I observe conservative tendency in the ways for overcome global crisis. From my sustainable development theory point of view this way lead us to global catastrophe. This crisis is not cyclical crisis as usually. It is vey dangerous global civilization crisis. Such crisis to overcome it needs quite new cooperation, information and value - ecohumanistic - tools. It is impossible to overcome it in old social-darwinistic mode.

Nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle.

As Barack Obama heads into his second hundred days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order. In its first hundred days, the Obama presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror). Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the Liquid War for the control of Eurasia takes place.

Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland -- Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.

We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way, but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops. Now, it's time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war.

Every time I've visited Iran, energy analysts stress the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics." What they mean is the ultimate importance to various great and regional powers of Asian integration via a sprawling mass of energy pipelines that will someday, somehow, link the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia, and China. The major Iranian card in the Asian integration game is the gigantic South Pars natural gas field (which Iran shares with Qatar). It is estimated to hold at least 9% of the world's proven natural gas reserves.

As much as Washington may live in perpetual denial, Russia and Iran together control roughly 20% of the world's oil reserves and nearly 50% of its gas reserves. Think about that for a moment. It's little wonder that, for the leadership of both countries as well as China's, the idea of Asian integration, of the Grid, is sacrosanct.

If it ever gets built, a major node on that Grid will surely be the prospective $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline." After years of wrangling, a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. At least in this rare case, both Pakistan and India stood shoulder to shoulder in rejecting relentless pressure from the Bush administration to scotch the deal.

Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell -- and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology.

And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about.

In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -- why Afghanistan matters -- is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.

And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.

Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan, and India) lurk in the vicinity. "Losing" Afghanistan and its key network of U.S. military bases would, from the Pentagon's point of view, be a disaster, and though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the moment, it's worth remembering that the country itself is a lot more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense deserts: it's believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.

And there's something highly toxic to be added to this already lethal mix: don't forget the narco-dollar angle -- the fact that the global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with U.S. dollars, not euros. For the SCO, the top security threat in Afghanistan isn't the Taliban, but the drug business. Russia's anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov routinely blasts the disaster that passes for a U.S./NATO anti-drug war there, stressing that Afghan heroin now kills 30,000 Russians annually, twice as many as were killed during the decade-long U.S.-supported anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s.

And then, of course, there are those competing pipelines that, if ever built, either would or wouldn't exclude Iran and Russia from the action to their south. In April 2008, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India actually signed an agreement to build a long-dreamt-about $7.6 billion (and counting) pipeline, whose acronym TAPI combines the first letters of their names and would also someday deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India without the involvement of either Iran or Russia. It would cut right through the heart of Western Afghanistan, in Herat, and head south across lightly populated Nimruz and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban, various Pashtun guerrillas and assorted highway robbers now merrily run rings around U.S. and NATO forces and where -- surprise! -- the U.S. is now building in Dasht-e-Margo ("the Desert of Death") a new mega-base to host President Obama's surge troops.

TAPI's rival is the already mentioned IPI, also theoretically underway and widely derided by Heritage Foundation types in the U.S., who regularly launch blasts of angry prose at the nefarious idea of India and Pakistan importing gas from "evil" Iran. Theoretically, TAPI's construction will start in 2010 and the gas would begin flowing by 2015. (Don't hold your breath.) Embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who can hardly secure a few square blocks of central Kabul, even with the help of international forces, nonetheless offered assurances last year that he would not only rid his country of millions of land mines along TAPI's route, but somehow get rid of the Taliban in the bargain.

Should there be investors (nursed by Afghan opium dreams) delirious enough to sink their money into such a pipeline -- and that's a monumental if -- Afghanistan would collect only $160 million a year in transit fees, a mere bagatelle even if it does represent a big chunk of the embattled Karzai's current annual revenue. Count on one thing though, if it ever happened, the Taliban and assorted warlords/highway robbers would be sure to get a cut of the action.

In fact, it's as if the New Great Gamesters had just discovered another Everest. This year, Obama's national security strategists lost no time unleashing a no-holds-barred diplomatic campaign to court Turkmenistan. The goal? To accelerate possible ways for all that new Turkmeni gas to flow through the right pipes, and create quite a different energy map and future. Apart from TAPI, another key objective is to make the prospective $5.8 billion Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline become viable and thus, of course, trump the Russians. In that way, a key long-term U.S. strategic objective would be fulfilled: Austria, Italy, and Greece, as well as the Balkan and various Central European countries, would be at least partially pulled from Gazprom's orbit. (Await my next "postcard" from Pipelineistan for more on this.)

If, one of these days, the Turkmenistani leader opts for TAPI as well, it will open Washington to an ultimate historical irony. After so much death and destruction, Washington would undoubtedly have to sit down once again with -- yes -- the Taliban! And we'd be back to July 2001 and those pesky pipeline transit fees.

As it stands at the moment, however, Russia still dominates Pipelineistan, ensuring Central Asian gas flows across Russia's network and not through the Trans-Caspian networks privileged by the U.S. and the European Union. This virtually guarantees Russia's crucial geopolitical status as the top gas supplier to Europe and a crucial supplier to Asia as well.

Meanwhile, in "transit corridor" Pakistan, where Predator drones soaring over Pashtun tribal villages monopolize the headlines, the shady New Great Game slouches in under-the-radar mode toward the immense, under-populated southern Pakistani province of Balochistan. The future of the epic IPI vs. TAPI battle may hinge on a single, magic word: Gwadar.

Essentially a fishing village, Gwadar is an Arabian Sea port in that province. The port was built by China. In Washington's dream scenario, Gwadar becomes the new Dubai of South Asia. This implies the success of TAPI. For its part, China badly needs Gwadar as a node for yet another long pipeline to be built to western China. And where would the gas flowing in that line come from? Iran, of course.

Whoever "wins," if Gwadar really becomes part of the Liquid War, Pakistan will finally become a key transit corridor for either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field heading for China, or a great deal of the Caspian gas from Turkmenistan heading Europe-wards. To make the scenario even more locally mouth-watering, Pakistan would then be a pivotal place for both NATO and the SCO (in which it is already an official "observer").

Now that's as classic as the New Great Game in Eurasia can get. There's NATO vs. the SCO. With either IPI or TAPI, Turkmenistan wins. With either IPI or TAPI, Russia loses. With either IPI or TAPI, Pakistan wins. With TAPI, Iran loses. With IPI, Afghanistan loses. In the end, however, as in any game of high stakes Pipelineistan poker, it all comes down to the top two global players. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets: will the winner be Washington or Beijing?

The majority of fish populations have been reduced by 70-95% -- and global demand keeps rising.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 70% of the world's fisheries are now fully exploited (ie, fished to the point where they can only just replenish themselves), overexploited or depleted. The majority of fish populations have been reduced by 70-95%, depending on the species, compared to the level they would be at if there were no fishing at all. In other words, only five per cent of fish are left in some cases. In more practical terms, fishermen are catching one or two fish per 100 hooks, compared to 10 fish per 100 hooks where a stock is healthy and unexploited - a measure of sustainability once used by the Japanese fleet. In England and Wales, we are landing one fish for every 20 that we landed in 1889, when government records began, despite having larger vessels, more sophisticated technology and trawl nets so vast and all-consuming that they are capable of containing 12 Boeing 747 aircraft.

Where have all those other fish gone? In short, we have eaten them. "Tens of thousands of bluefin tuna used to be caught in the North Sea every year," says Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York. "Now, there are none. Once, there were millions of skate - huge common skate, white skate, long-nosed skate - being landed from seas around the UK. The common skate is virtually extinct, the angel shark has gone. We have lost our marine megafauna as a consequence of exploitation."

Then there are the devastating effects of bottom trawling around our coasts, which began with the advent of the steam trawler 130 years ago. "Sweeping backwards and forwards across the seabed, they removed a whole carpet of invertebrates," Professor Roberts says, "such as corals, sponges, sea fans and seaweeds. On one map, dating from 1883, there is a huge area of the North Sea roughly the size of Wales, marked 'Oyster beds'. The last oysters were fished there commercially in the 1930s; the last live oyster was taken in the 1970s. We have altered the marine environment in a spectacular way."

Worse still, after stripping our own seas bare, we have "exported fishing capacity to the waters of developing countries", Professor Roberts warns. Off Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, fleets from the rich industrial north are "fishing in a totally unsustainable way with minimal oversight by European countries". In return for plundering the oceans, which deprives local people of food, and artisanal fishermen of their livelihood, these vessels pay minimal fees that impoverished countries are happy to accept. "It is a mining operation," Professor Roberts says, "a rerun of the exploitation of terrestrial wealth that happened in colonial days. This is colonialism in a new guise, albeit with a respectable cloak in the form of access agreements."

Such is the human feeding frenzy, there may come a time when there are no fish left to catch. In 2006, a study in the US journal Science warned that every single species we exploit would have collapsed by 2048 if populations continued to decline as they had since the 1950s. By 2003, nearly a third of all species had collapsed, the study found - meaning their numbers were down 90% or more on historic maximum catch levels. Extrapolate that on a graph, and the downward curve reaches 100% just before 2050.

Cutting your meat-eating habits is one of the most impactful ways you can prevent drastic changes to our climate.
If the Earth is warmed by a mere 4 degrees Celsius, by the year 2099 the planet will become unrecognizable. We will have warm, acidic seas that will probably not sustain fish; many of the areas where food is grown and populations flourish will no longer be able to provide for either because of vast flooding or desertification; storms will be fiercer and much more devastating; and the only places that will have enough water and resources to sustain humans will be in the high latitude areas of the planet (stress mine--because I'm shocked).

A nightmare scenario based on worst possible circumstances? Sadly, no. In fact a warming of 4 degrees Celsius is a conservative prediction according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If we don't make serious changes, and soon, warming could be markedly greater.

That's where all the life would be. The rest of the world will be largely desert with a few oases. Imagine what it might be like if 9 billion (the projected population by then) people are all scrambling to stake claim to a few select and prime habitable areas on the planet. Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I don't think they are clever enough to handle what's ahead. I think they'll survive as a species all right, but the cull during this century is going to be huge.The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution. To me, the whole discussion feels sort of like making your mind up to deal with cancer once it inevitably develops, rather than doing what you can to prevent it in the first place. To be sure, if you are likely to get such a troubling diagnosis - whether cancer or a dying environment - it would be wise to make meaningful (and to some, this might mean radical) changes. But wouldn't it be preferable to do everything possible to prevent disaster, rather than focusing most of your resources on planning for it?

