Glaciers Suffer Record Shrinkage

BBC News
Sunday 16 March 2008

The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, data from the United Nations Environment Programme has shown.

Average glacial shrinkage has risen from 30 centimetres per year between 1980 and 1999, to 1.5 metres in 2006.

Some of the biggest losses have occurred in the Alps and Pyrenees mountain ranges in Europe.

Experts have called for "immediate action" to reverse the trend, which is seen as a key climate change indicator.

Estimates for 2006 indicate shrinkage of 1.4 metres of 'water equivalent' compared to half a metre in 2005.

Achim Steiner, Under-Secretary General of the UN and executive director of its environment programme (UNEP), said: "Millions if not billions of people depend directly or indirectly on these natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year.

"There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine. The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice.

Litmus Test

He said that action was already being taken and pointed out that the elements of a green economy were emerging from the more the money invested in renewable energies.

Mr Steiner went on: "The litmus test will come in late 2009 at the climate convention meeting in Copenhagen.

"Here governments must agree on a decisive new emissions reduction and adaptation-focused regime. Otherwise, and like the glaciers, our room for maneuver and the opportunity to act may simply melt away."

Dr Ian Willis, of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said: "It is not too late to stop the shrinkage of these ice sheets but we need to take action immediately."

The findings were compiled by the World Glacier Monitoring Service which is supported by UNEP. Thickening and thinning is calculated in terms of 'water equivalent'.

Glaciers across nine mountain ranges were analysed.

Dr. Wilfried Haeberli, director of the service, said: "The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight.

"This continues the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past two and a half decades and brings the total loss since 1980 to more than 10.5 metres of water equivalent."

During 1980-1999, average loss rates had been 0.3 metres per year. Since the turn of the millennium, this rate had increased to about half a metre per year.

The record annual loss during these two decades - 0.7 metres in 1998 - has now been exceeded by three out of the past six year (2003, 2004 and 2006).

On average, one metre water equivalent corresponds to 1.1 metres in ice thickness. That suggests a further shrinking in 2006 of 1.5 actual metres and since 1980 a total reduction in thickness of ice of just over 11.5 metres or almost 38 feet.

In its entirety, the research includes figures from around 100 glaciers, with data showing significant shrinkage taking place in European countries including Austria, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier thinned by almost 3.1 metres in one of the largest reductions.

Secretary Bremby's testimony before Congress

Written Testimony of Roderick L. Bremby

Secretary, Kansas Department of Health and Environment

House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming

Hearing on “Massachusetts v. U.S. EPA Part II: Implications of the Supreme Court Decision”

Salina Journal On-Line - March 14th, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008.

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I am Roderick L. Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. I appreciate the opportunity to testify on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, No. 05-1120, slip op. (U.S., April 2, 2007), and how the decision related to my denial of the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation’s (Sunflower Electric) permit for the addition of two 700-megawatt coal-fired generators. I will also address the legal and policy implications of EPA’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

This responsibility is exercised through the regulation of health and environmental entities in Kansas including childcare centers, food service businesses, hospitals, laboratories, feedlots, landfills, power plants, and various other industries with environmental impacts. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment also manages programs dedicated to providing disease surveillance and prevention efforts, bioterrorism planning, local and rural health assistance, health care and environmental protection information, and statewide health promotional campaigns.

In keeping with the agency mission and to secure its vision of “healthy Kansans living in safe and sustainable environments,” in October 2007 I made the decision to deny the permit request of Sunflower Electric, which if granted, would have allowed the emission of an estimated 11 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually.

Basis for the Sunflower Electric Permit Decision.

The Massachusetts v. EPA decision was highly influential in the State of Kansas’ decision to deny the petition of Sunflower Electric to construct a coal-fired power plant. The Supreme Court’s finding that greenhouse gases are an air pollutant within the meaning of the federal Clean Air Act supports and confirms my own determination that CO2 constitutes air pollution within the meaning of the Kansas Air Quality Act.

