Poland and Sweden to pitch ‘Eastern Partnership’ idea

By Philippa Runner, May 22, 2008.

Poland and Sweden are to unveil joint proposals for a new eastern Europe policy at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Monday (26 May), in a mini-version of France’s “Mediterranean Union.” The “Eastern Partnership” envisages a multinational forum between the EU-27 and neighbouring states Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Polish press agency PAP reports. {This list amounts to the old GUAM States + Armenia}

The forum would aim to negotiate visa-free travel deals, free trade zones for services and agricultural products and strategic partnership agreements with the five countries.

It would also launch smaller, bilateral projects on student exchange, environmental protection and energy supply, but would avoid the controversial topic of EU membership perspectives.

Dictatorship Belarus could join at a technical and expert-level only. Russia would also be invited to cooperate on local initiatives, involving the Kaliningrad enclave for example.

Unlike the grander Mediterranean club, the eastern set-up would not have its own secretariat but would be run by the European Commission and financed from the 2007 to 2013 European neighbourhood policy budget. A commission official would be appointed as its “special coordinator.”
Following the foreign ministers’ debate, Warsaw hopes to secure formal approval at the EU summit in June and to start detailed work on the “partnership” by the end of the year.

Warm reception:

Germany, the UK and the Netherlands have also voiced initial support, but Spain and Italy could prove problematic while Ukraine will have to be persuaded the partnership offers something better than the current EU neighbourhood package, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reports.

“The EU’s eastern policy is of interest to the whole EU,” Polish commissioner Danuta Hubner told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper. “The weakness of [previous] northern, eastern or southern European Union policies was that they existed only in the sphere of interest of member countries in those regions.”

ADAM - ADaptation And Mitigation.

Climate Policy Workshops 28-29 May, 2008, at Lund University in Sweden.

May 28, Wednesday:
CDM Post-2012: Practices, Possibilities, Politics
Organization: ADAM project, ClimateColl project

May 29, Thursday:
Climate Governance Beyond Rhetoric: Deliberation and Rule Making Along the Public-Private Frontier. Organization: GreenGovern project.

The workshop series includes two independent one-day sessions and one common social event in the evening of May 28. This two-day event will allow participants to attend sessions according to their professional preferences. It also offers good opportunities to network with a broader circle of colleagues.
All costs related to the organization including lunch and the social event on 28th of May will be covered by the organizers. Participants are kindly asked to arrange their own travel and accommodation.
Please find enclosed the descriptions of the events including programs and registration information. Please note that you need to register separately for the events on May 28 and 29.

For further information, please use the contact information below:
CDM Post-2012 workshop, May 28:
Dr. Maria Falaleeva, Institute for Environmental Studies IVM,
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Email:  maria.falaleeva at ivm.vu.nl
Phone: +31 20 5986221
Climate Governance workshop, May 29:
Dr. Joakim Nordqvist, Environmental and Energy Systems Studies,
Lund University
Email:  joakim.nordqvist at miljo.lth.se
Phone: +46 46 2223848

Information is also availiable at:
ADAM project web-site: www.adam-project.eu
Lund University Climate Policy Research Blog: www.fpi.lu.se/climate

and from Dr. Henry Neufeldt:

the ADAM project (Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies: Supporting European Climate Policy) has just finished its second year. Since our last newsletter we have published a number of reports that could be interesting for you and can be accessed from the ADAM website (some require registering). The newsletter also gives a brief introduction to the work being carried out in our regional case studies.

Please have a look at the newsletter to see what kind of work we are doing and access the documents that could be of interest to you by visiting www.adamproject.eu.

Dr Henry Neufeldt
ADAM Project Manager
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
University of East Anglia
Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

+44 1603 59 1120 phone
+44 1603 59 3901 fax
 h.neufeldt at uea.ac.uk
www.adamproject.eu

Head of U.N. climate panel to seek new term.

Sat Apr 5, 2008 7:05pm BST

By Alister Doyle, Reuters Oslo Based Environment Correspondent.

India’s Rajendra Pachauri said on Saturday he will seek a new six-year term as head of the U.N. climate panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

“I have after a great deal of reflection and consultation decided to express interest in a second term,” Pachauri, 67, told Reuters.

“Of course, the government of India would have to send in my nomination, and I hope that will happen soon,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Elected in a controversial vote in 2002, Pachauri has in the past said he was undecided about whether to seek a second term as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a vote due later this year.

