Financial Times
By Martin Wolf
Published: October 30 2007 18:47 | Last updated: October 31 2007 07:14
Energy security and climate change are two of the most significant challenges confronting humanity. What we see, in response, is the familiar capture of policymaking by well-organised special interests. A superb example is the flood of subsidies for biofuels. These are farm programmes masquerading as answers to energy insecurity and climate change. Not surprisingly, they have the depressing characteristics of such programmes: high protection, open-ended support to producers, and indifference to economic rationality.
Already the support in members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development costs about $13bn to $15bn a year. But this sum generates much less than 3 per cent of the overall supply of liquid transport fuel. To bring the biofuel share to 30 per cent, as some propose, would cost at least $150bn a year and probably more, as marginal costs rose.
Someone needed to take a close look at the rationality of all these supports. An excellent report from the Global Subsidies Initiative of the International Institute for Sustainable Development does just that*. It does not tell a pretty story.
From ‘Living on Earth’ on PRI
WASHINGTON, DC (2007-10-26) Some states and local governments are calling on developers to calculate the climate impact of their development projects. As “Living on Earth’s” Ashley Ahearn reports, measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from the loss of trees or new construction may be the first step to limiting the emissions.
Converting land to new housing or commercial buildings can aggravate global warming. How much depends on what you measure. There are the emissions from heating and cooling of course, but some people also count the loss of trees, or even new, longer commutes. Now some states and local governments are starting to pressure developers to calculate the climate impact of their projects. At the head of the pack is Massachusetts, where there’s a major expansion project at Harvard University.
All of the buildings there will adhere to top green building standards solar panels, geothermal heat from the earth, energy efficiency. But one the new science center is taking the concept further.
After being approached by the state government, Harvard agreed the science center would take the building industry standard for emissions, and cut that in half.
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By Philip Stephens
Published: October 25 2007 19:08 | Last updated: October 25 2007 19:08
George W. Bush warns that Iran’s nuclear ambitions threaten world war three. Vice-president Dick Cheney speaks of “serious consequences” unless Tehran falls into line. Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat, says we are already fighting world war four against Islamist radicalism. As someone in the Hollywood movie said, it is time for the rest of us to be afraid, very afraid.
Afraid, though, of what? Of Tehran’s nuclear programme? Or of the possibility that Mr Bush, in the darkening twilight of his presidency, is preparing to launch a preventative military strike. The answer is both.
The big story, you might think, should be the menace to regional and global security posed by Iran’s development of the technology that would give it nuclear weapons. This, after all, is not a nice regime. You do not have to be an apologist for Washington to note that Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the Iranian president, has spoken of wiping Israel from the face of the globe. Nor to notice Tehran’s unapologetic sponsorship of terrorism. The regime’s human rights record is the wrong side of appalling.
Yet the White House once again seems hell-bent on being outwitted in the court of global opinion; and, maybe, on making a strategic miscalculation that could make the war in Iraq look like a sideshow.
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Financial Times
By Jeremy Grant in New York, Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington and Sheila McNulty in Houston
Published: October 25 2007 20:27 | Last updated: October 26 2007 00:09
BP on Thursday night sought to draw a line under two years of damage to its troubled north American operations by agreeing to pay fines totalling $380m to US authorities to settle violations linked to a refinery explosion, oil pipeline leaks and fraud in energy trading.
The payments are part of a wide-ranging settlement with three federal agencies requiring BP to submit to years of government-appointed monitors of trading and environmental systems.
Peter Keisler, acting attorney-general, said monitors were needed “because we are not confident that without that kind of intervention we would be happy with things going forward”.
Under Tony Hayward, the new chief executive, the UK oil group has been open about admitting to its past mistakes.
“These agreements are an admission that, in these instances, our operations failed to meet our own standards and the requirements of the law. For that, we apologise,” said Bob Malone, BP America chairman and president.
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October 24, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
By KEN CALDEIRA
DESPITE growing interest in clean energy technology, it looks as if we are not going to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide anytime soon. The amount in the atmosphere today exceeds the most pessimistic forecasts made just a few years ago, and it is increasing faster than anybody had foreseen.
Even if we could stop adding to greenhouse gases tomorrow, the earth would continue warming for decades — and remain hot for centuries. We would still face the threat of water from melting glaciers lapping at our doorsteps.
What can be done? One idea is to counteract warming by tossing small particles into the stratosphere (above where jets fly). This strategy may sound far-fetched, but it has the potential to cool the earth within months.