Under the Kansas Air Quality Act, the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment has broad authority to protect the health of Kansas citizens and the environment. The process for obtaining an air quality permit includes a technical review of a permit application as well as a comment period to solicit input on the proposed permit from the public. Upon consideration of the permit record as a whole and pursuant to the legal authority of K.S.A. 65-3008a(b) and K.S.A. 65-3012, the decision was made to deny the permit. The former statute provides that a decision on an air quality permit may be affirmed, modified or reversed after the public hearing. The latter statute allows the Secretary to take such action as necessary to protect the health of persons or the environment, notwithstanding a permit applicant’s compliance with all other existing provisions of the Kansas Air Quality Act. Action under K.S.A. 65-3012 requires information that the emission of air pollution presents a substantial endangerment to the health of persons or to the environment. Endangerment may be a threatened or potential harm as well as an actual harm.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA was a key consideration in making the Sunflower Electric decision. The Court’s recognition of the significant national and international information available on the deleterious impact of greenhouse gases on the environment, and its conclusion that the greenhouse gas, CO2, meets the broad definition of air pollutant under the Clean Air Act provided support for the position I took that CO2 also meets the similarly broad definition of air pollution under the Kansas Air Quality Act. The Court’s decision, the Kansas Attorney General Opinion supporting my interpretation of K.S.A. 65-3012, the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, and the extensive administrative record - including comments submitted at the public hearings held in regard to the Sunflower Electric permit application - all contributed to my conclusion that the CO2 emissions from the proposed Sunflower Electric expansion would constitute a substantial endangerment to the citizens of Kansas and our environment.

Effect of EPA’s Failure to Regulate Greenhouse Gases.

EPA’s failure to determine one way or the other whether greenhouse gases “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” has impacted the State of Kansas’ ability to enforce and maintain the authority stemming from state law to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution.

Unless and until EPA acts, its failure to regulate greenhouse gases has significantly - and adversely - affected Kansans. The Kansas Legislature has recently passed a bill that will serve to tether greenhouse gas emission control in our state directly to what EPA will do … or fail to do. The “Sunflower Electric bill” (House Substitute for S.B. 327) provides that I, as Secretary of KDHE, may not promulgate any rule or regulation, or issue any order or take any other action under any provision of the Kansas Air Quality Act that is more “stringent, restrictive, or expansive” than required by the CAA or any rule or regulation adopted thereunder by EPA. Governor Sebelius has expressed her intention to veto the Sunflower Electric bill, which passed with votes insufficient for an override, but that may change. .

Until EPA takes action on regulating greenhouse gases, we in Kansas will be limited in our ability to aggressively address CO2 emissions. Given the unambiguous requirement in the CAA that CO2 emissions be regulated and reduced, it would make sense from both a human health and business perspective for EPA to issue its regulations as quickly as possible. .

Impact of EPA Decision to Regulate GHG Emissions on Kansas Dispute.

EPA’s issuance of an endangerment finding or notice of any intent to promulgate federal regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources would further support my decision to regulate CO2 emissions in Kansas, which was appealed to the Kansas Court of Appeals, the District Court of Finney County, Kansas, and the Office of Administrative Hearings of the State of Kansas. The Kansas Supreme Court has taken up the appeals filed in the Court of Appeals on its own motion, and the proceedings in the district court and office of administrative appeals are stayed, pending disposition of the appeals by the Supreme Court.

In denying Sunflower Electric’s permit application, I found that its proposal to construct two new coal-fired power plant units poses a substantial endangerment to Kansans and our environment. That finding is well supported by the extensive administrative record, and I stand by it. EPA’s issuance of an endangerment finding would support my determination, but is not necessary for it. Similarly, my authority to take action in regard to greenhouse gas emissions - and therefore deny Sunflower Electric’s permit application - was based on the Kansas Air Quality Act. Therefore, EPA’s notice of intent to regulate would support my exercising the authority granted to me by Kansas law, but is not necessary to it. However, EPA’s decision to regulate GHG emissions would be critical to alleviating the so-called “regulatory uncertainty” and thus economic uncertainty I have been alleged to have created by denying the Sunflower Electric permit.

Conclusion.

The most critical challenge facing the states is policy uncertainty at the federal level. In the absence of federal legislation or regulation in this area and with the potential for enactment of the legislation currently pending in Kansas, it would be impossible for Kansas to protect the health of its citizens and the environment from the effects of CO2.

Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony. I look forward to your questions.

Roderick L. Bremby Secretary, Kansas Department of Health and Environment Topeka, Kansas Prior to his January 2003 appointment by Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary Bremby served as a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas and as associate director of the Work Group on Health Promotion and Community Development. His work involved providing technical assistance, evaluation support and community research for community health initiatives. Secretary Bremby has been a consultant for a variety of organizations including, community coalitions, advocacy organizations, local government agencies, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (Strengthening Democracy in Uganda).