Pachauri has no clear rivals and U.N. officials believe that Pachauri {an engineer and not a scientist}, who is head of Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) in New Delhi {funded by the Tata interests that are involved also in oil industry}, is likely to win re-election after successfully guiding a giant 2007 IPCC report.

Drawing on the work of 2,500 leading climate scientists, the IPCC said last year that it was “very likely”, or at least 90 percent certain, that human activities led by burning fossil fuels were causing global warming.

It said quick action to avert the worst effects — such as more droughts, heatwaves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels — would not derail world economic growth.

Pachauri was elected as chair of the IPCC in a 76-49 vote in 2002, with the backing of developing nations and of U.S. President George W. Bush, over the former IPCC head, British-born U.S. scientist Robert Watson {who was also Chief Scientist of The World Bank and seen by some Asian and African UN Member States as a tool of the developed countries}.

Gore at the time criticized Pachauri as the ‘let’s drag our feet candidate’ who would get little done compared to the blunt-speaking Watson.

Gore has since apologized for his criticisms of Pachauri. Many scientists and diplomats say Pachauri has been far tougher in warning of the risks of climate change than the Bush administration apparently hoped {and that is quite true but is yet no answer to how far Watson would have gone}.

The IPCC, founded by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.N. Environment Programme in 1988, will hold a meeting in Hungary next week to start planning for new work.

It has produced overview climate reports in 2007, 2001, 1995 and 1990. The conclusions are approved by scientists and by more than 130 member governments.

Some governments want more frequent updates and specialist reports, perhaps about the thaw of ice in the polar regions.

Spurred by the IPCC’s warnings, governments agreed in Bali, Indonesia, in December to work out a new climate treaty by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. {That is - to succeed the phase of Kyoto that ends in 2012. The 2009 - 2012 period - that is the training time for the Kyoto Protocol arrangements that do not include obligations from the US, China, india, Brazil … would benefit imensely if new studies were made officially public by the IPCC. As a lot of information is right there available already - an agresive leadership will not have to wait for 2012-13 to release an IPCC V report. Perhaps a more agresive scientist - balanced like Pachauri, but agresive like Watson - would be a better choice. Also, as backing for the position comes from Heads of State, it would be appropriate for the US to express its political/scientific choice after the new President was decided in the November 2008 elections.}

Kyoto binds all developed nations except the United States to curb emissions by 2012. Bush said Kyoto would cost too much and wrongly omitted targets for developing nations such as China and India.

 http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

This week - 31 March - 6 April - the European Commission will discuss plans designed to better sell the EU to its own public.

Known as “Plan D”, the concept was launched after the shock of the NO votes to the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands three years ago. The commission realized then that  they better go back to the drawing board to re-examine its public image.

Since then it has concentrated on churning out less legislation, and more attention to spelling out the benefits to citizens - with the famous example being its fight to lower tariffs for mobile phoning abroad.

EU communications commissioner Margot Wallstrom will present an update of the plan on Wednesday.

The following day, her external relations colleague Benita Ferrero Waldner will publish a report detailing the progress made in the bloc’s neighbourhood policy.

The policy covers eastern European states as well as Mediterranean and North African states. The commission says it tailors its agreements to the particular country concerned but several complain that the deals are too formulaic. Ukraine and Georgia, in particular, want more political commitment from the EU.

On Tuesday, the constitutional affairs committee will vote on a report by Finnish centre-right MEP Alexander Stubb on setting out rules for the thousands of lobbyists that work the institution to try and influence EU legislation.

The main sticking point is whether there should be a mandatory or voluntary register for the lobbyists, of which there are around 3000 permanently accredited to the parliament.

Tuesday will also see internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy address the economic and monetary affairs committee, with continued turmoil on the financial markets providing the backdrop.

EUROPEAN JOB MARKET  FOR ENVIRONMENTAL AND RESOURCE ECONOMISTS.

EAERE 16th Annual Conference

25-28 June 2008, Gothenburg, Sweden
 www.eaere.org) announces the European Job Market for Environmental and Resource Economists, to be held within its 16th Annual Conference, from the 25th to the 28th of June 2008, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Institutions with open positions and candidates are invited to take part in this initiative.

Detailed information is available at www.eaere.org

We look forward to receiving your application and to meeting you in Gothenburg.