One of the most meaningful things we can do to arrest climate change is to change the way we eat. the meat industry is one of the most devastating causes of global warming. And this is not just factory farming--some analysis indicates that smaller farms cause more warming. They're generally better for animal welfare, water pollution, and desertification, but they actually require more resources, and thus cause more greenhouse gas emissions. We need government change: We need a shift away from the billions in annual subsidies for the meat industry, as discussed in a Union of Concerned Scientists report. We need more healthy vegetarian foods in schools and other government programs. We need education of the public about this very real cause for alarm and potential solutions. We need leaders who understand the issues and take them seriously. But we also need all of us to take personal charge of our lives, and to do what we can personally to decrease our support for climate change. Eating meat causes about 40% more global warming gases as all the cars, trucks, planes, and other forms of transport combined--that is, cutting back on our consumption of chicken, pork, and other animal products.

Our model of exponential growth in consumption of energy, natural resources and raw materials cannot last forever.

The illusion that the "Free Market" is the logical savior of our world has been maintained by the promise of riches and an ever increasing standard of living and lifespan that has been demonstrated by the industrialized world for the past several hundred years. On the surface, who can look at the apparent success of America, and not come to that quick conclusion? However, when you look deeper, you will find that this success is built on a business model based upon exponential growth, and that this growth must be fed by a similar exponential growth in consumption of energy, natural resources, raw materials, and in the continuous expansion to new markets. All of this is well and good when the world has an abundant supply of undeveloped lands and unused resources, but it starts coming apart as that same world approaches its natural limits to growth and consumption.

Here is a brief summary of a few current trends that illustrate that we are operating a giant Ponzi scheme, and that we are running out of new sources of energy, untapped markets, and raw materials to keep it running:

1. Trees: About 1/2 of the world's forests are already gone (most were cut in the last 50 years), and a significant percentage of the rest are in trouble. At the current rate of destruction, it has been estimated that the world's rainforests will be completely eliminated within forty years. Trees play a necessary role in stabilizing our planet's weather, atmosphere and soils. A single large mature tree has the evaporative surface area on its needles or leaves equivalent to a 40 acre lake. A process called "desertification" occurs near areas that have been deforested once the trees stop recycling moisture back into the atmosphere to fall as rain somewhere down wind. A recent study shows that deforestation contributes roughly 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year.

2. Atmosphere: Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by a factor of four since 1950. We have been burning fossil fuels for over 500 years, but half of all of those burned fuels have been consumed in the past thirty years! There is a scientific consensus to 90% certainty that these atmospheric changes will result in catastrophic, potentially civilization busting, climate changes within the next 50 years. Even if you do not believe in global warming, data indicates that the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere (the primary greenhouse gas) caused by our rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels, is increasing the acidity of the oceans, and that if this trend continues much longer, it has the potential to kill most of the planktons, diatoms, and coral reefs of the ocean, knocking out the bottom of the food chain, killing most of the life in the oceans of the world, and destroying one of the legs of our world's oxygen cycle.

3. Oceans: 11 out of 15 of the world's major ocean fisheries are either already in collapse, or are in serious decline and danger of collapse. All large open ocean predatory fish, such as marlin and tuna, are already 90% depleted. By 2004, an estimated 20% of the world's coral reefs had been destroyed (up from just 11% in 2000), an additional 24% were close to collapsing, and another 26% were under long-term threat of collapse. A recent British government report showed a drop in the world's oceanic zooplankton of an astounding 73% since 1960. Zooplankton are a critical element in the bottom of the world's food chain as well as its oxygen cycle.

4. Oil and other fossil fuels: Our modern industrial global machine essentially eats, sleeps, and sh_ts oil. Nearly all of the world's giant oil fields (they produce over half the world's oil) are mature and exhibit declining rates of oil production. In 2008, the International Energy Agency (IEA) shocked the world when it released an authoritative public study revealing that the world's oil fields are declining at an average rate of 9.1%, which is much faster than previously thought. Even with huge capital investments to implement Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods, this rate of decline would only improve to 6.4%. What does this mean? It means that if our world is to maintain its current rate of oil consumption (our world's recent globalization has been fueled by an annual oil production growth rate of something like 10%), then we would need to find and develop a Saudi Arabia's worth of oil every year for the next year or two from now to eternity--an impossible fantasy!

5. Soil: A third of the original top soil in the United States is now gone. It has been estimated that the world has from 50 to 100 years of farmable soil, using current farming practices. The US has cut soil losses to 18 times the rate of nature's replacement, the developing world averages a soil depletion rate of 36 times natural replacement, and China averages 54 times the rate of replacement.

6. Fresh water: Irrigated land comprises only 16% of the world's croplands, but produces 40% of the world's crop production. Many of the world's major rivers (China's Yellow River, America's Colorado River, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Ganges, the Indus, the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, and Africa's Chao Phraya) now run dry, or nearly dry, for significant parts of the year due to expanding irrigation and population demands. Unsustainable over pumping from aquifers is causing increasing salinity, lowering aquifer levels, and failed wells in many of the world's irrigated bread baskets, such as California's Central Valley, the US' giant south central Ogallala aquifer, China's grainbelt middle plains, India's principle breadbasket, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula.

In the mid 1980's, when our world had just over half its current population, we first exceeded the capacity of our planet to continuously supply us with the food and raw materials that we consume, and to process our wastes. What this means, is that we have been consuming our planet's resources faster than they regenerate, and polluting its natural systems faster than they can recover. This "drawing down" of our resources, is essentially spending the money from investors (all of us) in this Ponzi scheme, and when the remaining "money" (the natural resources and ecosystems of our world) can't support the payments anymore, it will most certainly collapse! Unfortunately, it's going to take more than minor changes in the way we do business to get off this giant Ponzi scheme.

Governments across the planet are preparing for a surge of violent protests from economic upheaval. Wars may follow.
The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow. As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery. There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence. Banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.

In a short period of months, the entire system of global capitalism has screeched to a halt. No one knows what happens next.

Chinese manufacturing declined in each of the last five months. More than 20 [million] rural migrant workers in China have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages or towns as a result of the global economic crisis. The UN estimates that the downturn could claim 50 million jobs worldwide. The global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism. The model of economic globalization that's dominated during the past 40 years is, if not dead, at least in critical condition. Few progressives will mourn its demise -- it was both a proximate cause of the economic meltdown in which we find ourselves today, and one of its victims. But if we are reaching the end of an era, questions arise about not only what will replace it, but also how we'll finance the government spending that most economists agree will be required to stave off a long, painful depression. Among the wealthy countries, nowhere was this truer than in the United States, with its fealty to a mythic “free market” and its elites’ scorn for a robust safety net. After union-busting, global trade deals have done the most damage to workers’ bargaining power. Whereas companies used to negotiate with their employees in relatively good faith, those negotiations are now overshadowed by the threat -- ubiquitous in labor disputes today -- to simply move the whole plant to Mexico or China. The result was an illusion of prosperity. Corporate profits rose (in 2004, corporate profits took the largest share of national income since they started tracking the data in 1929 and wages took the smallest), and high earners did very well too. When the oil shock hit in 1973, those in the top one percent of the income ladder took in just over 9 percent of the nation’s income; by 2006, they grabbed almost 23 percent. In the intervening years, their average incomes more than tripled. After that, we started financing our lifestyles through debt -- mounds of it. Consumer debt blossomed; trade deficits (which are ultimately financed by debt) exploded and the government started running big budget deficits year in an year out. In the period after World War Two, while wages were rising along with the overall economy, Americans socked away over 10 percent of the nation’s income in savings. But in the 1980s, that began to decline -- the savings rate fell from 11 percent in the 1960s and ‘70s, to 7 percent in the 1980s, and by 2005, it stood at just one percent (household savings that year were actually in negative territory). After the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the recession that followed it, the economic “expansion” of the Bush era was the first on record in which median incomes never got back to where they were before the crash. Fortunately for Wal-Mart shoppers, a massive housing bubble was rising. Americans started financing their consumption by taking chunks of equity out of their homes. The result: in 2005, long before the housing bubble crashed, the average amount of equity Americans had in their homes was already the lowest it had ever been. We hear a lot of chatter about a “credit crunch” being at the root of our economic woes -- that banks aren’t lending to otherwise qualified individuals and businesses. The truth, however, is that before the housing (and stock) markets crashed, the average American household already had 20 percent more in debt than it earned in a year. Already deeply in the hole, when the markets crashed, consumers stopped spending, and that's fueled millions of layoffs, led to a mountain of foreclosures, and left state budgets decimated. The connection between decades of false prosperity, the piles of household debt that resulted, and the degree to which that left American families vulnerable to the bubble’s crash is not difficult to see. China became an export engine by keeping wages down through repressive union-busting and by drawing on an almost endless supply of poor rural peasants to work its production lines. While global trade flows have exploded, much of that trade has been between multinationals based in the advanced economies and their own offshore units. They ship production overseas, but the goods produced end up back in domestic markets; it’s a means of avoiding “first-world” wages, public interest regulations and environmental restrictions. China and the U.S. have developed a precariously symbiotic relationship. With its reserve army of cheap labor unmatched by any country in the world, China became the ‘workshop of the world,’ drawing in $50 billion in foreign investment annually by the first half of this decade.” To survive, firms all over the world, "had no choice but to transfer their labor-intensive operations to China to take advantage of what came to be known as the ‘China price,’ provoking in the process a tremendous crisis in the advanced capitalist countries’ labor forces. It was always an unsustainable model; the United States’ annual trade deficit with China -- financed by debt -- was $6 billion as recently as the mid-1980s; by last year it had exploded to $266 billion. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the world economy is anything but decoupled, all but begging the Chinese to continue to buy our debt. According to Agence France Presse, “Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi largely agreed to disagree on human rights,” while “she focused on the need for China to help finance the massive 787-billion-dollar US economic stimulus plan by continuing to buy US Treasuries.” In a moment of clarity -- one that shone a light on the rot of the global economic system that has prevailed for the past 40 years, Clinton explained to the Chinese media, "We have to incur more debt … the US needs the investment in Treasury bonds to shore up its economy to continue to buy Chinese products."

It is incumbent on progressives to propose a realistic alternative to new coal plants -- here's our best options.

