Mounting Arab concern over Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East has created a new opportunity for peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the United Nation’s most experienced regional negotiators said ahead of Friday’s quartet meeting in Washington. Terje Roed-Larsen, speaking as head of the influential International Peace Academy but with a long history as a UN and Norwegian mediator, told the Financial Times there had been a flurry of Arab diplomacy driven by a fear of Iran and the sense that ‘a new peace process would be incredibly helpful to stabilise the region’. While the crises in Lebanon and Iraq, and over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, presented no clear answers, there was a ‘very broad consensus’ over a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli issue. ‘In a way, it is easier to address this than the other issues,’ he said. He also argued that many in the region now thought Israel was in a defensive posture, compared with Iran’s more aggressive stance. The meeting of the quartet – the UN, European Union, Russia and the US – could be a ‘launching pad for a new process’, he said. Angela Merkel, German chancellor, also intended to ‘build on […]
ATLANTA — Cities should close schools for up to three months in the event of a severe flu outbreak, ball games and movies should be canceled and working hours staggered so subways and buses are less crowded, the federal government advised today in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities. Health officials acknowledged that such measures would hugely disrupt public life, but they argued that these measure would buy the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives because flu viruses attack in waves lasting about two months. ‘We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic,’ said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in releasing the guidelines. ‘It’s not easy. The only thing that’s harder is facing the consequences. That will be intolerable.’ In an innovation, the new guidelines are modeled on the five levels of hurricanes, but ranked by lethality instead of wind speed. Category 1, which assumes 90,000 Americans would die, is equivalent to a bad year for seasonal flu, Glen Nowak, a C.D.C. spokesman, said. (About 36,000 Americans die of flu in an average year.) Category 5, which […]
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered. The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment. The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees. The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as ‘resistant to reasonable criticism […]
Despite growing financial losses in various business sectors from climate change, over half of the nation’s 500 largest publicly traded companies are doing a poor job of disclosing climate change risks to their investors, according to a report analyzing climate disclosure practices among S&P 500 companies last year. The Ceres/Calvert report released today concludes that America’s largest companies still aren’t taking climate change seriously enough. Less than half (47 percent) of the S&P 500 companies responded to a global survey last year by the Carbon Disclosure Project requesting information about their climate risks and strategies, and those that did respond failed to provide much of the information investors are seeking. Nearly a third (30 percent) of the responders, in fact, declined to publicly release their responses, calling them ‘confidential.’ ‘Many U.S. companies are still downplaying climate change and its far-reaching business impacts,’ said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres, a coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations. ‘More-extreme weather events, regulatory changes and growing global demand for climate-friendly technologies are just a few of the ways that climate change will ripple across all sectors of the economy. Yet, many U.S. companies are not addressing these […]
Each year the world’s taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing. An Earth Council study, Subsidizing Unsustainable Development, observes that ‘there is something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.’ Iran provides a classic example of extreme subsidies when it prices oil for internal use at one tenth the world price, strongly encouraging car ownership and gas consumption. The World Bank reports that if this $3.6-billion annual subsidy were phased out, it would reduce Iran’s carbon emissions by a staggering 49 per cent. It would also strengthen the economy by freeing up public revenues for investment in the country’s economic development. Iran is not alone. The Bank reports that removing energy subsidies would reduce carbon emissions in Venezuela by 26 per cent, in Russia by 17 per cent, in India by 14 per cent, and in Indonesia by 11 percent. Some countries are eliminating or reducing these climate-disrupting subsidies. Belgium, France, and Japan have phased out all subsidies for coal. Germany reduced its coal subsidy from $5.4 billion in 1989 to $2.8 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
