. This is different than some random Twitterer or Facebook commenter making some hideous remark, and it’s different than him making the comment to a friend in private. He made the comment in his role as an official campaign surrogate, and broadcast it in a public interview. In response, most of the media ignored the story, and most conservatives played it down as nothing but an earnest son defending his dad. None of this means Tagg Romney is a bigot. But it does highlight the racist double standard in our politics. For if the races were reversed — if a young black male relative of Obama went on a radio show and publicly said he wanted to “jump out of your seat (and) rush down to the stage and take a swing” at Mitt Romney” — it would be an instant national outrage, replete with headlines about an imminent race war and Romney’s desperate need for beefed-up personal security. 5. If one of Obama’s teenage daughters was unmarried and pregnant, it wouldn’t be considered a “private” matter.When Sarah Palin was put on the Republican ticket in 2008, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy did not initiate a national discussion about the issue of teen pregnancy, unprotected sex or promiscuous fornication outside of wedlock. Instead, conservative leaders insisted it was off-limits as a topic, with no less than the leader of the Christian Coalition telling reporters, “I think it’s a very private matter.” Now imagine if instead of Palin’s teenage daughter being pregnant, it was Obama’s teenage daughter. Can anyone seriously insist that such a situation wouldn’t prompt a wave of vitriolic attacks on African-American “culture” and “irresponsible pathologies”? Of course not. As the author Tim Wise put it:
To reiterate: This persistent double standard of racism and White Privilege doesn’t mean all criticism of Obama is rooted in bigotry. It simply means that A) at least some of that criticism is and B) that over the long haul, that double standard distorts our politics in ways that run counter to the American ideals of equal opportunity. If the first step to recovery is to stop denying a problem, then acknowledging this bigotry is the first step to finally ending it. ———— David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book “Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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and:
also in News & Politics on Alternet
I Might Be Disillusioned About Election 2012, But the Stakes for the Country Are Still HugeTake a look at the two big agendas of the candidates, and it’s impossible to ignore that we’d get two very different outcomes.
October 18, 2012 |
Jay Walljasper writes: As the presidential campaign reaches fever pitch—with Super Pac attacks appearing constantly on TV and both candidates sharpening their debate zingers—I feel guilty about my growing obsession with it all. I realize the political and economic progress we desperately need won’t come directly from the ballot box. 2008 taught us that. Even with a former community organizer in the White House and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate, many urgent reforms were stalled, watered-down or completely MIA. I wish today I could take back at least half of my campaign contributions four years ago, redistributing them to grassroots fighting for the common good. But I can’t say elections don’t matter. 2010 taught us that. Whatever my disappointments with the Obama on economics and foreign policy, his administration has engineered some significant shifts in commons-related fields like health care, public works, student loans, sustainable transportation and smart growth that affect the lives of millions. Plus, even a sideways glance at Tea Party zealots in Congress makes me terrified about the prospects of Romney taking the Oval Office. Electing leaders (ideally from both parties) who care about sustaining the commons is clearly part of the strategy for delivering economic opportunity and ecological sanity for the world. But at this point in history, our energy needs to be focused more on igniting citizens outside the usual political circle to demand change in language and accents not usually heard in the corridor of powers—something like Occupy times twenty. Then why I am so intrigued by the political race? First, there’s the gaudy drama that captures my imagination like a hard-fought pennant race in baseball. And I will confess to some lingering hope that Obama in his second term will be able to slow the widespread looting of America’s public assets—schools, social services, the environment, transit, parks, libraries etc.—and get us started on the long path to fulfilling our national mission statement: liberty and justice for all. But I’ll also admit a fascination with the Republicans. Can they actually mean what they say? What do they really want? And why are they so angry even when the libertarian right wing has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams of 30 years ago. They mystify not to mortify me. The overarching theme of their campaign this year is challenging the legitimacy of a liberal—even a mild one—to be president. And for many, that’s compounded by incredulity that their fellow Americans elevated a black man to the White House. No less troubling is the party’s near-unanimous acceptance that government should not do much of anything beyond fielding an army, policing sexual conduct and subsidizing corporations. It’s clear the GOP agenda—which the once moderate Mitt Romney has wholeheartedly endorsed—serves the interests of the very wealthy, who more than ever are influencing this elections with Super Pac contributions. But cold, calculating self-interest is not the whole story. That doesn’t explain the fury we hear from Fox News, talk radio and Republicans on the stump. The right wing, after all, draws votes from beyond the one-percent, or even the ten-percent that their economic policies conspicuously favor. A more sweeping reason for Republican rage became more clear when I recently stumbled across an essay noting of Mitt Romney’s book No Apologies in an old copy of the New Yorker. Writer Louis Menand pinpointed anxiety about America’s decline as the centerpiece of the candidate’s campaign. The no-end-in-sight economic downturn and no-victory wars in the Middle East has set off a panic about American powerlessness. (Never mind that Obama’s predecessor in the White House shoulders much of the blame on both fronts.) Among some of the Republican base, fear that blacks, immigrants, gays and women are taking away the America they once knew intensifies this panic. The widespread consensus on the right is that Obama and his backers believe this decline is inevitable, and are too gutless to do what’s necessary to keep America #1. Romney’s remedy for getting America back on top is a large, expensive buildup of our military might coupled with lavish tax cuts for the rich. This spells disaster for the commons across the board as everything from the National Park Service to unemployment benefits to early childhood education is slashed. ————– Jay Walljasper is a writer and speaker who explores how new ideas in urban planning, tourism, community development, sustainability, politics and culture can improve our lives as well as the world. ================================================== What do you see in the following New Jersey sign floated on the internet by Jewish immigrants and demonstratively has the sub-context of a White America that did well for Italian immigrants? Nothing black mentioned, but there is a sub-context of welfare that reminds us without so saying of those parasitic 47% . Who is in fact eating Calandra bread in New Jersey? Did all Italian-Americans graduate from that 47% class? Could it be that much further away from New York City the feelings against competition for jobs by immigrants fires up the resentment of white lower income classes as well, not just higher level white tax payers? Could it be that Wall Street fraud litigation has picked cases of non-whites ahead of looking into same sort of insider dealings by old Anglo-Saxon descendants?
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