Also, while my original post focused on the key strategies of efficiency and recycled energy (i.e. cogeneration or combined heat and power), wind, and concentrated solar thermal, I left out one of the most crucial -- biomass cofiring, which is almost certainly the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way to provide new renewable baseload power without having to build any new transmission lines! So what do we do in the near term to meet the projected 1% annual increase in demand over the next decade while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? The answer is we do energy efficiency (including cogeneration), wind power, concentrated solar power (CSP), and biomass cofiring. These are the low-carbon power sources capable of delivering power affordably and quickly -- and that means having no obvious production bottlenecks (unlike, again, say, another well-known power source, The goal is to fund technologies and boost industries that are capable of scaling up to deliver hundreds if not thousands of GWs of carbon free power by mid-century.

The predictions about what climate change may bring are pretty dire, but now it seems, they were actually underestimated

In its most recent official report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) significantly underestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would occur during the last seven years, a miscalculation that has put the planet beyond the "range of possibilities" considered by some of the world's top climatologists. The overly optimistic predictions in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment, released in 2007, appear to have been driven, in part, by the political dynamics involved in the international effort. The underestimation means that government negotiators meeting in Copenhagen later this year to write a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol will have a tougher task than previously imagined. The underestimation of greenhouse emissions occurred, Field said, because the IPCC failed to include in its scenarios the rapid increase in carbon dioxide from Asia's coal-reliant industrial expansion between 2000 and 2007. What happened is that China and India developed rapidly while rising oil prices pushed wealthy nations to use more coal, which is more CO2 intensive in its emissions. An increase in atmospheric CO2 is attributable to the steep rise in global coal use, pushed upward by accelerated Asian economic and industrial development. Not only has atmospheric carbon increased beyond the range of possibilities, but so too has effects of that increase on Earth's ecosystems. The retreat of Arctic Sea ice, the collapse of permafrost, ice sheet melt and that melting's contribution to sea level rise are occurring faster and with more intensity than expected. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, Field said, rose 3.5 percent annually between 2000 and 2007, compared with annual increases of 0.9 percent in the 1990s. Between 1993 and 2003, melting ice sheets accounted for 40 percent of sea level rise. That contribution is now estimated at 80 percent.

As the global economy melts down, so is the planet, with droughts threatening food production and industry across the world.

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought. Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country's provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country's winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown. Some scientists warn China could face more frequent droughts as a result of global warming and changes in farming patterns. In Iraq, the worst drought in at least a decade and possibly a farming lifetime is expected to reduce wheat production by at least half; while the country's vast marshlands, once believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden, have been turned into endless expanses of baked mud. Nor is Iraq's drought a localized event. Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel where this January was reported to have been the hottest and driest in 60 years. In Latin America, Argentina is experiencing "the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years," according to Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society. One of the world's largest grain exporters, it has already lost five billion dollars to the drought. Its soybeans -- the country is the third largest producer of them -- are wilting in the fields; its corn -- Argentina is the world's second largest producer -- and wheat crops are in trouble; and its famed grass-fed herds of cattle are dying -- 1.5 million head of them since October with no end in sight. In the State of Texas -- 97.4% to be exact -- is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. As global warming strengthens, the American southwest, parts of which have struggled with varying levels of drought conditions for years, could fall into a possibly permanent state of drought." We're talking potential future "dust bowl" here. A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: "In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier. And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don't forget northern California which "produces 50 percent of the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes." Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%. California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming... In a worst case... up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture. As for East Africa and the Horn of Africa, under the pressure of rising temperatures, drought has become a tenacious long-term visitor. Half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers' crops... Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems. If global temperatures are on the rise and more heat means lower crop yields, then you're talking about more Kenyas, and not just in Africa either. You're probably also talking about desperation, upheaval, resource conflicts, and mass out-migrations of populations, even -- if scientists are right -- from the American Southwest.

To UN and G20 Leaders!

The world is confronted by crisis, its dimension is global, its character is inexperienced. This crisis is the result of obsoleteness of social-darwinist rules of politics and global economic order. They have very high ecosocial costs and they are shortsighted. Today we can choose a one of the three different ways and different responses to present challenges:

o The first way leads finally to global military confrontation and war for access to deficit resources and clean environment.
o The second way would be the "soft" continuation of social-Darwinist, "zero growth" social relations, by global Orwellian totalitarian order.
o The third way means the "three pillars" sustainable development of the world society. For this end we have to integrate human development with economic development and environment protection, and base policy on world society common interest axiology principle. This third way means ecohumanistic transformation as a partnership-based co-operation for the common good of all people (rich and poor, highly developed societies and underdeveloped countries), cooperation protecting natural environment, supported by science and high technology, including information culture.

The essence of the third way’s transformation includes creation of the new sustainable development economy, with possibility to account complex costs and effects - with social and environment components. It would allow stimulating creative (cognitive and innovative) activity, directed on common good/common interest, guided by ecosocial justice. In our opinion only the third way - oriented towards sustainable development of the world society - is rational, as the only realistic way of reversing present trends and avoiding the global catastrophe.

Two important world anti-crisis events will be held in the 2009 year: G20 World Summit (London, April 2nd) and UN General Assembly. We strongly recommend inclusion of the following proposals into agenda of both events:

[1] Creation of the UN Economic Council, together with the World Sustainable Development Strategy Center, including United Nations Information Center.
[2] Introducing THE WORLD INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND ECONOMY, including GLOBAL EARLY WARNING, as the new UN Program.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is focused on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going.

The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in futility. We've reached the limit of being able to create additional debt at any level without causing further damage, additional distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We can't raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly payments. We can't promote more mortgages for people with no income. We can't crank up a home-building industry with our massive inventory of unsold, and over-priced houses built in the wrong places. We can't ramp back up the blue light special shopping fiesta. We can't return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can't return to the now-complete "growth" cycle of "economic expansion." We're done with all that. History is done with our doing that, for now.

So far -- after two weeks in office -- the Obama team seems bent on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs, to attempt to do all the impossible things listed above. Mr. Obama is not the only one, of course, who is invoking the quest for renewed "growth." This is a tragic error in collective thinking. What we really face is a comprehensive contraction in our activities, especially the scale of our activities, and the pressing need to readjust the systems of everyday life to a level of decreased complexity.

For instance, the myth that we can become "energy independent and yet remain car-dependent is absurd. In terms of liquid fuels, we're simply trapped. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and there is absolutely no chance that drill-drill-drilling (or any other scheme) will change that. The public and our leaders can not face the reality of this. The great wish for "alternative" liquid fuels (bio fuels, algae excreta) will never be anything more than a wish at the scales required, and the parallel wish to keep all our cars running by other means -- hydrogen fuel cells, electric motors -- is equally idle and foolish. We cannot face the mandate of reality, which is to do everything possible to make our living places walkable, and connect them with public transit. The stimulus bills in congress clearly illustrate our failure to understand the situation.

The attempt to restart "consumerism" will be equally disappointing. It was a manifestation of the short peak energy decades of history, and now that we're past peak energy, it's over. That seventy percent of the economy is over, especially the part that allowed people to buy stuff with no money.

The argument about "change" during the election was sufficiently vague that no one was really challenged to articulate a future that wasn't, materially, more-of-the-same. I suppose the Obama team may have thought they would only administer it differently than the Bush team. If this nation wants to survive without an intense political convulsion, there's a lot we can do, but none of it is being voiced in any corner of Washington at this time. We have to get off of petro-agriculture and grow our food locally, at a smaller scale, with more people working on it and fewer machines. This is an enormous project, which implies change in everything from property allocation to farming methods to new social relations. But if we don't focus on it right away, a lot of Americans will end up starving, and rather soon. We have to rebuild the railroad system in the US, and electrify it, and make it every bit as good as the system we once had that was the envy of the world. If we don't get started on this right away, we're screwed. We will have tremendous trouble moving people and goods around this continent-sized nation. We have to reactivate our small towns and cities because the metroplexes are going to fail at their current scale of operation. We have to prepare for manufacturing at a much smaller (and local) scale than the scale represented by General Motors.

The political theater of the moment in Washington is not focused on any of this, but on the illusion that we can find new ways of keeping the old ways going. Many observers have noted lately how passive the American public is in the face of their dreadful accelerating losses. It's a tragic mistake to tell them that they can have it all back again. We'll see a striking illustration of "phase change" as the public mood goes from cow-like incomprehension to grizzly bear-like rage. Not only will they discover the impossibility of getting back to where they were, but they will see the panicked actions of Washington drive what remains of our capital resources down a rat hole.

A consensus is firming up on each side of the "stimulus" question, largely along party lines -- simply those who are for it and those who are against it, mostly by degrees. Nobody in either party -- including supposed independents such as Bernie Sanders or John McCain, not to mention President Obama -- has a position for directing public resources and effort at any of the things I mentioned above: future food security, future travel-and-transport security, or the future security of livable, walkable dwelling places based on local networks of economic interdependency. This striking poverty of imagination may lead to change that will tear the nation to pieces.

There's lots of good news -- from a tax credit for renewables to the $50 billion nuclear industry giveaway being axed. Here's the highlights.

A final deal was reached on a $789 billion stimulus plan (see NYT here). One of the best pieces of news is that the $50 billion in fraudulent budget gimmickry on behalf of the nuclear industry was axed, as I posted last night.

There's also a 3-year extension of the production tax credit for wind and other renewables, which will be crucial to Obama meeting his goal to "double the production of alternative energy in the next three years." And there's an expanded tax credit for plug in hybrids, which will be critical for Obama to meet his goal of one million plug-ins by 2015.

Clean, Efficient, American Energy: To put people back to work today and reduce our dependence on foreign oil tomorrow, we will increase renewable energy production and renovate public buildings to make them more energy efficient.

Oil costs a third of what it did in July, and prices keep dropping. That may seem like a godsend now, but we'll pay through the nose later.