Secretary Bremby served 10 years as the assistant city manager in Lawrence, KS, where he was responsible for overseeing the budgeting process, police, fire and medical, public works, water, sewer, finance, information systems, and parks and recreation departments. Secretary Bremby holds a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Kansas, where he completed an undergraduate degree in psychology and communication studies. He also completed postgraduate study at the Brookings Institution, The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and an executive development course at The Center for Creative Leadership. Secretary Bremby is a Kansas Health Foundation Fellow and a graduate of Leadership Forth Worth, Leadership Lawrence, and Leadership Kansas.

The Monstrous Monsanto Universe

By Dominique Dhombres
Le Monde, Wednesday 12 March 2008

To view original click here.

The charge sheet is horrifying, inexorable and convincing. The multinational firm Monsanto, which sells 90 percent of genetically modified organisms (GMO), massively lies to many people and even the whole planet with great success - the power that money and the - apparently unlimited - support of the United States government bestows. You already know all that if you watched Marie-Monique Robin's extraordinary documentary, "Le Monde selon Monsanto" ["The World According to Monsanto"], March 11 on the Arte channel.

The case is conducted as a personal investigation, and the director has herself filmed as she plays her computer keys to research, most often through Google, the information accessible to everyone, as long as one is willing to try to separate the wheat from the chaff in the mass of available documents. And there's an abundance of chaff, given how the company has proliferated effective advertising (intended for farmers in every country and in every language) and dubious scientific studies over the years. "On its Internet site, Monsanto presents itself as an agricultural company the mission of which is to help small farmers produce healthier food, while reducing agriculture's impact on the environment," the director explains. Neither assertion is true. Some of these foodstuffs are dangerous and their effect on nature is catastrophic in the long term. Founded in 1901 in Saint Louis (Missouri), the firm is a dangerous recidivist. It began as an industrial company manufacturing chemical products.

It has, notably, concocted impressive quantities of dioxin, the hyper-concentrated poison contained in the Agent Orange American airplanes dispersed over forests to destroy vegetation during the Vietnam War. Its consequences are still being felt today, with the births of deformed children and after-effects on a goodly number of American war veterans exposed to this frightening product. Is that nightmare in the process of resuming under a new form right under our eyes? There's this hormone injected into milk cows to increase their yield that invariably transforms them into Frankenstein animals.

We are now very familiar with - because José Bové has so often "prematurely" reaped it - the surprising corn that yields a bigger ear than the others. At the moment, no one knows whether it also has death-dealing properties. But we are certain that it is in the process of eliminating, little by little, all other corn species, even from the plant's original birthplace, Mexico.

Obviously, we should have liked to have Monsanto's response to these accusations. The firm declined that offer. That's too bad.

---

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

SUVs Without Wheels

by Stan Cox
Published on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

To view original click here.

The financial industry is suffering convulsions because it gave too many people too big an answer to the question, “How much house can I afford?” But in looking over the mess left by the popped housing bubble, another question comes to mind, one of much greater consequence in the long run: “How much house can the planet afford?”

Since 1990, construction of supersized homes of 3,000 square feet or more has doubled, to 24 percent of new homes. Combine that with the shrinking size of the American family, and the result is that average floor space per person has grown by three times since 1950.

As the heavy-breathing real estate market reached its zenith, square-footage mania spread from the suburbs into cities, mutating into a doubly wasteful disease: teardown fever. Normal-sized, sound, comfortable houses were demolished to free up urban lots for the biggest, flashiest structures that could be squeezed in.

For homebuyers with more money than time, the big bust is no problem. The Wall Street Journal reports that luxury-home builders in places like Greenwich, Conn., and Aspen, Colo., are hiring armies of construction workers to complete 10,000-square-foot projects in about half the typical time.

Whether they’re targeting the tastelessness of mass-produced McMansions bulked up on low-interest steroids or the ostentation of real mansions in enclaves of the rich, critics of the oversized-house trend usually focus on aesthetics. Monumental bad taste is indeed fascinating. But far more serious is the lasting environmental damage these incredible hulks do.

The manufacture and transportation of concrete to build a typical 3,000-square-foot house generate greenhouse gases amounting to 47 tons of carbon dioxide. And laid end to end, the pieces of lumber to make that house would stretch for more than four miles.

Wood, unlike concrete, gets some credit for being a “renewable” resource. The lumber and construction industries point out that they are taking greenhouse carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it into wood-frame houses. But that ignores the ecological effect of wrecking complex forest ecosystems to feed industrial wood production.

