Who pays the price?

According to a new scientific study, six species of coral are under threat of extinction in the Caribbean due to toxic runoff and rising temperatures from global warming.

Meanwhile, we are being told that a "compromise" was made on the issue of climate change at the G-8 Summit. As always with the mainstream media, symbolism is presented as substance.
According to the BBC,

"Leaders of the G8 nations have agreed to seek "substantial" cuts in emissions in an effort to tackle climate change. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the G8 would negotiate within a UN framework to seek a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2009. No mandatory target was set for the cuts, but Mrs Merkel's preference for a 50% emissions cut by the year 2050 was included in the agreed statement. Developing nations should also cut emissions, the leaders agreed." [Emphasis added]

So this is not an agreement, but a promise that some replacement for the Kyoto protocol will be negotiated two years from now. Why do we need a replacement? Because the US refused to sign the Kyoto protocol, which called for 60% emissions cuts by 2050.

But even if the U.S. does agree to this reduced cut (by no means guaranteed), is that enough? One of the problems with projecting cuts based on current trends is the non-linearity of climatic trends. According to a new study, one of the world's main carbon dioxide sinks, the Southern Ocean around Antartica, is now so C02-saturated that it is beginning to "fail" as an absorber of carbon dioxide.

According to the UK Independent, "As a result, atmospheric CO2 levels may rise faster and bring about rising temperatures more quickly than previously anticipated. Stabilising the CO2 level, which must be done to bring the warming under control, is likely to become much more difficult, even if the world community agrees to do it. " Read more!

Liberating Iraqis from their own land

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, the number of Iraqis who have been driven from their homes since 2003 is about 4.2 million, 2.2 million of whom have fled Iraq (1.4 million into Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, and the rest in Iran, Turkey and other states). The other 2 million comprising this estimated figure are 'internally displaced,' concentrated in the central regions of Iraq.

This overshadows what is occurring in Darfur, but unlike that conflict, it is a direct result of U.S. military aggression, and so barely makes it onto the radar screen of the U.S. media.

This is similar to what occured in Palestine after 1948, and the occupied territories after 1967, with permanent refugee populations being created in neighboring states by military conquest. The situation is also, of course, analogous to Vietnam, where the bloodbath that became 1970s Cambodia was largely prepared by the crossborder refugee influx and massive U.S. bombing of Cambodia and Laos, in addition to South and North Vietnam.

The International Herald Tribune article linked above ends with the quaint sentence, "UNHCR hopes to find a permanent home for 20,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of the year." Ah, so the only organization likely to cater to their needs "hopes" that a tenth of them will be helped by the end of 2007. Read more!

Iraqi Oil Law

In a March 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Antonia Juhasz pointed out that, under the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law currently slated for passage, "The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known — and all of its as yet undiscovered — fields open to foreign control."

The law, which can be read here, is largely a blueprint for the privatization of Iraqi oil.

Back in 2004, a Shell representative told the UK Guardian that "We are interested in building a long term relationship with Iraqis."

They will not be alone. As the UK Independent observed in January, the new Iraqi oil law will give Exxon, BP and Shell 30-year contracts to develop Iraqi oil.

"Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled." Read more!

Climate Change as Slow-Motion Holocaust?

The effects of climate change are often discussed in the North as an abstract problem which "our" children and grandchildren will have to deal with in the future if emissions are not reduced. But there are two problems with this formulation. First, it sweeps aside the massive inequalities underlying both the causes and effects of climate change. Second, it presumes that the problem is not already with us. But who is "us"?

As much as people and governments in the North like to point fingers at people and governments of the South for "overpopulation" and ecologically unsustainable practices (slash-and-burn agriculture, endangered animal poaching, coal burning), the problem of ecological degradation and anthropogenic climate change cannot be laid at the doorstep of the world's poor. By every measure we have, the countries of the North are consuming far more raw materials, and emitting far more pollutants, in absolute as well as per capita terms, than the "middle-income" and poor countries of the South. According to the World Resources Institute, in 1990-99 the United States (with less than 5% of the global population) accounted for 30.3% of fossil fuel emissions, while EU countries accounted for 22.1%. While over 40% of the global population lives in China and India, those two countries made up up 7% and 2%, respectively.