Low prices, as at present, are bad for producers, and so will hurt a number of countries that the US government considers hostile, including Venezuela, Iran and even that natural-gas-and-oil giant Russia. All of them have, in recent years, used their soaring oil income to finance political endeavors considered inimical to US interests. However, dwindling prices could also shake the very foundations of oil allies like Mexico, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, which could experience internal unrest as oil revenues, and so state expenditures, decline. No less important, diminished oil prices discourage investment in complex oil ventures like deep-offshore drilling, as well as investment in the development of alternatives to oil like advanced (non-food) biofuels. Perhaps most disastrously, in a cheap oil moment, investment in non-polluting, non-climate-altering alternatives like solar, wind and tidal energy is also likely to dwindle. In the longer term, what this means is that, once a global economic recovery begins, we can expect a fresh oil price shock as future energy options prove painfully limited. The upsurge in Chinese consumption, combined with unremitting demand from older industrialized nations and significant price speculation on oil futures, largely explained the astronomical way prices were driven up until last summer. But with the Chinese economy visibly faltering, such projections no longer seem valid. Many analysts now predict that a sharp drop-off in Chinese demand will only accelerate the downward journey of global energy prices. Under these conditions, an early price turnaround appears increasingly unlikely. At present, the world enjoys the (relatively) unfamiliar prospect of a global oil-production surplus, but there's a problematic aspect to this. As long as prices remain low, oil companies have no incentive to invest in costly new production ventures, which means no new capacity is being added to global inventories, while available capacity continues to be drained. Simply put, what this means is that, when demand begins to surge again, global output is likely to prove inadequate. Most "easy oil" reservoirs have now been exhausted, which means that virtually all remaining global reserves are going to be of the "tough oil" variety. These require extraction technology far too costly to be profitable at a moment when the per barrel price remains under $50. Principal among these are exploitation of the tar sands of Canada and of deep offshore fields in the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Guinea and waters off Brazil. While such potential reserves undoubtedly harbor significant supplies of petroleum, they won't return a profit until the price of oil reaches $80 or more per barrel -- nearly twice what it is fetching today. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the oil majors are canceling or postponing plans for new projects in Canada and these offshore locations. While competition among consuming states may lessen, negative political conditions within producing nations are sure to be magnified. Many of these nations, including Angola, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, among others, rely on income from oil exports for a large part of their government expenditures, using this money to finance health and education, infrastructure improvements, food and energy subsidies and social welfare programs. Soaring energy prices, for instance, allowed many producer countries to reduce high youth unemployment -- and so potential unrest. As prices come crashing down, governments are already being forced to cut back on programs that aid the poor, the middle class and the unemployed, which is already producing waves of instability in many parts of the world. Plunging oil prices are also expected to place severe strains on the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, all of which benefited from the record prices of the past few years to finance public works, subsidize basic necessities and generate employment. Like Russia, these countries adopted expansive budgets on the assumption that a world of $70 or more per barrel gas prices would continue indefinitely. Now, like other affected producers, they must dip into accumulated reserves, borrow at a premium, and cut back on social spending -- all of which risk a rise in political opposition and unrest at home.

The world is in the open phase of global crisis. We are standing in front of :

(A) new world war;
(B) "soft" continuation of social-Darwinistic social relations - in the quite new (high science and technology supported, most probably global Orwellian totalitarian) its pathological form;
(C) sustainable development of the world society, conditioned upon ecohumanistic transformation (including creation of the new economy with possibility to account complex costs and effects and stimulate creative – cognitive and innovative - activity directed on common good).

Ecohumanism is a partnership-based co-operation for the common good of all people (rich and poor, from countries highly developed and behind in development), their descendants, and natural environment - commonly supported by science and high technology (including information culture).

It is impossible to overcome global crisis by the (A) or (B) ways. We have to overthrow "zero growth" defense strategy (A. Merkel, WEF, Davos 2007). We have to substitute entrepreneurial capitalism for speculative capitalism (N, Sarcozy, EU Summit 10.2008, B. Gates, WEF Davos 2008). We need creative, ecosocial useful capitalism – i.e. ecosocial free market economy (GMPI)

To achieve above we ought to support G. Brown‘s proposal: GLOBAL EARLY WARNING SYSTEM. But this information system building should be only the first step of creation of world information system for sustainable development policy and economy.

To avoid global catastrophe we need especially – as soon as possible - to elaborate, adopt and enforce UN program of sustainable development information bases creation. The two important world anticrisis events will be hold in the 2009 year:

I - G20 (London, April 2nd);
II – UN General Assembly.
Therefore we propose to try to include into programs of both above events our strategic proposal: TO START TO CREATE THE WORLD INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND ECONOMY.

Without that information system all of the main UN tasks: MDGs, ("three pillars") sustainable development of the world society, fair globalization, sustained economic growth, decoupling economy growth and resources depletion - are not possible to achieve.

See also:

Eco-Humanism and Popular System Dynamics as Preconditions for Sustainable Development, The Vol. 3, No. 11, November 2007 issue of the Solidarity, Sustainability, and Non-Violence (SSNV) Research Newsletter, editor Luis Guterriez – http://pelicanweb.org/solisustv03n11michnowski.html ,

Ecohumanism as a Developmental Crossing, [in:] Sri Sadguru Sainathaya Namah, Transformative Pathways Attainable Utopias, (red. Sangeeta Sharma), Jaipur, India, 2008 - http://www.psl.org.pl/kte/Indie.pdf .

1.0     Meeting the Kyoto Targets: The Importance of Developing Country Participation (the market of tradable permits from no emissions trading to full global trading)
2.0    Estimating the Size of the Potential Market for the Kyoto Flexibility Mechanisms
3.0     Is it Fair to Treat China as a Christmas Tree to Hang Everybody's Complaints? Putting its Own Energy Saving into Perspective
4.0     How Far Can Developing Country Commitments Go in an Immediate Post-2012 Climate Regime?
5.0     Asian Energy and Environmental Policy: Promoting Growth While Preserving the Environment
6.0     Why Has China Not Embraced a Global Cap-and-Trade Regime?
7.0     China, the United States and Technology Cooperation on Climate Control
8.0     Trade and the Environment in North America
9.0     China's Hunt for Oil in Africa in Perspective
10.0     China's Reds Embrace Green
11.0     Energy, Environmental and Climate Issues in Asia
12.0     Electric Power Grid Interconnection in Northeast Asia
13.0     Interregional Burden-Sharing of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in the United States
14.0     A Report on the International Conference on Climate Policy After Marrakech: Towards Global Participation

We've got to think about our choices for the future collectively, seeking cooperation rather than competition.

There is an emergency. In less than a decade we will have to change course -- assuming the collapse of the U.S. economy or the explosion of the Middle East does not impose a change through chaos. To confront the emergency, we must understand the objective: to achieve a sober society; to plot out the way there; to accomplish this transformation equitably, by first making those with the most carry the burden within and between societies; to take inspiration from collective values ascribed to here in France by our nation's motto: "Liberty, ecology, fraternity." The third, wobbly force is the left. Since its social-democratic component became its center of gravity, it has abandoned any ambition of transforming the world. The compromise with free-market liberalism has led the left to so totally adopt the values of free-market liberalism that it no longer dares -- except in the most cautious terms -- to deplore social inequality. On top of that, the left displays an almost cartoonish refusal to truly engross itself in environmental issues. The left will be reborn by uniting the causes of inequality and the environment -- or, unfit, it will disappear in the general disorder that will sweep it and everything else away. The somewhat successful, although still incomplete, battle in Europe against GMOs, the international community's continuance of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 despite the United States' withdrawal, the refusal by the peoples of Europe to participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the general recognition of the urgency of climate-change challenge are signs that the wind of the future has begun to blow. Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are emerging and -- faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote -- the desire to remake the world is being reborn.

Climate scientists wonder why people don't do more about global warming. Social scientists have some troubling answers.

Why don't more of us respond more seriously to the most serious threat to the planet in human history?

But most of us do not rely on our analytic abilities to evaluate the risk of global warming-or any risk, for that matter. Instead, we rely on the second and more common way of perceiving risk: our emotions. Emotions, more than anything else, are what motivate us to act. As decades of behavioral decision research has shown, most people have to feel a risk before they do something about it. In this way, our limited response to global warming is similar to our limited response to mass murder or genocide. Like genocide, the long-term consequences of global warming are so enormous we can't wrap our heads around them. Scientists predict in 40 years global warming will displace 20 million people from Beijing, 40 million from Shanghai and surrounding areas, and 60 million from Calcutta and Bangladesh. These statistics are daunting, but they're abstract; they don't inspire us to feel for the one individual whose life will be put at risk. As a result, we fail to take appropriate action. And as with others, so with ourselves: It is emotions, such as fear or worry, that motivate us to protect ourselves from risk. With global warming, this presents an even more challenging situation. The fact that global warming appears to represent a hazard of nature also leads people to underestimate the risk. A third obstacle that limits people's response to global warming-and even their willingness to believe in it-is also one of the most intractable. In a series of recent studies, a group of scholars from Yale and other universities have been studying how cultural values shape our perceptions of risk. Based on the premise that Americans are culturally polarized on a range of societal risks, from global warming to gun control. People may simply reject evidence that clashes with their worldview. To a certain extent our attitude toward risk and behaviors are conditioned not just by the raw facts of the matter, but by the orientation that we have to the world. In the case of global warming, researchers found two general worldviews that seemed to have the most significant influence on perception and action. One group consists of egalitarians, or people who prefer a society where wealth, power, and opportunity are broadly distributed. Researchers called the other group the hierarchists, those who prefer a society that is linear in its structure, with leaders on top and followers below. What we've seen through this research is that egalitarians are generally more concerned about environmental risks over a range of hazards, including global warming. Hierarchists tend to be less concerned.

Communication about global warming needs to reach people's emotions and trigger fear, and that means emphasizing the dramatic consequences to come. Also, people need to be offered a set of actions they can take to combat global warming.

Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world. In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business. “Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. The Earth is much more important than the stock exchanges of Wall Street and the world While the United States and the European Union allocate $4100 billion to save the bankers from a financial crisis that they themselves have caused, programs on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only $13 billion. The resources for climate change are unfairly distributed. More resources are directed to reduce emissions (mitigation) and less to reduce the effects of climate change that all the countries suffer (adaptation)[3]. The vast majority of resources flow to those countries that have contaminated the most, and not to the countries where we have preserved the environment most. Around 80% of the Clean Development Mechanism projects are concentrated in four emerging countries. Capitalist logic promotes a paradox in which the sectors that have contributed the most to deterioration of the environment are those that benefit the most from climate change programs. At the same time, technology transfer and the financing for clean and sustainable development of the countries of the South have remained just speeches. Attack the structural causes of climate change:

1) Debate the structural causes of climate change. As long as we do not change the capitalist system for a system based in complementarity, solidarity and harmony between the people and nature, the measures that we adopt will be palliatives that will limited and precarious in character. For us, what has failed is the model of “living better”, of unlimited development, industrialisation without frontiers, of modernity that deprecates history, of increasing accumulation of goods at the expense of others and nature. For that reason we promote the idea of Living Well, in harmony with other human beings and with our Mother Earth.

