More than 800 million poor people in India are bearing the burnt of climate change. This is partly due to the emissions caused by the few privileged rich people in the country, said a report released by Greenpeace India Society. The report on climate injustice entitled `Hiding Behind the Poor’ urged the government to apply the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in the country to deal with the situation arising out of climate change. The study authored by G Ananathpadmanabhan, K Srinivas and Vinuta Gopal, however advocated India’s right to seek common but differentiated responsibilities at the global level. Referring to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, it said that India claims its right to development and thus its right to consume more energy from fossil fuels, asking developed nations to create the carbon space. Implicit in this is the notion that the developed countries need to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions drastically so that developing countries can still increase theirs without pushing the planet in the direction of climate change.” However, the study pointed out that over the last few decades, emissions of rapidly developing countries like India and China have surged. In fact, rankings by the WRI of top GHG emitters has US on top and developing countries such as China and India are ranked at No 2 and 5 respectively, making them amongst the world’s biggest emitters. The Greepeace India made an urgent plea to the government to consider the situation especially when the next round of negotiations for the second phase of Kyoto Protocol is scheduled to take place in Bali in Indonesia in December, this year. The Greenpeace India report further said that India was faced with two sharply contradictory realities. On the one hand there was a rapidly growing rich consumer class which has made the country the 12. The largest luxury market in the world and on the other hand India has become the home to more than 800 million poor people on the planet who are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. India’s per capita carbon dioxide emission has averaged to 1.67 tonne.

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon urged the national governments to do more to arrest the climate change. The report also offered blueprints to avert the worst catastrophes, he said and added that climate change imperils the most precious treasures of our planet. Ki-moon said that the report would be placed before the forthcoming UN framework on climate change meeting in Bali in Indonesia to review the progress made under the Kyoto Protocol. The report noted that observational evidence from all continents and most oceans showed that many natural systems were being affected by regional climate changes, particularly rise in temperatures. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of the human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial value determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.

The US Navy, with the assistance of British and Australian commandos, is building a permanent base to guard two oil-export platforms in Iraqi waters at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. The military mission goes far beyond the patrols which US warships have conducted in the Persian Gulf for the past 30 years, in the name of keeping oil shipping lanes open. The Navy finds itself with an additional, much more specific role: playing security guard to Iraq’s offshore oil infrastructure. US, British and Australian military officers will control Iraq’s oil export shipping for the indefinite future.
Iraq is one of the least-explored countries among the major oil producers, and there are plans to explore for oil in the western desert (Anbar province) as well as the traditional oil-producing regions in the north and south. Iraq has 112 billion barrels in proven oil reserves, but UN estimates have placed its probable but as yet unproven reserves at 214 billion barrels, perhaps the world’s largest pool of untapped oil. The oil ministry reported last week that daily crude oil production in October hit a three-year high of 2.7 million barrels a day, of which 1.8 million barrels were exported. Hussein al-Shahristani, the oil minister, said that crude production should reach 3 million barrels daily by the end of the year.

Post-invasion non-violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan - a month on from the 6th anniversary of the war criminal US invasion and occupation on 7th October 2001 – now total an estimated 3.2 million. However comparisons with Occupied Iraq (1.5-2 million TOTAL post-invasion excess deaths, and 0.8-1.2 million or about 50% of these being VIOLENT deaths) suggest that the post-invasion violent excess deaths in Occupied Afghanistan could total 3 million. The racist, war criminal US military state that they “don’t do body counts” of Indigenous victims but publicly-accessible UN demographic data allow us to estimate the carnage as outlined below.
With Racist Zionist-beholden Bush America and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel threatening to devastate remote, peaceful, non-invading, non-occupying, non-threatening, non-nuclear armed, democratic Iran (population 70 million, half of them KIDS and three quarters Women and Children), perhaps the best advice about how the World can stop these proto-Nazi, racist war-mongers is that given by outstanding CONSERVATIVE American economist, writer, academic and “Father of Reaganomics” Dr Paul Craig Roberts (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02122007.html ), QUOTE :

“Dump the Dollar! How the World can stop Bush … If the rest of the world would simply stop purchasing US Treasuries, and instead dump their surplus dollars into the foreign exchange market, the Bush Regime would be overwhelmed with economic crisis and unable to wage war ...The demise of the US dollar is only a question of time. It would save the world from war and devastation if the dollar is brought to its demise before the Bush Regime launches its planned attack on Iran.”

