28 March 2015, The Spectator, Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all. Margot Wallström’s principled stand deserves wide support. Betrayal seems more likely. If the cries of ‘Je suis Charlie’ were sincere, the western world would be convulsed with worry and anger about the Wallström affair. It has all the ingredients for a clash-of-civilisations confrontation. A few weeks ago Margot Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. As the theocratic kingdom prevents women from travelling, conducting official business or marrying without the permission of male guardians, and as girls can be forced into child marriages where they are effectively raped by old men, she was telling no more than the truth. Wallström went on to condemn the Saudi courts for ordering that Raif Badawi receive ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website that championed secularism and free speech. These were ‘mediaeval methods’, she said, and a ‘cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression’. And once again, who can argue with that? The backlash followed the pattern set by Rushdie, the Danish cartoons and Hebdo. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. The United Arab Emirates joined it. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which represents 56 Muslim-majority states, accused Sweden of failing to respect the world’s ‘rich and varied ethical standards’ — standards so rich and varied, apparently, they include the flogging of bloggers and encouragement of paedophiles. Meanwhile, the Gulf Co-operation Council condemned her ‘unaccept-able interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, and I wouldn’t bet against anti-Swedish riots following soon. Yet there is no ‘Wallström affair’. Outside Sweden, the western media has barely covered the story, and Sweden’s EU allies have shown no inclination whatsoever to support her. A small Scandinavian nation faces sanctions, accusations of Islamophobia and maybe worse to come, and everyone stays silent. As so often, the scandal is that there isn’t a scandal. Read More here
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12 March 2015 Global Footprint Network: China world’s largest contributor. “China is the world’s largest contributor to annual growth in the demand for ecological resources and services, and has been for the last five years for which data is available, according to Global Footprint Network. The Ecological Footprint of the world – a measure of people’s demand on nature – has begun climbing again after experiencing a 2.1 percent decline in 2009 during the recession, according to Global Footprint Network’s 2015 Edition of the National Footprint Accounts, released today….” Read More here
12 February 2015, Climate News Network: Rice serves up double measure of biofuel and fodder. An inexpensive process developed in Japan will allow farmers to produce their own tractor fuel and cattle feed in one simple step. Japanese scientists have found a potential answer to the biofuel dilemma that if you grow crops for energy, you have to sacrifice crops for food. They report that they can now ferment rice to deliver ethanol, while making silage for cattle feed –and that it can all be done on the farm without need for any expensive off-site processes. Mitsuo Horita, of the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues write in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels that they used a process of solid-state fermentation known to temperate zone farmers everywhere: grass or cereal is harvested, compressed, sealed, and fermented in the absence of oxygen. Read More here
8 February 2015, climate 7 Capitalism, Pentagon Pollution,PENTAGON POLLUTION THE MILITARY ASSAULT ON GLOBAL CLIMATE The military assault on global climate. The U.S. military is the single greatest institutional contributor to the growing natural disasters intensified by global climate change. By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy … Yet, the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements … Any talk of climate change which does not include the military is nothing but hot air, according to Sara Flounders. It’s a loophole [in the Kyoto Convention on Climate Change] big enough to drive a tank through, according to the report A Climate of War. In 1940, the US military consumed one percent of the country’s total energy usage; by the end of World War II, the military’s share rose to 29 percent.(1) Oil is indispensable for war. Correspondingly, militarism is the most oil-exhaustive activity on the planet, growing more so with faster, bigger, more fuel-guzzling planes, tanks and naval vessels employed in more intensive air and ground wars. At the outset of the Iraq war in March 2003, the Army estimated it would need more than 40 million gallons of gasoline for three weeks of combat, exceeding the total quantity used by all Allied forces in the four years of World War 1. Among the Army’s armamentarium were 2,000 staunch M-1 Abrams tanks fired up for the war and burning 250 gallons of fuel per hour.(2) The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world. Fathom, if you can, the astronomical fuel usage of USAF fighter planes: the F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour and peaks at 14,400 gallons per hour at supersonic speeds. The B-52 Stratocruiser, with eight jet engines, guzzles 500 gallons per minute; ten minutes of flight uses as much fuel as the average driver does in one year of driving! A quarter of the world’s jet fuel feeds the USAF fleet of flying killing machines; in 2006, they consumed as much fuel as US planes did during the Second World War (1941-1945) — an astounding 2.6 billion gallons.(3) Barry Sanders observes with a load of tragic irony that, while many of us assiduously reduce our carbon footprint through simpler living, eating locally, recycling and reusing, energy conservation, taking public transportation, installing solar panels, and so on, the single largest institutional polluter and contributor to global warming — the US military — is immune to climate change concerns. The military reports no climate change emissions to any national or international body, thanks to US arm-twisting during the 1997 negotiations of the first international accord to limit global warming emissions, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Read More here