2) Developed countries need to control their patterns of consumption -- of luxury and waste -- especially the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. Subsidies of fossil fuel, that reach $150-250 billion[4], must be progressively eliminated. It is fundamental to develop alternative forms of power, such as solar, geothermal, wind and hydroelectric both at small and medium scales.

3) Agrofuels are not an alternative, because they put the production of foodstuffs for transport before the production of food for human beings. Agrofuels expand the agricultural frontier destroying forests and biodiversity, generate monocropping, promote land concentration, deteriorate soils, exhaust water sources, contribute to rises in food prices and, in many cases, result in more consumption of more energy than is produced.

Substantial commitments to emissions reduction that are met

4) Strict fulfilment by 2012 of the commitments[5] of the developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least by 5% below the 1990 levels. It is unacceptable that the countries that polluted the planet throughout the course of history make statements about larger reductions in the future while not complying with their present commitments.

5) Establish new minimum commitments for the developed countries of greenhouse gas emission reduction of 40% by 2020 and 90% by for 2050, taking as a starting point 1990 emission levels. These minimum commitments must be met internally in developed countries and not through flexible market mechanisms that allow for the purchase of certified emissions reduction certificates to continue polluting in their own country. Likewise, monitoring mechanisms must be established for the measuring, reporting and verifying that are transparent and accessible to the public, to guarantee the compliance of commitments.

6) Developing countries not responsible for the historical pollution must preserve the necessary space to implement an alternative and sustainable form of development that does not repeat the mistakes of savage industrialisation that has brought us to the current situation. To ensure this process, developing countries need, as a prerequisite, finance and technology transfer.

Address ecological debt

7) Acknowledging the historical ecological debt that they owe to the planet, developed countries must create an Integral Financial Mechanism to support developing countries in: implementation of their plans and programs for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change; the innovation, development and transfer of technology; in the preservation and improvement of the sinks and reservoirs; response actions to the serious natural disasters caused by climate change; and the carrying out of sustainable and eco-friendly development plans.

8) This Integral Financial Mechanism, in order to be effective, must count on a contribution of at least 1% of the GDP in developed countries[6] and other contributions from taxes on oil and gas, financial transactions, sea and air transport, and the profits of transnational companies.

9) Contributions from developed countries must be additional to Official Development Assistance (ODA), bilateral aid or aid channelled through organisms not part of the United Nations. Any finance outside the UNFCCC cannot be considered as the fulfilment of developed country’s commitments under the convention.

10) Finance has to be directed to the plans or national programs of the different states and not to projects that follow market logic.

11) Financing must not be concentrated just in some developed countries but has to give priority to the countries that have contributed less to greenhouse gas emissions, those that preserve nature and are suffering the impact of climate change.

12) The Integral Financial Mechanism must be under the coverage of the United Nations, not under the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and other intermediaries such as the World Bank and regional development banks; its management must be collective, transparent and non-bureaucratic. Its decisions must be made by all member countries, especially by developing countries, and not by the donors or bureaucratic administrators.

Technology transfer to developing countries

13) Innovation and technology related to climate changes must be within the public domain, not under any private monopolistic patent regime that obstructs and makes technology transfer more expensive to developing countries.

14) Products that are the fruit of public financing for technology innovation and development of have to be placed within the public domain and not under a private regime of patents[7], so that they can be freely accessed by developing countries.

15) Encourage and improve the system of voluntary and compulsory licenses so that all countries can access products already patented quickly and free of cost. Developed countries cannot treat patents and intellectual property rights as something “sacred” that has to be preserved at any cost. The regime of flexibilities available for the intellectual property rights in the cases of serious problems for public health has to be adapted and substantially enlarged to heal Mother Earth.

16) Recover and promote indigenous peoples' practices in harmony with nature which have proven to be sustainable through centuries.

Adaptation and mitigation with the participation of all the people

17) Promote mitigation actions, programs and plans with the participation of local communities and indigenous people in the framework of full respect for and implementation of the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The best mechanism to confront the challenge of climate change are not market mechanisms, but conscious, motivated and well organised human beings endowed with an identity of their own.

18) The reduction of the emissions from deforestation and forest degradation must be based on a mechanism of direct compensation from developed to developing countries, through a sovereign implementation that ensures broad participation of local communities, and a mechanism for monitoring, reporting and verifying that is transparent and public.

Two radically different approaches dominate assessments of today's global situation. In a rather generally accepted view world society's development is and will be driven by the ongoing rapid economic growth of many heretofore backward societies, notably China and India. In addition, this growth will — as it is doing now — take place in a socio-Darwinistic global rivalry, in other words, according to a ,,growth at the cost of the environment (social and/or natural)1" policy. And without proper knowledge about this policy's complex effects.

The expected goal of such essentially lethal globalization would be the elimination of the fundamental threats looming before contemporary humanity, like the depreciation of the natural environment and the exhaustion of rare, deficit natural resources.

The second approach — which can be shared is to see the world in global crisis (Pajestka 1989). Evident proof of this lies in the continuously progressing and ruthless depreciation of the life supporting natural environment and the increasing use of accessible natural resources at a faster pace than their alternatives can be found. Moreover, access to these valuable resources is fast becoming the object of ruthless battle (even if fought with modernday means).

In the light of the research this crisis is the result of world society's ill adjustment to life in State of Change and Risk, in other words in a qualitatively new situation mainly created by the rapid development of science and technology. In order to overcome global crisis world society will have to achieve sustainable development, in other words, development without cyclically returning disasters and the shortsighted construction of new forms of social and economic life on the ruins of former life forms.

This will require human coexistence models that are qualitatively different from the present ones. The emergence of these new social models will be pre-condition the transformation of the rapid economic and civilizational growth of societies which until recently were behind in their development into a driving force of world society's sustainable development.

Systematic studies of the ways to overcome global crisis show that an in-depth diagnosis of global crisis and its causes is fundamental for developing new forms of interpersonal, international and intercultural life. Equally necessary is the pinpointing of the basic factors driving sustainable development, also in terms of ethic and information. Of prime importance in overcoming global crisis is the rejection of today's dominating selfishness and individualism in favour of ecohumanism.

Ecohumanism means partnership-based cooperation for the common good of all people (rich and poor, from countries highly developed and behind in development), their descendants, and natural environment - commonly supported by science and high technology.

Partnership-based cooperation along "development together with the environment (social and/or natural)" principles will require universal access to knowledge about the complex effects of human activity, including those, which take place over time and space.

How should Obama act on the environment? A report by 29 major enviro groups gave Obama a list of actions and policies.
Twenty-nine of the country's biggest green groups rolled out a comprehensive list of actions and policies they'd like President-elect Barack Obama to adopt after he takes office Jan. 20. In it, the groups stress the need for an approach that unites environment, energy, and economic policies. "We need to dig ourselves out of the financial hole we're in with a green shovel," said National Wildlife Federation President Larry Schweiger during a conference call with reporters. It calls for the creation of jobs in the renewable energy sector, building weatherization, a retooled auto industry, investment in infrastructure like public transportation, and major improvements to the electrical grid. The guidelines also detail what can be done in every executive branch agency, department, and office on a number of other environmental issues. The groups call for Congress to pass legislation in 2009 to cut emissions 35 percent below currently levels by 2020, and 80 percent below 1990 levels by midcentury. They also call for movement toward 100 percent clean electricity through "energy efficiency, modernizing the grid, and greatly expanding power generation from renewable energy resources." The groups urge Obama to grant California's request for waiver to allow the state to enforce tougher standards for cutting emissions from vehicles, and that he use the Clean Air Act "to declare that global warming pollution endangers public health and welfare and to set standards for power plants, vehicles, and fuels." Other recommendations include a call for tougher fuel economy and appliance efficiency standards,and a mandate that government agencies take into account and plan for climate change in all of their actions regarding energy use and natural resources. The groups also urge Obama to reengage in international climate negotiations.

Coal and its byproducts are everywhere -- in plastics, tar, fertilizer, steel and as the energy source for major industries such as paper and cement. In the U.S., however, over 90% of coal is used for electricity generation, resulting in 83% of carbon dioxide emission from the power sector. Coal is burned in power plants to create steam, thereby powering turbines and generating both electricity and a diversity of harmful air pollutants. No matter how you look at it, there isn't much clean about coal. The extraction and burning of coal is considered the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, including oil and gas. So, what is this new, innovative and so-called "clean coal"? Unfortunately, no one has discovered a new form of coal -- the black rock composed of carbon or hydrocarbons that is intensively mined throughout the world. The dangerous misnomers "clean coal" or "clean coal technology" are not about finding a cleaner form of fuel, instead they describe the reduction of air pollution from coal-burning power plants. For instance, some "clean coal technology" works to boost power plant efficiency in converting coal to energy, others physically filter emissions before release, and others are being developed to capture emissions upon release from the plants. With goals of zero-emissions coal power plants, the U.S. has spent over $2.5 billion since 2001 in research and development for "clean coal technology." Unfortunately, none of the options on the table actually help coal--as a whole--become any cleaner. A misnomer at best, "clean coal technology" is key to the cleanup of existing coal-powered facilities, but it's a long shot from the clean energy bill of health. There are some promising technologies being tested and applied within the "clean coal technology" umbrella, such as those addressing "end of the pipe" issues with the burning of the most abundant of fossil fuels.