Around the planet as a whole, there is what UN researchers call a "wine-glass" distribution of wealth. This means that, on a graph where the vertical axis measures population and the horizontal axis measures wealth, the results look like a wine (or more accurately a martini) glass. The long stem represents the 80% of the world's poor with less than 2% of the wealth, while the wide hollow represents the 20% with 87% of the world's wealth. As for the "rim," a 2006 report from the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER) revealed that the richest 2 per cent of the world’s adults own more than half of global household wealth, while the bottom half own barely 1 per cent. The 37 million people who constitute this elite one percent of the globe live (or own property) in every country, but are overwhelmingly concentrated in the G-7: the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Italy and Canada.

Disparities in Per-Capita Emissions

So, who is really doing the polluting? In a speech at the UN, environmental scientist Norman Myers recently pointed out that, while OECD nations comprise only 16 percent of the world's population, they own 81 percent of all cars (the United States 35 percent, Europe 37 percent), and emit two-thirds of all CO2 emissions from motor vehicles worldwide.

Despite the disproportionate usage of cars, trucks and other carbon-emitting vehicles by private citizens in the North, between half and three quarters of overall emissions in most Northern countries are industrial. The ratio of industrial to private usage is even more skewed when it comes to water: according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 80% of water in the U.S. is used by agriculture. That being said, in a world where petroleum and water are both non-renewable (and where the former resource is permanently dissipated through use), even working-class Northerners are burning more than our share of carbon, and using more than our share of water, on an individual level. Of course, we live in an industrial system which is more unsustainable than the sum of our individual excesses by many degrees. But those of us (and here we can include the middle classes and elites of the South) who have running water, air conditioning, and access to more food than necessary will not bear the brunt of climate change. Who will?

According to the 2006 UN Human Development Report, 2.6 billion people worldwide (or over eight times the U.S. population) lack access to adequate sanitation, and 1.1 billion people lack access to sufficient clean water, and most consume one-tenth the average daily amount used in rich countries to flush toilets. This, according to the World Health Organization, is responsible for 80% of preventable disease deaths in the world. As a consequence, 1.8 million children die annually from diseases like diarrea and cholera. Even more ominously, the 2006 report predicts the following:

"-Marked reduction in water availability in East Africa, the Sahel and Southern Africa as rainfall declines and temperature rises, with large productivity losses in basic food staples. Projections for rainfed areas in East Africa point to potential productivity losses of up to 33% in maize and more than 20% for sorghum and 18% for millet.
-The distruption of food production systems exposing an additional 74-125 million people to the threat of hunger.
-Accelerated glacial melt, leading to medium-term reductions in water availaibility across a large group of countries in East Asia, Latin America and South Asia.
-Distruptions to monsoon patterns in South Asia, with the potential for more rain but also fewer rainy days and more people affected by drought.
-Rising sea levels resulting in freshwater losses in river delta systems in countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt and Thailand."

But what is even more frightening than these future prospects is the possibility that those who cause anthropogenic climate change are geographically separated from those who suffer; and that, for this reason, the former have little reason to act. Because the truth is that people have already been dying because of Northern industrial pollution--people who, evidently, we don't care as much about as ourselves.