And in addition to requiring greater quantities of wood, concrete, plastics and copper, large houses have more volume to heat and cool, and more room for appliances and gadgets. Over a 50-year lifetime, a standard house pumps out greenhouse emissions amounting to 30 to 40 times the weight of the carbon that’s socked away in its frame.

The bigger the house, the bigger the emissions. Based on University of Michigan figures, a typical 3,000-square-footer will emit as much carbon dioxide as would three — count ‘em, three — 16-miles-per-gallon SUVs driven the national vehicle average of 12,000 miles per year over 50 years.

Energy consumption is being addressed in a limited way by eco-friendly construction. But a 2005 analysis in the Journal of Industrial Ecology concluded that a 3,000-square-foot, super-efficient house consumes 50 percent more energy than does a 1,500-square-foot house built only to mediocre energy standards.

Building new, resource-tight houses without curbing their size could make matters worse. Taking monthly energy savings into account, buyers will see that they can afford a bigger mortgage payment — and more square footage — with an efficient house.

The long-term effect of titanic houses parallels that of SUVs and pickup trucks. Sales of the biggest and least efficient vehicles might be ebbing, but those that have accumulated over the past decade will be out there by the millions, belching pollutants, for years to come.

And American families will be living in, heating, cooling and powering their current fleet of SUVs without wheels not for years, but for decades.

The economy will eventually shake off its post-bubble hangover and move on to new crises. The bigger challenge will be cutting carbon emissions deeply enough to avert catastrophic climate change. To meet that goal, one thing we will have to do is yank excessive square footage out from the tangle of current housing problems and declare it a luxury whose ecological costs we can no longer afford.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., and author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine,” a book to be released later this month. He wrote this essay for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. Reach him at t.stan@cox.net.

The World as It Is

by Chris Hedges, Turthdig, posted 10 March 2008.

To view original click here.

War creates a world without empathy. Those who have empathy cannot, as did Palestinian gunman Alaa Hisham Abu Dheim, coldly murder students in a Jerusalem library. Those who have empathy cannot drop tons of iron fragmentation bombs on crowded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, killing more than 120 Palestinians in a week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians. Those who have empathy do not, as Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai did, thunder at the Palestinians that they face a shoah, meaning catastrophe or holocaust. Those with empathy are unable to rejoice, as many leaders of Hamas did, over slaughter, as if the murder of the other’s innocents is justified by the murder of your innocents.

We live in a world, at home and in the Middle East, hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do no love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses. And we are all guilty, Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis and Israelis. But we are not all guilty equally.
Israel and the United States bear the responsibility for a world that has unleashed twisted killers such as Abu Dheim. It is the decades of repression in Gaza, as well as the callous occupation in Iraq, that has bequeathed to us a new generation of jihadists and gunmen who walk into yeshivas and spray automatic fire at people bent over books. For as the poet W.H. Auden pointed out:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The long, slow drip of collective humiliation and abuse, along with the tiny and large indignities that go into transforming human beings into fanatics, is rarely understood by those on the outside. It ticks away like a clock until it suddenly explodes in our face. Because we do not know where it came from, it strikes us as incomprehensible, irrational, the product of a demented form of humanity. These killers, however, are not formed by the Quran or Islam or a culture that is morally inferior to our own. They are formed by a 40-year occupation, by the continued expansion of Jewish settlements, by the refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees, by the use of fighter jets to bomb squalid refugee camps and by an Israeli siege of Gaza that has blocked fuel, electricity and essential supplies and created a humanitarian crisis for 1.5 million Palestinians. It is what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians, what we have done to the Iraqis, that has brought us to this impasse. We unleashed this violence and only we can end it.

Hamas was a nonentity, a tiny group of radicals who wielded no influence and had little following when in 1988 I first reported from Gaza. But the steady drumbeat of Israeli repression and violence, aided by the corruption and incompetence of Yasser Arafat, led to Hamas’ slow rise to supplant Arafat’s Fatah party. By 2006 Hamas was elected to power. This election, by all accounts free and fair, saw Jerusalem and Washington begin a covert effort to overthrow Hamas, according to documents obtained by Vanity Fair and the Guardian. The Fatah leader Muhammad Dahlan was, according to these documents, given cash, weapons and assistance through Egypt and Jordan to start a Palestinian civil war. Hamas stepped in to thwart the attempted coup. It drove Dahlan and Fatah out of Gaza. The current bifurcation of Palestinian territories, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank, began.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, unable to break Hamas with the siege and frustrated by the Palestinians’ spontaneous rupture of the barricades that separate the Gaza Strip from Egypt, is trying to pound Gaza into submission. During the past three months of unrelenting Israeli strikes, over 300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have died in Israeli attacks. The strikes have done nothing, however, to halt the rocket attacks on Israeli towns or end Hamas rule.