Thomas Sterner, EAERE President and 16th Annual Conference Organiser
Santiago Rubio, EAERE Vice-President
Monica Eberle, EAERE Secretary General

Modern Purim thoughts include the UN.

Purim is the day when Jews remember the plans made by Haman to eradicate all the Jews of the old Persian empire. He did not succeed and paid with his life - as we say - the rest is history.

Jews were ordered to remember what happened then - so they read that story - the Megillah (the parchment of Esther) - year after year - on the evening before Purim. This year it happened on Thursday, March, 20th - so last night we participated at the “Megillah Madness” - at The New York Synagogue in Manhattan - led by Rabbi Marc Schneier.
The celebration was at very high tone and at serious decibels - this to the sound and projections of the Beatles Music and the noise of the traditional “grogger” rattles. Each time the name Haman is read - and this happens 54 times during the readings - mayhem brakes lose and the costumed servers came forth to bring us delicious Haman’s Ears (”Oznei Haman” in Hebrew - staffed with marmalade or poppy seeds), or glasses of sweet whisky spiked drinks. Purim is in effect an annual of catharsis, healthy for the mind and the soul. Quite nice when all you are supposed is to remember evil, so you are better prepared when it strikes again. You see, Purim does in effect obligate today the State of Israel to the UN mandate of: “The Principle to Protect.”

On Purim, the Jewish Jockers are used to run a competition for the coveted “Haman of the Year Award” and this year’s two top candidates were two heads of UN Member States who appear daily on the UN menu: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir of the Sudan. The former attacks Jews verbally every day, and has also sponsored militants that fight Jews and Israel daily, while the latter was reportedly actually engaged in genocide against less Arabized Africans of Darfur. www.SustainabiliTank.info has posted many times articles on above deeds. We even tried to understand the background of the genocide in Darfur by considering climate change aspects as an influence on what started the warfare. But whatever the reasons, it is the government of Khartoom that backed its favorites. We see here fights between intruding, more Arabized, pastoralists against lesser Arabized, and blacker, agriculturalists. Our claim was that this is genocide that was started by increased desertification in the region. The UN as an institution did not want to hear such arguments, and eventually it took Sir Nicholas Stern, and the intervention of the UK government at the UN Security Council, to vindicate last year what we were saying three years ago. Whatever the issue, it was al-Bashir’s responsibility “TO PROTECT” his citizens. Instead he puts hurdles before those from the outside that came to help.
The UN Security Council has had Darfur on its agenda for five years, and the genocide continues. But the Council spends disproportionately more time considering Israel’s actions with various UN diplomats berating Israel for defending itself vigorously.
Our “Haman of the Year Award” goes to President al-Bashir. If his enemies don’t get him, the UN has established an International Criminal Court and we wonder why was it not invoked yet in the matter of Sudan’s actions in Darfur. Our website described last week how Dr. al-Bashir let UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wait for him in Dakar, and never showed up for the meeting claiming a headache.

Happy Purim - and I would like to note further that this year Purim falls on the same day as Good Friday - or Easter Friday. This has happened only the second time since 1910.

Easter occurs on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, and that full moon usually coincides with the first day of Passover. That is how both religions - Judaism and Christianity have the renewal holidays aligned. This year this is not the case, and the reason is that it is leap year in the Jewish calendar, and an added month (a 13-th month) has been introduced. That brings instead the strange alignment between Easter and Purim. We would like to see in this an opportunity for healing - in the sense that we could say changes could be introduced so that Haman-type of hatred is removed from our lives - our society gets renewed like at Passover time, though this is Purim time. Would it be so terrible to ask the UN to consider this proposition of making sure that evil is remembered and actually acted against?

At the five years’ mark, we still think that deposing Saddam was right - staying in Iraq for oil was wrong. Investing that over half trillion dollars waisted (costs are already over $800 billion considering also the fight to depose Saddam) in creating an economy less dependent on oil would have been a much more reasoned choice. What now?