Some of us who examine and discuss environmental matters are constantly puzzled and frustrated by the seeming inability of elected officials, environmental organizations, and environmental and political writers to “get” the nature of our ecological plight. Could it be they’re simply unaware of the ecological principles which enable one to understand it?
A finite earth can support only a limited number of humans. There is therefore a global “carrying capacity” for humans. A basic definition of carrying capacity is “The maximum number of people, or individuals of a particular species, that a given part of the environment can maintain indefinitely.” It is an axiom of ecological science that a population which has grown larger than the carrying capacity of its environment (e.g., the global ecosystem) degrades its environment. It uses resources faster than they are regenerated by that environment, and produces waste faster than the environment can absorb it without being degraded.

Welcome to the Age of Insuffiency: As oil prices hit new highs and supplies sink, our way of life will drastically change.
We are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency. Major investors are not likely to cough up the trillions of dollars needed to substantially boost production in the years ahead, suggesting that the global output of conventional petroleum will not reach the elevated levels predicted by the Energy Department but will soon begin an irreversible decline. This conclusion leads to two obvious strategic impulses: first, the government will seek to ease the qualms of major energy investors by promising to protect their overseas investments through the deployment of American military forces; and second, the industry will seek to hedge its bets by shifting an ever-increasing share of its investment funds into the development of nonpetroleum liquids. In considering these past events, it is important to recognize that the use of military force to protect the flow of imported petroleum has generally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Washington. One might imagine that the current debacle in Iraq would shake this consensus, but there is no evidence that this is so. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case: possibly fearful that the chaos in Iraq will spread to other countries in the Gulf region, senior figures in both parties are calling for a reinvigorated US military role in the protection of foreign energy deliveries. There is mounting perils to the safe flow of foreign oil. Concluding that the United States alone has the capacity to protect the global oil trade against the threat of violent obstruction, it argues the need for a strong US military presence in key producing areas and in the sea lanes that carry foreign oil to American shores. An awareness of this new "Washington consensus" on the need to protect overseas oil supplies with American troops helps explain many recent developments in Washington. Most significant, it illuminates the strategic stance adopted by President Bush in justifying his determination to retain a potent US force in Iraq -- and why the Democrats have found it so difficult to contest that stance. We should expect an increase in the use of military force to protect the overseas flow of oil, as the threat level rises along with the need for new investment to avert even further reductions in global supplies.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years.
The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain. The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions. It ultimately comes down to an issue of democracy. "We came to see that the conflicts over water are really about fundamental questions of democracy itself: Who will make the decisions that affect our future, and who will be excluded?

The hot breath of global warming has now touched some of the coldest northern regions of world, turning the frozen landscape into mush as temperatures soar 15 degrees C. above normal. Entire hillsides, sometimes more than a kilometre long, simply let go and slid like a vast green carpet into valleys and rivers on Melville Island in Canada’s northwest Arctic region of Nunavut this summer, says Scott Lamoureux of Queens University in Canada and leader of one the of International Polar Year projects. The entire landscape is on the move, it was very difficult to find any slopes that were unaltered, said Lamoureux, who led a scientific expedition to the remote and uninhabited island. The topography and ecology of Melville Island is rapidly being rearranged by climate change.

We are all looking at the end of the world as we know it. Our attention is focused on the holes in the ozone layer, planet warming, peak oil, the spread of DU weapons, the collapse of the house of credit cards, and the prospect of the planetary financial elite quickly establishing fascist control of the planet. Below this threshold of conscious awareness our biological survival systems are rapidly eroding. At this point some twenty percent of the planet’s soils erode each twenty-five year period. Each year at least two hundred thousand acres of irrigated crop-lands go out of production because of salinization or water-logging and experts say that sixty to eighty percent of all irrigated acreage is due to follow the eight to ten million acres that have historically gone into ruination from irrigation. The total drylands of the planet are 7.9 billion acres of which 61% are desertified, that is, driven by human abuse toward uselessness. Globally, 23% of all arable crop lands have been lost since 1945 through human use and experts say that all arable land on the planet will be ruined in 200 years.