Amnesty International, CARE International and Oxfam UK, along with other humanitarian aid groups, in a report last week said that living conditions in Gaza are at their worst point since Israel occupied the strip in 1967. The report estimated that 80 percent of the residents of Gaza are now dependent on food aid, compared with 63 percent two years ago. It noted that unemployment is about 40 percent among the general population and 70 percent in the private sector. The aid groups document power cuts to hospitals of as long as 12 hours a day, 50 million liters of sewage pouring into the sea daily, and water and sewage systems on the brink of collapse. The groups have called on the European Union and the British government to pressure Israel to open border crossings and begin negotiations with Hamas.

Washington and Jerusalem have little interest in a peaceful settlement. They are blinded by their own military prowess. They do not grasp that a continuation of violence and a tightening of the siege will spur more desperate and embittered young men and women to acts of vengeance. The only route left is to hear the cries of all the victims, Israeli and Palestinian, to recapture empathy. Hamas’ offer to negotiate a truce, an offer backed by 64 percent of Israelis, is the only escape route. There is no option other than to finally give the Palestinians control over their lives and land. It is the only option that will, as well, save us in Iraq. The occupation of Palestinian territory, like the occupation of Iraq, is illegal, increasingly violent and counterproductive.

I was in Gaza in 1993 after the Oslo peace accord was signed. It was as if, after years of suffocation, Palestinians and Israelis could breathe. But Oslo, in the hands of former Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, was strangled and thwarted. Peace eludes us in Palestine, Israel and Iraq not because people do not want peace but because we are governed by moral and intellectual trolls.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the Fatah party, was once considered a terrorist organization. It was illegal for an Israeli to have contact with the PLO. Those Israelis who called for negotiations with the Palestinian group were attacked and vilified. The Israeli government, however, under the pragmatism of Yitzhak Rabin, violated its own ban and began secret negotiations with the PLO. These negotiations led to the Oslo peace agreement. Fatah, today, is touted by Jerusalem and Washington as an ally in the war against Hamas and a partner for peace.

The dynamics of power have changed. They will change again. Hamas is a reality that, however distasteful, is not going to go away. Any peace deal reached without Hamas is doomed to fail. The only question left is how many more people are going to die needlessly in Israel, in Palestine and in Iraq before Israeli and American leaders begin to deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be.

International Women's Day: How and Why We Celebrate

By Sue Katz
Consenting Adult
Friday 07 March 2008
To view original click here.

On Saturday, women around the world will celebrate our progress and plans for the future. Where will you be?

It's annoying that International Women's Day gets a mere whisper compared to the retail shout-out that Mothers' Day receives in this country. Although I'm not a big holiday/ritual/ceremony kinda girl (no, you can't ignore my birthdays), I do think this particular annual event is special, so I try to celebrate each year.

Let's start with some history.

In February, 1909, following a march for labor rights by many thousands of women workers the year before, the Socialist Party of America declared International Women's Day (IWD) in the United States. The next year, at the Second International, in Copenhagen, women from 11 countries adopted the Day in the hopes of furthering women's suffrage.

In 1911, over a million women and men marked the Day around the world, but only a week later the crime known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives of over 140 women in the rag trade - mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants - and the struggle against sweatshop conditions became forever associated with IWD.

Russian women imprinted their own radicalism on IWD in 1917 when their strike for "bread and peace" over the death of two million Russian soldiers led to the abdication of the Czar and governmental embrace of women's voting rights.

Soon the UN adopted International Women's Day and in 1975, in recognition of the second wave of feminism, held a global International Women's Year. This meant that, just like the men, we could gather from around the world, compromise bitterly after difficult debate (say, over the inclusion of queers or abortion rights), make resolutions that no one is entirely happy with and be unable to get our governments to put any resources into meeting the goals, anyway. Wow, finally we've got a seat at the table of world-level frustration.

While there's hardly even an official murmur in the States over IWD, there is a website that lists an exhilarating range of world locations and activities - giving the sense that International Women's Day is not as moribund elsewhere as it seems to be here. This website keeps a tally of events (and provides the photos I've used in this posting), including the following.