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The State Department Turned to Contractors Such as Blackwater Amid a Fight With the Pentagon Over Personal Security in Iraq
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 2007; Page A01
Last Christmas Day in Baghdad, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad received a furious phone call from Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. An American — drunk, armed, wandering through the Green Zone after a party — had shot and killed one of his personal bodyguards the night before, Mahdi said. He wanted to see Khalilzad right away.
At the vice president’s home, Khalilzad found the slain guard’s family assembled. Mahdi demanded the names of the American and his employer. And he wanted the man turned over to the Iraqi government.
After consulting with the embassy’s legal officer, Khalilzad identified the shooter as Andrew J. Moonen, an employee of Blackwater USA, the company that provides security for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad. But he would not deliver Moonen himself. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country.
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Financial Times
Opinion
Published: October 21 2007 19:43 | Last updated: October 21 2007 19:43
Is more expensive food here to stay? Long-term changes in food production and consumption are being blamed for recent rises in food prices. But research by UBS suggests that some myths should be exploded.
Food prices in the Group of Seven economies rose by nearly 3 per cent year-on-year in the 12 months to July 2007, and in emerging economies by 10.5 per cent. However, they have not risen uniformly, either at the commodity or retail level. One reason is that, unlike in, say, metals, producers tend to boost output when prices of a particular crop go up, so that price rises in any one agricultural commodity tend to be transitory.
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New York Times
October 19, 2007
By MATTHEW L. WALD and ANDREW C. REVKIN
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — For most of human history, the Arctic Ocean has been an ice-locked frontier. But now, in one of the most concrete signs of the effect of a warming climate on government operations, the Coast Guard is planning its first operating base there as a way of dealing with the cruise ships and the tankers that are already beginning to ply Arctic waters.
With increasingly long seasons of open water in the region, the Coast Guard has also begun discussions with the Russians about controlling anticipated ship traffic through the Bering Strait, which until now has been crossed mainly by ice-breaking research vessels and native seal and walrus hunters.
The Coast Guard says its base, which would probably be near the United States’ northernmost town, Barrow, Alaska, on the North Slope coast, would be seasonal and would initially have just a helicopter equipped for cold-weather operations and several small boats.
But given continued warming, that small base, which could be in place by next spring, would be expanded later to help speed responses to oil spills from tankers that the Coast Guard believes could eventually carry shipments from Scandinavia to Asia through the Bering Strait. Such a long-hoped-for polar route would cut 5,000 miles or more from a journey that would otherwise entail passage through the Panama Canal or the Suez.
The Coast Guard is also concerned about being able to respond to emergencies involving cruise ships, which are already starting to operate in summers in parts of the Arctic Ocean.
And in yet a further kind of new activity abetted by warming seas, Royal Dutch Shell is preparing for exploratory oil drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast beginning next year.
“I’m not sure I’m qualified to talk about the scientific issues related to global warming,” the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said in an interview. “All we know is we have an operating environment we’re responsible for, and it’s changing.”
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New York Times
October 18, 2007
U.S. Concerned as Iraq Awards Power Contracts to Iran and China
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 — Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.
The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
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New York Times
October 18, 2007
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL, Oct. 17 — Turkey’s parliament voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to authorize sending troops into northern Iraq to confront Kurdish rebels in hideouts there, sending an angry message to the Baghdad government and its Washington sponsors. But the NATO country made clear it would not act unless it had to.
“We’re at a point that our patience has run out,” said Cemil Cicek, a government spokesman and a member of Turkey’s Special Council Combating Terrorism, speaking in the parliamentary chamber.
The 507 to 19 vote was the culmination of months of frustration here with the United States, which has criticized Kurdish fighters but has failed to get its Kurdish allies in Iraq to act against them. President Bush on Wednesday reiterated American wishes for a diplomatic solution.
The vote came in tandem with another vexatious issue for U.S.-Turkish relations, a bill on the 1915 Armenian genocide that was taken as a slap by Turkey when it passed a Congressional committee last week.
In a sign of Turkey’s importance as an American ally, congressional leaders seemed to back away from a vote on that bill in Washington on Wednesday.
Turkey is a maturing power and a strong support to the United States in a complex and troubled region. The motion, which Turkish officials said would not necessarily result in military action but gives them a year to apply it, was, at its essence, a blunt request for the Unites States to acknowledge Turkey’s status.
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