Will the crisis be good or bad for the environment, especially with respect to global warming?
Of the many areas that will be impacted by the downturn, the environment stands out in particular. It's closely tied to the tempo of resource consumption, and significant efforts to ameliorate environmental decline will prove very expensive and out of reach for already-stretched budgets. The question thus arises: Will the crisis be good or bad for the environment, especially with respect to global warming? By all accounts, the steady growth in the world economy -- much of it driven by phenomenal economic expansion in China, India, and other nations -- was producing a corresponding increase in demand for energy of all forms, especially greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuels. According to the latest pre-crisis projections by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), combined energy consumption by all nations of the world was expected to grow by 22 percent between 2005 and 2015, from 462 to 563 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs). Most of this increase, almost 90 percent, was expected to come from fossil fuels -- oil, coal, and natural gas. The result, not very surprisingly, was a dramatic projected increase in the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Again using DOE projections, total world emissions of CO2 were expected to increase by a frightening 22 percent between 2005 and 2015, from 28.1 to 34.3 billion metric tons. This increased rate of greenhouse-gas emissions would precipitate global climate change, resulting in persistent droughts, increased storm activity, and a significant rise in the sea level. At some point, the price of gasoline will fall so low that many drivers will once again engage in the wasteful driving habits they may have given up when the price of gas soared over $3 per gallon. This may not occur right away. But with crude oil at $70 per barrel, half of what it was in August, a corresponding drop in the price of refined products will eventually follow. And that could lead people to see cheap gasoline as the one bright spot on an otherwise dismal horizon.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression but were afraid to ask. A speculative bubble occurs when price far outstrips the fundamental worth of the asset. Bubbles have occurred in everything from real estate, stocks and railroads to tulips, beanie babies and comic books. As with all bubbles, it took more and more money to make a return. In 1996, the Fed allows regular banks to become heavily involved in investment banking, which opens the door to conflicts of interest in banks pushing sketchy financial products on customers who poorly understood the risks. In 1999, under intense pressure from financial firms, Congress overturns Glass-Steagall, allowing banks to engage in any sort of activity from underwriting insurance to investment banking to commercial banking (such as holding deposits). Many Americans joined the stock mania literally in the last days and lost considerable wealth, and some, such as Enron employees, lost their life savings. When the stock market bubble erupted, turbulence rippled through the larger economy, causing investment and corporate spending to sink and unemployment to rise. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, generating a shock wave of fear and a drop in consumer spending. Burned by the stock market, many people shifted to home purchases as a more secure way to build wealth. By 2002, with the economy already limping along, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Fed slashed interest rates to historic lows of near 1 percent to avoid a severe economic downturn. Low interest rates make borrowed money cheap for everyone from homebuyers to banks. This ocean of credit was one factor that led to a major shift in the home-lending industry -- from originate to own to originate to distribute. Low interest rates also meant that homebuyers could take on larger mortgages, which supported rising prices. In the originate-to-own model, the mortgage lender -- which can be a private mortgage company, bank, thrift or credit union -- holds the mortgage for its term, usually 30 years. Every month the bank* originating the mortgage receives a payment made of principal and interest from the homeowner. If the buyer defaults on the mortgage, that is, stops making monthly payments, then the bank can seize and sell a valuable asset: the house. Given strict borrowing standards and the long life of the loan, it's like the homebuyer is getting married to the bank. *Shorthand for any mortgage originator. In the originate-to-distribute model, the banks sell the mortgage to third parties, turning the loans into a commodity like widgets on a conveyor belt. By selling the loan, the bank frees up its capital so it can turn around and finance a new mortgage. Thus, the banks have an incentive to sell (or distribute) mortgages fast so they can recoup the funds to sell more mortgages. By selling the loan, the bank also distributes the risk of default to others. The banks made money off mortgage fees, perhaps only a few thousand dollars per loan. Because they sold the loan, sometimes in just a few days, they had no concern that the homebuyer might default. Banks began using call centers and high-pressure tactics to mass-produce mortgages because the profit was in volume--how many loans could be approved how fast. This was complemented by fraud throughout the realestate industry, in which appraisers over-valued homes and mortgage brokers approved anyone with a pulse, not verifying assets, job status or income. And the mushrooming housing industry distorted the whole economy. Of all net job growth from 2002 to 2007, up to 40 percent was housing-sector related: mortgage brokers, appraisers, real-estate agents, call-center employees, loan officers, construction and home-improvement store workers, etc. To make the loans easier to sell, the banks go to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and get assurance for conforming (or prime mortgages*). Assurance means one of the agencies certifies that the loans are creditworthy; they also insure part of the loan in case the homeowner defaults. Before their recent nationalization, Fannie and Freddie were government-sponsored entities (GSEs). While anyone could buy shares in the two companies, they were also subject to federal regulation and congressional oversight. This federal role was seen as an implicit guarantee: While there was no explicit guarantee, all parties believed loans backed by Fannie and Freddie were absolutely safe because the government would not let the two agencies fail. This allowed them to borrow huge sums of money at extremely low rates. *Prime refers to the credit score of the borrower. Banks then sold their newly acquired assured prime mortgage loans to bundlers, ranging from Fannie and Freddie to private labels, such as investment banks, hedge funds and money banks (ones that hold deposits like savings and checking accounts. Bundlers pooled many mortgages with the intention of selling the payment rights to others, that is, someone else pays to receive your monthly mortgage payments. The next step was to securitize the bundle (a security is a tradable asset. Much of the financial wizardry of Wall Street involves turning debts into assets. Say you're Bank of America and you sell 200 mortgages in a day. Lehman Brothers buys the loans after they are assured and bundles them by depositing the mortgages in a bank account -- that's where the monthly payments from the 200 homeowners go. Then, a mortgage-backed security (MBS) is created from this bundle. An MBS is a financial product that pays a yield to the purchaser, such as a hedge fund, pension fund, investment bank, money bank, central bank and especially Fannie and Freddie. The yield, essentially an interest payment, comes from the mortgage payments. How does it work? The homeowner keeps making monthly mortgage payments to Bank of America, which makes money from the fees from the original mortgage and gets a cut for servicing the mortgage payments, passing them on to Lehman Brothers. Lehman makes money as a bundler of the mortgages and underwriter of the mortgage-backed security. The purchaser of the mortgage-backed security, say, Fannie Mae, then gets paid from the bank account holding the mortgage payments. At first, this process covered only prime mortgages because Fannie and Freddie could not assure subprime loans. To address low rates of home ownership among low-income populations and communities of color, around 2004 Congress began encouraging Fannie and Freddie to start assuring subprime mortgages on a wide scale. And easy credit fed investors' appetite for more and more mortgage-backed securities, which provided funding for new mortgages. One definition of subprime loans is any loan at an interest rate that is at least 3 percentage points more than a prime loan. Many of these loans were adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) with teaser rates. The rate was low for the first few years, but then it would reset, causing monthly payments to leap dramatically, sometimes to two or three times the original amount. Subprime borrowers are considered riskier to lend to because of low credit scores. Subprime borrowers are concentrated among people of color and immigrant and low-income communities, partly because racial and class disparities result in less access to banking services such as credit cards, online billing and checking and saving accounts. Bill paying becomes a labor-intensive process, making it much more likely that payments will be late or missed, driving down credit scores. With mortgage brokers and lenders pushing loans on anyone and everyone, those with less financial acumen -- disproportionately low-income people, immigrants, the elderly and communities of color -- often found themselves with mortgages that became unaffordable. With the surge in mortgage loans, around 2004, banks started extensively using financial products called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). The banks would either combine mortgage-backed securities they already owned or bundle large pools of high-interest subprime mortgages. CDOs were sliced into tranches -- think of them as cuts of meat -- that paid a yield according to risk of default: The best cuts, the filet mignon, had the lowest risk and hence paid the lowest yield. The riskiest tranches, the mystery-meat hotdogs that paid the highest yield, would default first if homebuyers stopped making payments. This was seen as a way to distribute risk across the markets. The notion of distributing risk means all the market players take a little risk, so if something goes bad, everyone suffers but no one dies. Tranches were given ratings by services like Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch. The highest rating, AAA, meant there was virtually no risk of default. The perceived safety of AAA meant a broad variety of financial institutions could buy them. And because tranches were marketed as a tool to fine-tune risk and return, this spurred a big demand. There was a conflict of interest, however, because the rating services earned huge fees from the investment banks. Moody's earned nearly $850 million from such structured finance products in 2006 alone. The investment bank also bundled lower-rated mortgage backed securities, like BBB -rated ones, and then sliced them to create new tranches rated from AAA to junk. This was like turning the hotdogs into steaks. Furthermore, the banks would hedge the tranches, another way of distributing risk, by purchasing credit default swaps (CDSs) sold by companies like AIG and MBIA. The swaps were a form of insurance. This was seen as a way to make tranches more secure and hence higher rated. For instance, say you're Goldman Sachs and you have $10 million in AAA tranches. You go to AIG to insure it, and the company determines that the risk of default is extremely low so the premium is 1 percent. So you pay AIG $100,000 a year and if the tranche defaults, the company pays you $10 million. But CDSs started getting brought and sold all over the world based on perceived risk. The market grew so large that the underlying debt being insured was $45 trillion -- nearly the same size as the annual global economy! Also around 2004, things began to get even trickier when investment banks set up entities known as structured investment vehicles (SIVs). The SIVs would purchase subprime MBSs from their sponsoring banks. But to purchase these MBSs, the structured investment vehicles needed funds of their own. So the SIVs created products called asset-backed commercial paper (short-term debt of 1 to 90 days). Asset-backed means it is backed by credit from the sponsoring bank. The SIVs then sold the paper, mainly to money market funds. In this way, the SIVs generated money to purchase the mortgage-backed securities from their bank. The SIVs made money by getting high yields from the subprime MBSs they brought, while paying out low yields to the money markets that purchased the commercial paper (profiting from a spread like this is known as arbitrage). Wall Street's goal was to conjure up ways to make money while not encountering any liability. It was moving everything off-book to the SIVs to get around rules about leveraging. Banks, hedge funds and others leverage by taking their capital reserves -- actual cash or assets that can be easily turned into cash -- and borrowing many times against it. For instance, Merrill Lynch had a leverage ratio of 45.8 on Sept. 26. That means that if Merrill had $10 billion in the bank, it was playing around with $458 billion. The Federal Reserve is supposed to regulate reserves to limit the growth of credit, but the SIVs were one method to get around this rule. More leverage also meant more risk for the bank, however, because funds could disappear quickly if a few bets went bad. This is all part of what's called the Shadow Banking System, meaning it gets around existing regulations. It was deregulation that led to the huge growth of the shadow banking system. In 2004 Wall Street successfully lobbied the Securities and Exchange Commission to loosen regulations on how much they could leverage against their capital reserves. This allowed the companies "to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments," according to the New York Times. The only real oversight left in place was self-policing by the investment banks themselves to determine if they were putting investors at risk. The whole process worked as long as everyone believed housing prices would go up endlessly. This is a form of perceptual economics, one principle of which is that any widely held belief in the market tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the case of housing, homeowners took on ever-larger mortgages in the belief that prices would keep rising rapidly. Mortgage lenders believed the loans were safe because even if the homeowner defaulted, the mortgage holder would be left with a house that was increasing in price. Confidence in rising prices led the creators and purchasers of mortgage-backed securities to think these investments were virtually risk-free. This also applied to over-leveraging -- as long as there was easy credit and quick returns to be made, investors clamored for more mortgage-backed securities. And this applied to the money market funds that brought the paper from structured investment vehicles. As long as the money market funds had confidence in the system, they didn't cash out the commercial paper when it came due, but rolled it over at the same interest rates. This allowed the SIVs to mint money without posing any liabilities for their sponsoring banks. This system kept the U.S. economy chugging along for years. For some 35 years, real wages have been stagnant for most Americans, but as house values skyrocketed over the last decade, many homeowners refinanced and cashed out the equity -- turning their homes into ATMs. For example, if you owed $200,000 on a mortgage but the house value rose to $300,000, you could potentially turn the $100,000 difference into cash by refinancing. By 2004, Americans were using home equity to finance as much $310 billion a year in personal consumption. This debt-driven consumption was the engine of growth. U.S. over-consumption was balanced by over-production in many Asian countries. Countries like China, India, Taiwan and South Korea run large trade surpluses with the United States, which speeds their economic development. They invest excess cash in U.S. credit instruments ranging from corporate debt and MBSs to government bonds and bills. It's what economists call a virtuous cycle: we buy their goods, helping them develop, while they use the profits to buy our credit, allowing us to purchase more of their goods. But it's also unsustainable. A country cannot over-consume forever. In the final stage of the housing bubble, fewer first-time buyers could afford traditional mortgages. Rising house prices required ever-larger down payments so subprime mortgages multiplied, as they often required little or no money down. From 2004 to 2006, nearly 20 percent of all mortgage loans were subprime loans. As the vast majority were adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), this created a time bomb. The minute interest rates went up, the rates reset, and homeowners with ARMs were saddled with larger monthly payments. Various factors combined to slow real-estate prices and deflate the bubble. Rising prices led to a building boom and oversupply of houses, everaccelerating prices meant more money brought smaller returns and, once again, the Fed played a role by raising interest rates. It was trying to stave off inflation, but given the proliferation of adjustablerate mortgages, it led to higher mortgage payments, pushing hundreds of thousands of homeowners into foreclosure. Once the bubble started to leak, the process accelerated, turning the mania into a panic. First, the default spread to the structured debt instruments like collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities. The system of distributing risk failed. Securitization had spread across the entire financial system -- investment and money banks, pension funds, central banks, insurance companies -- putting everyone at risk. Because the finance sector had lobbied aggressively for decades to slash regulation, the lack of oversight amplified risk. As mortgage holders defaulted, mortgage-backed securities also began to default. The subprime funding conduit from Wall Street froze up, which led big mortgage lenders like Countrywide, New Century Financial and American Home Mortgage to go belly-up. As panic set in, money market funds began to stop rolling over the commercial paper -- they wanted to cash it out. So SIVs now had to either call on their credit line from their sponsoring banks or sell assets such as the mortgage-backed securities to raise money. Mortgage defaults and forced sales of the MBSs began to push prices down even further. This forced banks to book losses, requiring some to sell more assets to cover the losses, further lowering prices, forcing them to book more losses, creating a vicious cycle. This is known as a liquidation trap. Since no one was sure about the size of the losses, banks began to hoard funds, which caused the credit markets to dry up. Over the last year, the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury have taken increasingly drastic measures -- lowering interest rates, pumping cash into the banking sector, allowing investment banks to borrow funds while putting up low-valued securities as collateral. This then proceeded to financing takeovers, such as the Fed providing a $29 billion credit line for JP Morgan to take over Bear Stearns in March. Then it nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; this was followed by the federal takeover of AIG, which was done in by its gambling with credit default swaps. In the end, the legendary Wall Street banks disappeared in a fortnight -- bankrupt, acquired or converted into bank holding companies like Citigroup. But the contagion has not been contained. Whether the bailout plan can succeed is highly questionable. Many are skeptical as to whether the bailout will even restore confidence -- and credit -- to the banking system. As Reuters stated recently, "Doubts remain as to how it [the bailout plan] could immediately thaw the frozen money and credit market." Even if the bailout revives the banking sector, few economists think it will jumpstart the consumer credit machine. For one, over-leveraged, money-strapped banks will eagerly dump nearworthless securities on taxpayers in exchange for cash to bulk up their reserves. Plus, with working hours and wages declining and unemployment, home foreclosures and inflation surging, banks are in no mood to give consumers more credit, so consumption -- and hence the economy -- will continue to contract. There are many other, better options that were proposed: avoiding the poisonous mortgage-backed securities and buying equity stakes directly in troubled banks, re-regulating the industry, sending in teams of government auditors to decide the real worth of financial companies and which should live and die, creating a Home Owners' Loan Corporation to allow the government to buy troubled mortgages directly, allowing local governments to seize foreclosed homes and turn them into subsidized housing to minimize abandonment (which creates ghost neighborhoods, driving down the price of still-occupied homes), public works program, alternative energy investments, a Green New Deal. But these are political questions that depend on organizing and political power to propose, legislate, fund and enact. That's what will determine if there is a 21st-century New Deal or if Wall Street will get away with the biggest financial crime in world history.

