by David Steven | Mar 4, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Extracts From Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs
President Barack Obama
Delivered in person before a joint session of Congress
May 25, 2009
[With apologies to JFK’s ‘man on the moon‘ speech.]
The Constitution imposes upon me the obligation to “from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.” While this has traditionally been interpreted as an annual affair, this tradition has been broken in extraordinary times.
These are extraordinary times. And we face extraordinary challenges… [The President’s discussion of economic, security and resource threats has been cut from this transcript.]
…Finally, if we are to win the battle to secure our shared future, then we must act decisively to stabilize the world’s climate. Otherwise, we will begin to suffer the consequences of our folly within a generation – not just at home, but across the world, as we struggle to sustain security and prosperity on an increasingly crowded planet.
Since early in my term, serious efforts to tackle climate change here in America have begun. We have examined where we are strong, and where we are not, where we may succeed and where we may not. Now it is time to lead the world in a great new enterprise, one which will hold the key to our future on earth.
I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the international decisions or marshaled the international resources required for such leadership. We have never before specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.
I therefore believe we should set these global and national goals.
First, I believe that the world should commit itself to achieving the goal of stopping the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions that is doing so much to put our planet in peril. I don’t believe we should aim to achieve this goal in 2020 or 2030 or 2050 – but right now in 2009, making this year the high water mark for mankind’s global experiment with the global climate.
Second, once we have bought emissions to a standstill, we should aim to force them down year by year – slowly at first, but at an ever increasing pace, triggering a radical transformation that brings us to a near zero carbon world by mid-century.
(more…)
by Richard Gowan | Mar 3, 2009 | North America
A recurrent game in Washington DC is trying to fix the fact that DC itself has no Congressman (it sends a non-voting delegate). Initiatives to give the capital a national representative come and go, but never succeed. And so it has come to pass again:
Legislation to give the District of Columbia voting representation in the House has been pulled from Wednesday’s calendar because of concerns about Republican efforts to use the bill to wipe out many of the District’s gun laws.
A key House aide confirmed that the bill will be pulled from consideration, at least for Wednesday. The aide stressed that negotiations are continuing and the bill could come up in the future.
Republicans want to add the language on D.C.’s gun laws to the bill. Democratic leaders don’t want that to happen, but many of their centrist members from Republican districts would vote to support the amendment to avoid the ire of the National Rifle Association.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said adding the gun language could cost enough Democratic votes that the entire bill would fail.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 3, 2009 | Conflict and security, South Asia
While the rest of the world faces job losses, Nepal’s Maoists are hiring:
A former Maoist rebel commander said on Tuesday the group plans to recruit thousands of fighters, a move seen as a blow to peace and underlined serious tensions between Nepal’s army and the Maoists. Nanda Kishore Pun, chief of the Maoist fighters, told Reuters it was the ex-rebel group’s turn to fill vacancies in their ranks, after Nepal’s national army’s recruited 2,800 personnel last year.
The move could endanger a 2006 peace pact which ended a decades-long civil war and saw the Maoists joining the political process, winning an election last year, analysts said. The Maoist-led government has not commented on Pun’s remarks so far, and analysts said it was not immediately clear if he had taken Maoist Prime Minister Prachanda into confidence.
Nepal’s former rebel fighters are now housed in U.N.-monitored camps and their weapons locked away under the 2006 peace deal. Their rehabilitation is seen as key to lasting peace, but the national army is refusing to enrol “indoctrinated” rebels into its ranks.
The Maoists won a surprise victory in last year’s election and now head a coalition government but their rebel army has never disbanded. A former Maoist commander is now the defence minister.
Pun said the plan was to take the number of rebel fighters to 31,000 which was their strength when they signed the 2006 peace pact. “It is not a new recruitment and is to fill vacancies in our army,” he told Reuters.
by Jules Evans | Mar 3, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Fairly sobering cover story in New Scientist this week, by the aptly-named Gaia Vince, a freelance journalist who apparently is ‘wandering the world’, like a cross between Monkey and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
The environment, according to Gaia, is about to strike down upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.
She asks the question – what will the world be like if it is 4°C warmer, as scientists predict it probably will be within 30-60 years?
Not good.
The world will be divided by two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).
That means the global population will have to crowd into the few places where habitation is possible, which the New Scientist estimates will be: Canada, the UK, Greenland and Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the parts of the Antarctic that are thawed. Some parts of West Africa may also be able to sustain life.
The global population will either be reduced dramatically, or will be crammed into high rise cities, eating mainly vegetarian food, unable to travel, probably subject to birth control, and energy control, and all kinds of other control. Most animal and plant life, and almost all aquatic life, will either have died of natural causes, or been eaten. “If it moves, we will have eaten it”, says James Lovelock. “We will be desperate.”
Those areas of the world that can still sustain plant life will be faced with a grim choice – do they protect their borders, create a ‘life boat’ as Lovelock put it, and close their ears and eyes to the screams of the dying, or do they open the doors to mass migration, and if so, how much, and to who? If they do, how do they order their societies? Do they give all new arrivals a vote and equal rights, or will such societies have to be run in an authoritarian, Mega City Four-type way?
Can we avoid this grim scenario? Yes, but the chances are very slim.
Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist, says: “”I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70% by 2015. We are currently putting in 3% more each year.”
In other words, we have to get ready for a much hotter world, we have to start thinking the politics, economics, and ethics, of it through.
At the same time, for the next 30 years, and particularly in the next five years, we need to devote all the effort we have to lobbying governments to reduce emissions as much as possible. There’s no higher priority. Discussing anything else is like discussing the latest cricket results on the deck of the Titanic.
We will be judged on this by the rest of humanity, and our generation will probably be considered the most stupid, lazy and destructive ever. Our children and grandchildren, if they are unfortunate enough to have been brought into the world, will stare at us and say ‘why didn’t you do something when you had the chance?’ And we will smile weakly, and look away.