www.SustainabiliTank.info posts the following Washington Post article as a memorial to what we were saying since the start of our website. Sure - the surge has started to work, but to what end? Will the US be able to hold Iraq together as one state common to all its communities? Is it really important to have it as one integrated oil exporting source, at a time that we will anyway start to decrease our economy’s dependence on oil? After removing Saddam we could have left the Iraqi’s to sort out their future by themselves. Had they come up with a Saddam-alike, the US could have gone in a third time - less cost and nothing lost. If the US still insists in keeping Iraq in one piece - will this not push the country even more into future collusion with Iran? The Shiia are the majority and the only part of Iraq that really seeks independence are the Kurds. Why hold them back from achieving their goal? Even Turkey starts to understand that a secure Kurdistan, cards played right, could be to their advantage, and the EU, without pressure from the US, would also shine some light in that direction. The Sunni monarchs of the League of Arab States are yet years away from understanding the emerging new neighborhood in which extreme religious interpretation is bound to highjack also their own states - this because they had that false hope that the oil-money can help them deflect the ire of their own people to targets abroad - the likes of Israel, and even their own benefactor - the United States. This sounds sick - but sick it is. It was that oil-money, that to different degrees, paved the way and paid for the radicalization of the world’s two billion Muslims.

And what did all of this do to the value of the dollar and to US economy at large?

Surely, The Washington Post does not make our points, but then it presents a reasonable description of how sad America feels on this day - after five years of war and just one year after the start of a real attempt to manage that war.

The EU Observer looks into the damages the continuation of the war did to EU-US relations and to the split it created within the EU. What is the value loss to the US from above? How long will take the healing process?

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…

 http://euobserver.com/9/25856/?rk=1

Five Years In Iraq
Iraqis and Americans Offer Perspectives on the War
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008; A01

The planning ministry in Baghdad explodes after being hit during the second day of U.S. raids on the Iraqi capital March 20, 2003. (Faleh Kheiber - Reuters)

For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.

It has been about a year since Army Gen. David H. Petraeus arrived to command U.S. forces in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker took over as the chief U.S. diplomat, and the military deployed 30,000 more troops to protect and rebuild neighborhoods.

Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies — in particular, sharply reduced violence — are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife.

“I came to Washington to describe what we’re doing,” Charles P. Ries, Crocker’s senior deputy in charge of reconstruction and the Iraqi economy, said during a visit last week. “At almost every meeting, somebody wants me to describe what we used to do. . . . I know why people raise these questions, but I don’t feel it’s something I can speak to. The times were different then.”

Today’s policy is fundamentally different from the impatient mind-set of 2003, in both lowered U.S. expectations and a less imperious approach to dealing with Iraqi authorities. “In those days,” Ries said, “we decided what [the Iraqis] needed, and we built it.” Today, he said, Iraqis are asked what they want, and then told that while the United States will help, they will have to pay for most of it themselves.

Yet as the administration requests additional war funding and calls for a pause in promised troop withdrawals, some question its right to a second chance. “Like a tourniquet,” the troop increase “has stopped the bleeding,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed said, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become. And even U.S. officials acknowledge that the “surge” has not led to the political reconciliation the administration had hoped for.

Others see the past year’s successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. “I think they have it righter than they ever have before,” Daniel P. Serwer, an Iraq expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace, said of the administration. “But the fact is that those four other years did exist, and they condition a lot of what can and cannot happen now. There’s a history here, there’s a lot of blood and guts on the floor — literally.”

The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. While it recognizes the inclination to “relitigate the past” when a milestone such as the fifth anniversary is reached, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, “our focus is on the way ahead and making sure that the current situation and the future situation gets better.”

In addition to new directions on the ground in Iraq, officials point to a newly effective structure designed to avoid the kind of ad hoc decision-making that led to early bureaucratic gridlock and mistakes, such as decrees dissolving the Iraqi army and banning Baath Party members from government jobs. President Bush’s appointment last spring of Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan has “helped streamline the process and made sure that there is . . . a senior-level official who can devote his full, undivided attention” to the subject, Johndroe said.

The once-bickering State Department and Pentagon are reporting new levels of cooperation. Diplomats who recall Donald H. Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Defense Department control all aspects of early postwar policy note approvingly that it was his successor as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who recently called on Congress to increase the State Department’s budget.

Many U.S. officials participating in the new efforts talk about those years as though they belonged to another administration. “We weren’t here five years ago,” said one who, like several interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity about past policy on the grounds that it would undermine the present.

“In the early days, they had an idea of something, a plan, of how it was going to be,” the official said. “They would remove Saddam, and democracy would flower. They took this plan and rammed it down into the reality of Iraq, which nobody understood. What did they know about Iraq? Who were they listening to?” In the past year, the official said, “there has been a coming to grips across the board with Iraqi reality.”