A powerful excerpt from 'Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan' lays bare the racism at the core of the Iraq occupation. In March of this year, a courageous group of veterans brought the war home, at a historic event held in Silver Spring, Md., inspired by Vietnam veterans a generation before. "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan" convened more than 200 soldiers who have served in the so-called "War on Terror;" like their fellow soldiers before them, who shared stories that laid bare the nightmare of Vietnam, these veterans bore witness to the crimes that have been committed in Americans' names during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The hearings lasted four days; in their testimony, soldiers described how the discarding of the military's rules of engagement and its systematic dehumanization of Iraqi and Afghan civilians has led to horrible acts of violence against innocent men, women and children. "These are not isolated incidents," was a common refrain, even as the episodes they described seemed exceptionally brutal. For many of the veterans, it was the first time they had told their stories. When I got to Iraq in 2003, I learned a new word, "haji." Haji was the enemy. Haji was every Iraqi. He was not a person, a father, a teacher, or a worker. It's important to understand where this word came from. To Muslims, the most important thing is to take a pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. Someone who has taken this pilgrimage is a haji. It's something that, in traditional Islam, is the highest calling in the religion. We took the best thing from Islam and made it into the worst thing. Since the creation of this country, racism has been used to justify expansion and oppression. Native Americans were called "savages," the Africans were called all sorts of things to excuse slavery, and Vietnam veterans know the multitude of words used to justify that imperialist war. So haji was the word we used. It was the word we used on this particular mission I'm going to talk about. We've heard a lot about raids and kicking down the doors of people's houses and ransacking their houses, but this was a different kind of raid. We never got any explanation for our orders. We were only told that a group of ?ve or six houses was now property of the U.S. military, and we had to go in and make those families leave their houses. I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the occupation. These are human beings. I've since been plagued by guilt. I feel guilt any time I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn't walk who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt any time I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt any time I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street. We were told we were ?ghting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war. I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and ?nd families thrown onto the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not ?ve thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we organize and ?ght, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.

Look no further than the World Bank to see how many economic, social and environmental problems so-called experts can make worse. Remember the World Bank, that global "development" institution based in Washington, D.C., that dispenses billions of dollars a year to poorer nations with the declared intent of ending global poverty? We -- and many of you -- spent decades protesting the World Bank and documenting the bank's projects and policies that exacerbated economic, social and environmental problems. In the United States, thousands of protesters took to the streets in the years prior to 9/11 to condemn the financial behemoth. Across the Third World, where the impacts of World Bank lending are felt on the ground every day, such protests began even earlier. This weekend, World Bank President Robert Zoellick will use the occasion of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's annual meetings in Washington, D.C., to announce that critics like us were oh so wrong and that we should look to the World Bank to play a key role in solving the world's food, climate, poverty and other crises. Were we indeed wrong? Could millions of our allies in developing countries, including so-called beneficiaries of the development mega-agency, have possibly been so wrong? Is it a time for a mea culpa? Having taken a close look at the World Bank past and present in our recently published book, Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match, we'd say it's not. When the Institute for Policy Studies started monitoring World Bank greenhouse gas emissions in 1997, the Bank was investing roughly 100 times more in fossil fuel energy projects than in clean energy. Tens of billions of dollars of dirty energy lending later, the Bank certainly has demonstrated its ability to contribute to climate chaos. Here, Zoellick is onto a truth of some sorts. If you really get down to the basics, over the course of its history, the World Bank has been all about "inclusive globalization." For example, over the past two decades, the economic-globalization free-market model it pushed on its borrowing countries has propelled the total number of billionaires in the world from around 100 to 1,125, with a far more inclusive group of countries being home to the billionaires today. So too does the World Bank now acknowledge that its math was wrong and the number of people living in poverty today is actually much higher than the Bank's prior calculations asserted. In other words, "inclusive globalization" has helped create a larger, more inclusive class of poor people. Way to go, World Bank. The World Bank has loaned tens of billions of dollars to Africa since the Bank set up shop right after World War II? The fact that poverty and inequality have risen in most African countries over that same period is surely pure coincidence. Consider the case of Malawi, where the government explicitly rejected the World Bank's advice on how to deal with a crisis in domestic corn production that threatened widespread famine. The result of ignoring the Bank's expertise? By late 2007, Malawi was not only feeding its own population, but also exporting corn. Dare we suggest that if Zoellick really cares about sub-Saharan Africa, he would encourage other countries to follow Malawi's example and ignore the Bank's advice? Indeed, check out the Bank's preferred solution to climate change. It's to get governments out of the picture and let the invisible hand of "carbon markets" prevail. Talk about ingenuity regarding an appropriate role for the public sector: The Bank has devised a way to make hundreds of millions of dollars off carbon markets by charging a hefty commission on trades. Or take the food crisis. By pressing countries to follow a set of policies geared to shift farmers from subsistence food crops (rice and corn, for instance, that the grower could eat) to export crops (cut flowers, ornamental plants, gourmet veggies -- that either can't be eaten or aren't meant for local stomachs), the Bank has created a "freer" global market for farm products grown largely by or for big agribusiness companies. Southern countries get to be more vulnerable to and dependent upon the whims of an unfair and volatile global market. And, now there's a role for governments to play in quelling the ensuing "food riots." Who could better grasp the challenges faced by people who make less than $2 a day than people who make hundreds of dollars a day, often tax-free? Who could better understand the needs of poor people than experts who zip in and out of poorer countries and stay in five-star hotels? And, as for those World Bank staff who do live in-country, who could better comprehend the realities of the average poor person there than Bank staff who typically live in mansions with chauffeurs and gardeners?