In Saudi Arabia, they're holding a two-day workshop on integrating women into the economy. A domestic violence group in Albania offers an event they call a Manifestation. Likewise, Tanzania's having a mother-daughter fundraiser for their domestic violence organization, while the funder in Fiji goes towards building a scholarship fund for "young women studying Automotive and Electrical Engineering at the Fiji Institute of Technology" - the event has the charming name of Women in Celebration of You. In Lebanon they'll be looking at women's health. Icelanders are planning to talk about women's world-wide friendships and about children's rights, while the Kenyan's are having a musical festival and handing out prestigious awards.

So what are you doing? I'm going to an annual tea with 90 other women in the afternoon and in the evening to a screening of the as-yet-unfinished film, "Left on Pearl", about the 1971 takeover that started on IWD of a Harvard University building by the vibrant Boston women's movement. I was there, so I was interviewed for the film. I'm going to celebrate old victories, because lately it feels like those are the only ones we have.

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Sue Katz has published journalism on the three continents where she has lived; her topics range from Middle East peace movements to the impact of ageing on sexuality. Visit her blog, Consenting Adult, at www.suekatz.com.

Loans Program for Rural Coal Plants Shelved

The Associated Press, Wednesday 05 March 2008
To view original click here

US agency cites climate change and construction costs.

Billings, Mont. - The federal government is suspending a major loan program for coal-fired power plants in rural communities, saying the uncertainties of climate change and rising construction costs make the loans too risky.

After issuing $1.3 billion in loans for new plant construction since 2001, none will be issued this year and likely none in 2009, James Newby, assistant administrator for the Rural Utilities Service, a branch of the Department of Agriculture, said Tuesday.

The program's suspension marks a dramatic reversal of a once-reliable source of new coal plant financing. It follows the announcement last month that several major banks will require plant developers to factor in climate change when seeking private funding.

"This is a big decision. It says new coal plants can't go to the federal government for money at least for the next couple years, and these are critical times for companies to get these plants built," said Abigail Dillen with the environmental law group Earthjustice. The group filed a federal lawsuit last year seeking to block the loan program.

At the time of the suspension, at least four utilities had been lined up for loans totaling $1.3 billion - for projects in Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas and Missouri. A project in Montana was denied funding last month. Two more were recently withdrawn: last October in Wyoming and earlier this week in Missouri.

Newby said material and labor costs for new coal plants have been rising 30 percent a year, even as utilities struggle to pinpoint future costs of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The 2 billion tons of those gases produced annually by coal-fired plants in the United States exceed the emissions of any other source.

Newby said those uncertainties prompted the White House's Office of Management and Budget to ask that new loans be put on hold until risks can be better quantified.

Rural utilities provide power to about 40 million customers across the nation. More than 60 percent of that electricity comes from coal.

Whether the plants that were awaiting federal loans can find alternative financing remains to be seen.

Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. announced this week it was "delaying indefinitely" its proposed plant in Norborne, Mo., after receiving word of the loan program suspension.

At least one developer, the East Kentucky Power Cooperative, is hoping to wait out the suspension of the loan program rather than seek more expensive loans on the open market, spokesman Nick Comer said.

Two more projects - Southern Montana Electric's Highwood Generating Station and Basin Electric Power Cooperative's Dry Fork plant in Wyoming - already are seeking private funding.

A representative of the East Texas Power Cooperative, which has proposed a plant in Plum Point, Ark., also said his utility would seek private financing if the loans are not resumed.

"We'll have to look elsewhere for funding, which will increase the interest expense, which will increase the electric bill for the consumers at the end of the line," said the cooperative's Ryan Thomas.

Newby, with the Rural Utilities Service, said his agency is considering imposing upfront fees on coal plant developers as a way to mitigate taxpayer exposure through the loan program. Initial discussions have centered on a 0.2 percent fee - equivalent to $2 million on every $1 billion in loans.

Newby added he was confident the government would work through the concerns over risk and resume issuing loans possibly as soon as 2010.

Glenn English, chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said the program's suspension was a sign of "nervousness" among lenders anxious over the potential ramifications of climate change legislation now before Congress.

Depending on what policies are adopted, retail electricity prices could increase sharply once the costs of reducing greenhouse gases are factored in, he said. Utilities that drop coal-fired power proposals will be forced to shop for more expensive electricity on the open market.

"What you're seeing (with the Rural Utilities Service) is a general reflection of the attitude we find in the financial community, mainly this apprehension about what the future holds and what can be expected out of government," English said.