One of the more troublesome realities is that Iraqi leaders have been slow to take advantage of the “breathing space” that the troop increase was supposed to create. The administration has often noted that Washington and Baghdad operate on different clocks, with the U.S. timetable for demonstrable progress running far faster than its Iraqi counterpart. In an interview last week, Petraeus, the U.S. military commander, acknowledged that “no one” in the U.S. and Iraqi governments “feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation” or in the provision of basic public services.

In congressional testimony scheduled for early next month, both Petraeus and Crocker are expected to make the case that enough forward movement has been made to justify continuing the current strategy, and to warn that an abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops could jeopardize the gains of the past year.

But while a strong congressional appearance by the two men last September quieted talk of funding cutoffs and brought a brief rise in public attention, their upcoming testimony appears to have sparked little anticipation.

As the administration struggles to focus on Iraq’s future, it is competing with a presidential race locked in debate about how the war began and how to end it, a Democratic Congress determined to fight over every additional dollar, and a weary, distracted public.

Indeed, once a top public concern, Iraq has been muscled aside by the economy and the political campaigns. In a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center, more people knew the names of the head of the Federal Reserve Board and the president of Venezuela than knew the approximate number of U.S. casualties in Iraq.

Some public views about the situation in Iraq have eased over the past year. But others, including baseline judgments about the war itself, have hardly budged. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly two-thirds said the war was not worth waging. Less than half, 43 percent, think the United States is making significant progress, and majorities continue to judge the war’s benefits as not worth its costs.

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

——————————-

And From the EUobserver - Iraq and the EU: Five Years On.

20.03.2008 - 09:21 CET | By Renata Goldirova from Brussels.
It has been five years since the United States began its military operation dubbed ‘Iraqi Freedom’. The war resulted in a deep rift in transatlantic relations, caused a split within the European Union and made Iraqis the single largest group seeking refuge in Europe.

On 20 March 2003, thousands of troops from four countries - the US (250,000), the United Kingdom (45,000), Australia (2,000) and Poland (194) - invaded Iraq. The invasion led to a quick defeat of the Iraqi regime, with its leader, Saddam Hussein, being captured in December 2003 and executed in December 2006.

The US and its allies cited allegations that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed and was actively developing weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the invasion. However, no evidence of weapons of mass destruction have been found in the country’s territory.

“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting … The answer is clear to me: removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision,” US president George W. Bush said on Wednesday (19 March).

Some estimates suggest that up to one million Iraqis have been killed since 2003, while the financial burden amounts to some $9 billion for London and $845 billion for Washington. Former head of the IMF Joseph Stiglitz has recently estimated the cost to be as high as $3 trillion.

But Mr Bush referred to the costs of the war as “exaggerated estimates”. “No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure - but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq,” he said.

EU split:

The issue of military intervention against Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime became the biggest ever test for the EU’s common foreign and security policy, as member states were not able to speak with one voice.

Several countries, led by France and Germany, were opposed to US-led invasion, while others took part.

At the time, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld exacerbated the divisions by saying: “Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem.”

“You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe,” Mr Rumsfeld famously said.

Since 2003, a number of EU countries such as Italy, Lithuania, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia and the Netherlands have withdrawn their soldiers from the violence-torn country, mainly due to public opinion.

At the same time, troops from Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Romania and the Czech Republic remain deployed in Iraq.

Pressure from Iraqi refugees:

According to fresh numbers released by the UN high commissioner for refugees earlier this week (18 March), asylum requests from Iraqis climbed to 38,286 in 2007, a sharp increase from the 19,375 claims in 2006.

A number of non-governmental organisations have therefore blamed the EU for not doing enough over a major refugee crisis, pointing to the fact that the treatment of Iraqis varies significantly from one member state to another.

For example, Sweden’s reception facilities have been under huge pressure, as the Scandinavian country is the only one within the 27-nation bloc granting refugee status or other protection to almost all Iraqi asylum seekers. A total of 9,065 Iraqis applied for refugee status there in 2006, compared to 2,330 the previous year.

The EU “cannot continue to ignore one of the world’s major displacement crises,” says a statement of a group of eight NGOs, including Amnesty International and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.

In general, it is estimated that six million people inside Iraq need urgent humanitarian assistance as a result of the conflict. Some 2.5 million are internally displaced, while an additional two million are hosted by neighbouring countries such as Syria and Jordan.