The economic crisis, however painful, will lead to at least one positive outcome. Our economy in recent decades has been propped up by an alarming degree by profligate consumer spending and wasting of resources prompted by an avaricious credit industry. Even before the crisis, it was obvious that the traditional American Dream of comfort and security had been displaced by a "more is better" focus that promotes not quality of life, but rather the unbridled production and consumption of stuff. There was never any chance that could continue indefinitely. Recently, the Global Footprint Network issued a report stating that by September 23, humanity had consumed all the new resources the planet will produce for the year. For the rest of 2008, we are in the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, drawing down our resource stocks -- in essence, borrowing from the future. Sound familiar? We can't hope to keep to our economic budget if we can't keep to our ecological budget. The "more is better" version of the American dream is unsustainable environmentally, fueling a level of resource consumption that the planet cannot keep up with. It is personally unsustainable, drawing American families into a work-and-spend treadmill that depletes savings and clutters lives. And now we see it is unsustainable economically, as well. Whatever economy emerges from this crisis will need to put less emphasis on "more" stuff and greater emphasis on more of what matters -- like healthy communities, a healthy planet and a higher quality of life. In righting the economic ship, the end game shouldn't be to plug up a broken vessel, but to move to something more seaworthy -- one that sails within both personal and ecological limits.

We are facing crises of freshwater, food, deforestation, and ocean health. We need leadership in the protection of all our natural resources. All of our natural resources are in peril because of what we do and what that does to our planet.

We are facing a fresh water crisis. We are facing a food crisis. We are facing a crisis over deforestation. And we are facing crises in our oceans. While carbon emissions from fossil fuels pollute the air, so does a lot of other stuff. Now is the time to press for leadership in the protection of all our natural resources. We must increase our freshwater supply by about 20 percent by the year 2025 to meet world demand, and 90 cities still dump sewage into it. The price of most food has doubled over the past year, forcing millions deeper into poverty and malnourishment. There is now six times as much plastic as zooplankton in parts of the Pacific Ocean, and 90 percent of the big fish on Earth have disappeared. Meanwhile, we have an ever-increasing waste and electronic-waste burden on our hands. We each create twice as much trash per day as we did 40 years ago. The average size of our landfills has multiplied 25 times in that period as well. And our e-waste burden is so bad that we ship 80 percent of it overseas to countries with weak environmental standards. These countries in turn make products from our discards and ship them right back to us. (And we wonder how lead paint gets in toys.) As well, up to 40 percent of global wood production is from illegal timber operations. Deforestation not only displaces people and endangers species, it is the second biggest cause of climate change. (It isn't only fossil fuels that cause global warming.) To be sure, an alternative energy supply is needed and important. But let's not forget the importance of other environmental factors crucial to our health and well-being, not to mention the planet's.

L'explorateur français Jean-Louis ETIENNE, vient de lancer une pétition pour sauver la banquise au pôle Nord. Selon ses analyses, la fonte avec le réchauffement va entraîner une période de chaos climatique notamment dans l'hémisphère Nord.

Depuis quelque temps, nous connaissons de sérieux avertissements. Même s'il existe des phénomènes climatiques conjoncturels exceptionnels, force est de constater, ces dernières années, l'accroissement des tornades, cyclones, tremblements de terre ou autres tsunamis.

Il suggère que le Président français Nicolas SARKOZY, qui préside actuellement l'Union Européenne propose aux Nations Unies le vote d'une résolution qui classerait la banquise de l'Océan arctique comme une zone d'intérêt commun pour l'humanité.

Il est temps, qu'en actes, les gouvernements mettent en œuvre les recommandations du GIEC et des conférences internationales. La France pour sa part, a tenu son Grenelle de l'environnement. Il faut, après le vote d'une résolution par l'AG de l'ONU, que les Nations Unies organisent un sommet millénaire pour l'environnement avec le vote ensuite de résolutions par continent avec des échéances d'application et les sommes allouées.

En effet, contrairement à ceux qui parlent de déterminisme de la bourse pour justifier leur impuissance ou inaction, les humains sont encore les décideurs de l'économie mondiale .Par contre, face à la nature en colère, quelle que puisse être notre conception philosophique ou religieuse, nous ne pouvons rien empêcher à l'instant = sauf constater les dégâts. Ce qui se fait maintenant et se fera pour l'environnement, aura des incidences pour une autre génération. Cependant, il faut le faire au présent car c'est de la survie de la planète et de toutes ses formes de vie : humaine, animale,minérale, végétale...qu'il est question!

L'AVENIR COMMANDE MAINTENANT LA SAGESSE ET LA DETERMINATION DU PRESENT.Que la science serve l'humain, les peuples, et non des privilégiés détenteurs d'intérêts privés ou de stratégies étatiques suicidaires.

Le principe d’harmonie est celui où les choses en apparence stables, se développent et meurent en passant par un changement ininterrompu au cours duquel finalement, malgré tous les hasards apparents et les retours en arrière momentanés, un développement progressif vers l’harmonie finit par se faire jour. En 2007, il s’est écoulé 50 ans, depuis que le bouddhiste Josei TODA, devant 50.000 jeunes réunis dans le stade de Mitsuzawa à Yokohama au Japon a dénoncé les armes nucléaires comme un mal absolu et il a rugi comme un lion en exigeant leur abolition.

En surface, sans parler de L’échec actuel du TNP ( traité de non-prolifération nucléaire ) on pourrait penser que cet appel n’a pas été écouté car comme l’écrit Monsieur Daisaku IKEDA, dans ses propositions pour la paix le 26 janvier 2007, transmises au Secrétaire général de l’ONU : Ban Ki-Moon, « … Il est regrettable, que nous soyons entrés dans le 21è siècle encombrés du fardeau de 27.000 têtes nucléaires….. »

Le principe d’harmonie ? Il sera lorsque les humains mettront en actes le Manifeste RUSSELL –EINSTEIN publié en 1955 qui disait : « L’appel que nous lançons, est celui d’êtres humains à d’autres êtres humains ; rappelez-vous que vous êtes de la race des hommes et oubliez le reste …. »

Avec la guerre entre la Russie et la Géorgie début août dans le Caucase, ce conflit est également apparu comme le théâtre d’un affrontement Est-Ouest entre la Russie (qui soutient les indépendantistes Ossètes) et les Etats –Unis (avec l’OTAN.)

L’ONU est apparue bien limitée ou timorée pour peser d’un quelconque poids relativement à ce conflit. Il est vrai que depuis l’éclatement de l’ex URSS, les relations des l’OUEST avec la Russie ont permis des avancées de relations plus détendues que lors de la guerre froide, mais l’implantation prévue du bouclier antimissiles dans des anciens pays alliés du bloc soviétique a relancé des tensions.

Des concepts tels ceux de : humanisme, démocratie, liberté, valeur, de droit de l’homme et de devoir sont utilisés en des sens divers. Ils deviennent de simples abstractions, des sortes d’hymne générique ignorant les singularités.

Le vécu des peuples est ressenti comme étranger à des mots qui ressemblent à des slogans creux !

Egalement, ces abus de langage aboutissent à un affaiblissement de la pensée elle-même ; ceci, dans la mesure ou celle-ci se rétrécit, véhicule par les mots des conceptions fausses ou à interprétations multiples, sans clarté ou cohérence de vulgarisation et sans le respect des usages originaux et primitifs des concepts.

Un autre concept reste à affirmer : celui de dignité ; du respect de toutes les minorités humanistes de pensée et de groupes sociaux marginalisés et cependant porteurs d’une riche histoire humaine.

C’est pourquoi, ma modeste ambition d’essayiste sera celle de redéfinir l’humanisme contemporain, ce à quoi voulait s’atteler le philosophe Michel FOUCAULT, hélas mort avant d’avoir pu réaliser son dessein.

A ma modeste manière, je réfléchis sur les questions de société et relativement à l’humanisme, je viens de terminer 2 livres : la Révolution de l’esprit (pour l’humanisme en action) à paraître le 9 décembre 2008 et « Réconcilier les droits et les devoirs pour l’avenir de l’humanité » à paraître l’été 2009.

La culture de la paix et de la non-violence ne concerne pas que les Institutions, elle est exigeante pour chaque citoyen si nous voulons que notre planète vive en harmonie. Sinon, les violences sociales planétaires qui nous attendent seront un drame aussi grave que les déséquilibres causés à la bio-diversité et qui menacent nos vécus à venir.

Certes, le rôle des parents, des enseignants reste primordial afin de transmettre les valeurs de paix et d’harmonie et de ce point de vue si l’engagement associatif prend un relief grandissant, le rôle des Religions valorisant la compassion, l’amour universel, le travail intérieur sur soi, devrait être une contribution également importante. Hélas, l’apparition des fondamentalismes et autres fanatismes ont obscurci bien des messages originaux, lesquels, ont perdu de leur portée étant parfois et hélas abusivement assimilé aux dérives sectaires et obscurantistes, voire meurtrières.

Je propose donc, dans cette perspective, aux Chefs d’Etats et de Gouvernements de devenir des promoteurs et garants du devoir d’humanité !

Curieusement, les concepts de VIE et de PEUPLE ne font l’objet d’aucune définition dans le droit international. Ceci, alors qu’ils sont au centre de toute aventure humaine.

Cette apologie ou ce laxisme vis-à-vis de la suppression de la vie s’applique alors également pour les animaux, les plantes,….Bref, toute vie organique et biologique en général !

Parlons, et réglons dans le droit international, dans les Constitutions, actes, traités, de tout ce qui a trait aux atteintes multiples et caractéristiques des droits et devoirs de la personne.

Pour ma part, j’ai suggéré à l’occasion du 60e anniversaire de la déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, la mise en chantier d’une nouvelle déclaration des droits et devoirs de la personne. J’ai exposé mes arguments dans un livre à paraître sous le titre : « Réconcilier les droits et les devoirs pour l’avenir de l’humanité.

En ce début de IIIe millénaire, le véritable humanisme contemporain est celui du respect de la vie : de toute forme de vie, et ce : à commencer pour l’exemplarité par Les Chefs d’Etats et de Gouvernements et autres Institutions, les leaders religieux,….

Cet humanisme, passe par l’exigence du devoir d’humanité !