This whole week, beginning March 31, the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Groups on climate change are meeting in Bangkok in the critical first round of negotiations to follow up on the resolutions of the climate talks in Bali in December.
While the economic contraction is apparently slowing in the advanced industrial countries and may reach bottom in the not-too-distant future, it’s only beginning to gain momentum in the developing world, which was spared the earliest effects of the global meltdown. Because the crisis was largely precipitated by a collapse of the housing market in the United States and the resulting disintegration of financial products derived from the “securitization” of questionable mortgages, most developing nations were unaffected by the early stages of the meltdown, for the simple reason that they possessed few such assets.
ST. BERNARD PARISH, La., Sept. 7 (UPI) – Thirty-four bodies were found drowned in a nursing home where people did not evacuate. The more than half of the residents of St. Rita’s nursing home, 20 miles southeast from downtown New Orleans, died Aug. 29 when floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina reached the home’s roof.
The power dynamics of militarism in the Asia-Pacific region rely on dominance and subordination. These hierarchical relationships, shaped by gender, can be seen in U.S. military exploitation of host communities, its abuse and contamination of land and water, and the exploitation of women and children through the sex industry, sexual violence, and rape. Women’s bodies, the land, and indigenous communities are all feminized, treated as dispensable and temporary. What is constructed as “civilized, white, male, western, and rational” is held superior to what is defined as “primitive, non-white, female, non-western, and irrational.” Nations and U.S. territories within the Asia-Pacific region are treated as inferiors with limited sovereignty or agency in relation to U.S. foreign policy interests that go hand-in-hand with this racist/sexist ideology.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of Chapter 5 in Maude Barlow’s latest book, Blue Covenant. She is touring with her book across the country; see Food and Water Watch for her full schedule.
It’s a tough time to be an American climate realist. After all, which realism will you choose? The Beltway realism that limits U.S. commitments, and even U.S. initiatives, to those that are immediately sustainable by veto-proof congressional majorities? The internationalist realism that begins instead with the recognition that – as the recent multilateral climate talks in Bali clearly indicated – a viable global accord will necessarily require substantial rich-world financial commitments? How about a straightforward scientific realism that proceeds differently, ignoring the politics of the moment and stressing instead the physical demands of the climate system?
Accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore called on the nations of the world to mobilize to avert climate disaster “with a sense of urgency and shared resolve that has previously been seen only when nations have mobilized for war.”
This report measures in fiscal terms how far our own nation has to go to reach that goal.
Last month’s conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, brought the North-South fault line in climate politics into sharp relief. While U.S. intransigence on the question of mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions took center stage, not far behind was the issue of what commitments fast-growing developing countries like China and India should make in a new, post-Kyoto climate change regime.
For many Democrat voters, John McCain represents the least bad Republican presidential candidate on the ballot. Democrats not wanting the Bible in the White House are disinclined toward southern Baptist Mike Huckabee, and those not wanting a doubled-in-size Guantanamo or an immigrant-free America find Mitt Romney completely unlikable. McCain seems to be the most willing to build bipartisan coalitions, the most willing to give detainees legal representation, and the most willing to tackle global warming  all of which makes many Democrat voters fonder of McCain than any other Republican candidate.
South Korea’s new president underwent his own personal green revolution when he became mayor of Seoul. In charge of major construction projects at Hyundai for three decades, Lee Myung-bak reversed himself in the new millennium. He made rivers spring from concrete and grass grow where there had once been only cars.