FCC Official Wants Probe of "60 Minutes" Blackout

By Peter Kaplan
Reuters
Monday 03 March 2008

To view original click here

Washington - A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

"The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

The "60 Minutes" segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

The blackout of the segment in Huntsville prompted an editorial in The New York Times the following week that raised comparisons between the WHNT incident and systematic efforts by a Mississippi TV station to suppress information about the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

WHNT denied that the blackout was politically motivated. It said it had failed to get the segment on the air because of an equipment failure at the station that cut off the feed from CBS. WHNT said the problem was corrected a few minutes before the end of the Siegelman segment.

In a posting on WHNT's Web site, the station's news director, Denise Vickers, said the station had been "bombarded" with complaints and accusations that the station had sabotaged the broadcast for political reasons.

"But I assure everyone that the notion is patently false," Vickers wrote in her Web site posting. "Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??"

WHNT was sold along with eight other stations by The New York Times Co last year to the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Station managers requested and received permission from CBS to re-air the segment twice in the following days, Vickers said.

Copps said on Monday the FCC should move quickly to "determine the facts" surrounding the incident.

"If the decision was intentional, who made the decision and why? The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this," Copps said.

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Reporting by Peter Kaplan; editing by Stuart Grudgings.

It's Time for the UN to Make Water a Human Right

By Maude Barlow
Movement Vision Lab
Thursday 21 February 2008

The global water crisis is evident. We need a global solution in form of a United Nations covenant on water.

Maude Barlow is currently in the US touring for her new book, "Blue Covenant: Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water." Visit Food and Water Watch to see a list of cities and dates.

All over the world, groups who are fighting for local water rights are championing an international instrument on the right to water. Due to over-development and climate change, fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce. In addition, in many communities across the globe, people cannot get access to whatever clean water does exist without paying private corporations. The global water crisis is evident. We need a global solution in form of a United Nation Covenant on water.

For the past 15 years, the World Bank and the other regional development banks have promoted a private model of water development in the global South. This model has proven to be a failure. High water rates, cut-offs to the poor, reduced services, broken promises and pollution have been the legacy of privatization.

At the March 2006 4th World Water Forum in Mexico City, the UN cited the failure of privatization and called for governments to re-enter the water services arena. Calls for a UN Covenant to re-assert the crucial role of government in supplying water to the poor increased dramatically at the Forum and new impetus was given to this campaign.

Why a UN Covenant?

The fact that water is not now an acknowledged human right has allowed decision-making over water policy to shift from the UN and governments toward institutions and organizations that favour the private water companies and the commodification of water. These institutions include the World Bank and other regional development banks, the World Water Council, the Global Water Partnership and the World Trade Organization.

Not only have these institutions vigorously promoted the interests of the private water companies in the global South, they have ceded much political control over water policy to them. Many nations-state governments have gone along with this trend, allowing creeping privatization with little or no government oversight or pubic debate.

Behind the call for a binding instrument are questions of principle that must be decided soon as the world's water sources become more depleted and fought over:

• Is access to water a human right or just a need?
  
  
• Is water a common good like air or a commodity like Coca Cola?
  
  
• Who is being given the right or the power to turn the tap on or off - the people? Governments? Or the invisible hand of the market?
  
  
• Who sets the price for a poor district in Manila or La Paz - the locally elected water board or the CEO of Suez?

What is the Practical Use of a Covenant?

Would a Covenant on water solve the world's water crisis? Of course not. Almost two billion people now live in water stressed parts of the world and the situation is getting worse, not better. But it would set the framework of water as a social and cultural asset, not an economic commodity. As well, it would establish the indispensable legal groundwork for a just system of distribution.

A Covenant on the right to water would serve as a common, coherent body of rules for all nations and clarify that it is the role of the state to provide clean, affordable water to all of its citizens. Such a Covenant would also safeguard already accepted human rights and environmental principles.

It would also set principles and priorities for water use in a world destroying its water heritage. The Covenant I envisage would include language to protect water rights for the earth and other species and would address the urgent need for reclamation of polluted waters and an end to practices destructive of the world's water sources.

At a practical level, a right to water Covenant gives citizens a tool to hold their governments accountable in their domestic courts and the "court" of public opinion, as well as seeking international redress.

A Covenant could also include specific principles to ensure civil society involvement for conversion into national law and nation action plans. This would give citizens an additional constitutional tool in their fight for water.

Why Should Activists in the United States Care?

No country needs to be held more accountable to this crisis than the United States. Many of the companies privatizing water are based in the United States and the United States is among the chief backers of the privatization strategy through the World Bank and other mechanisms. If we are to stop this crisis, the United States government must become part of the solution, not the problem.

In addition, water privatization is encroaching in U.S. communities, being fought back at every turn by citizens insisting that water is a basic right and should be free for everyone. A UN Covenant will help advance these struggles in the U.S. as well.

More broadly, it is essential that American activists push for greater recognition of international law and treaties in the United States. In the long run, this will not only help advance causes in the United States where the international community is leading and domestic lawmakers are lagging behind, but it will also help shift the political center of gravity away from the U.S. alone. U.S. policies should not be dictating the world's fate. We need robust international standards and communities of action so that the world's diverse peoples may, together, identify key problems and enact viable solutions.

Support among civil society groups around the world is growing rapidly and we are collecting the names of these groups for reference in the near future. For instance, a right to water convention has been adopted by Red Vida, the network of grassroots groups fighting for water justice all through the Americas. To become involved please go to the Blue Plant Project at the Council of Canadian's Web site.

The right to water is an idea whose time has come. Let us make sure no future generation ever again has to suffer from the horrors of living without clean water.

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Maude Barlow is the Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and author of the new book: "Blue Covenant: Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water."

New High In US Prison Numbers

By N.C. Aizenman
The Washington Post
Friday 29 February 2008

Growth attributed to more stringent sentencing laws.

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

The report compiled and analyzed data from several sources, including the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and Bureau of Prisons and each state's department of corrections. It did not include individuals detained for noncriminal immigration violations.

Although studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect may be less influential than changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents and the proportion of young people in the population, report co-author Adam Gelb said.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals - who make up about half of the incarcerated population - less-expensive punishments such as community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug counseling might prove as much or more effective than jail.

For instance, Florida, which has almost doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, has reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

"There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved," said Gelb, who as director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project advises states on developing alternatives to incarceration. "On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost - while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims and paying child support."

Sociologist James Q. Wilson, who in the 1980s helped develop the "broken windows" theory that smaller crimes must be punished to deter more serious ones, agreed that sentences for some drug crimes were too long. However, Wilson disagreed that the rise in the U.S. prison population should be considered a cause for alarm: "The fact that we have a large prison population by itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country."

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction. And the report also documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they devote larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent; spending on higher education rose 21 percent.

Five states - Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware - now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education. Locally, Maryland is near the top, spending 74 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education. Virginia spends 60 cents on the dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation's incarcerated population has been growing more slowly since 2000 than it did during the 1990s, when harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law (since revised) mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the 1990s, many states adopted "three-strikes-you're-out" laws and curtailed the powers of parole boards.

Many state systems also send offenders back to prison for technical violations of their parole or probation, such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment with a supervisory officer. A 2005 study of California's system, for example, found that more than two-thirds of parolees were being returned to prison within three years of release, 40 percent for technical infractions.

"We're just stuck in this carousel that people get off of, then get right back on again," said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who as New York City police commissioner in the 1990s oversaw a significant reduction in crime.

Because of these policy shifts, the nationwide prison population swelled by about 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, increasing by as much as 86,000 a year. By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, that population increased by 25,000, a 2 percent rise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states - including Texas, which has the country's second-highest incarceration rate - are seeking to reduce their prison population by adopting alternative punishments.

Last year, Maryland officials began developing a new risk-assessment system to ensure that low-level offenders are not kept in jail longer than necessary, said Shannon Avery, executive director of a policy planning division of the state's Department of Public Safety.

"That's what you have to do when you don't have enormous amounts of tax dollars available for building prisons," she said.

Among the early innovators that states can look to is Virginia, which overhauled its system for sentencing nonviolent offenders in the mid-1990s. Although the state's incarceration rate remains relatively high, Virginia has managed to slow the growth of its prison population substantially and reduce the share of its budget spent on corrections while still reducing its crime rate.

State judges use a point system to weigh factors believed to predict a lawbreaker's likelihood of becoming a repeat offender or otherwise pose a threat to public safety. Those deemed low risk are given alternative sentences. As a result, the share of Virginia prison beds occupied by nonviolent convicts has dropped, from 40 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2007.

"The idea is to make a distinction between the people we're afraid of and the ones we're just ticked off at," said Rick Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission. "Not that you shouldn't punish them. But if it's going to cost $27,500 a year to keep them locked up, then maybe we should be smarter about how we do it."