Worse Than Darfur

On June 13th, 2002, in an article entitled "The West's Pollution 'Led to African Droughts,'" the BBC reported these horrifying findings, which seem to have mysteriously slipped from the public consciousness of Europeans and North Americans:

"Scientists in Australia and Canada say that pollution from Western countries may have caused the droughts which ravaged Africa's Sahel region in the 1970s and 1980s. Millions died in the droughts, which hit Ethiopia hardest in 1984. [...] The research says that sulphur dioxide from factories in Europe and the United States has cooled the Northern hemisphere, driving the tropical rainbelt south- away from the Sahel. Rainfall in the region has declined by between 20% and 50%, leading to severe droughts in 1972, 1975, 1984 and 1985. This was the most sustained drought in any part of the world since records began, according to the research which is reported in the New Scientist magazine. But climate experts had been unable to explain the drastic change. The research was carried out by Leon Rotstayn from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research organization (CSIRO) in Austrialia and his colleague Ulrike Lohmann from Canada's Dalhousie University. They ran a simulation of global weather including the interaction between sulphur dioxide emissions and cloud formation. Sulphur emissions from power stations and factories prevent cloud formation, cooling the earth below. As this pollution havppened mainly in the industrialised north, the Northern hemisphere became relatively cooler than the south. This caused the rain belt to move away from the Sahel."

The findings of Rotstayn and Lohmann were further confirmed by a simulation of climate change in the Sahel, undertaken by five climate scientists, summarized in a 2005 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as follows:

"We describe simulations using a new global climate model that capture several aspects of the 20th century rainfall record in the Sahel. An ensemble mean over eight realizations shows a drying trend in the second half of the century of nearly half of the observed amplitude. Individual realizations can be found that display striking similarity to the observed time series and drying pattern, consistent with the hypothesis that the observations are a superposition of an externally forced trend and internal variability. The drying trend in the ensemble mean of the model simulations is attributable to anthropogenic forcing, partly to an increase in aerosol loading and partly to an increase in greenhouse gases. The model projects a drier Sahel in the future, due primarily to increasing greenhouse gases." [Emphasis added]

Then, in 2006, Italian geophysicists Michela Biasutti and Alessandra Gianinni published a study, based on simulations produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comparing the pre-industrial climate of the Sahel with its 20th century climate. They conclude that:
"the late 20th century Sahel climate was significantly dryer than pre-industrial, and at least 30% of the drying was externally forced. Comparison between 20th century runs and runs forced by GHG alone reveals the key role of reflective aerosols: they force a gradient in SST that excites robust drying in the northern edge of the Atlantic Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and in the Sahel." [Emphasis added]

The implication of these three studies, which reflect a growing scientific consensus about the cause of the Sahel famines, is twofold. 1) The deaths of millions of people from these famines were sufficiently attributable ("at least 30%") to North American and European pollution to constitute third-degree mass murder, the kind of "accident" that would start World War III if it were Euroamerican deaths caused by African pollution, not the reverse. Moral culpability for the famines can no longer be smugly assigned to the post-colonial dictatorships of the Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Ethiopia, etc., and their mismanagement or neglect of famine relief. 2) The destruction of entire peoples and ways of life in the South, particularly in Africa and South Asia, due to Northern pollution (in addition to the ecological effect of raw materials extraction and export agriculture in the South for Northern markets) is ongoing and will get worse.

Those in North America and Europe now lecturing leaders in Khartoum and Mogadishu for their role in fomenting violence (but who seem strangely quiescent about the nearly 700,000 Iraqis who have died since 2003 as a result of the US-UK invasion) ought to acknowledge that the slow ecological destruction of the Sahel as a viable landbase is the real backdrop for these conflicts. These are resource wars primarily and ethno-religious conflicts secondarily, contrary to politically motivated "Muslim Arabs Versus Christian or Animist Africans" narrative imposed on them by the U.S. media. Washington has increased the U.S. troop presence in Africa to unprecedented levels, as the continent is seen (along with the Andes region) as an increasingly important strategic and economic zone, especially as a source of petroleum and natural gas for the U.S. economy.

As Mahmood Mandani, a Ugandan who studied the Rwandan genocide in depth in his highly regarded book "When Victim Become Killers," pointed out last week in an article in the London Review of Books last week entitled "The Politics of Naming":

"The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?"

Taking responsibility for the North American and European role in the death of millions of people in the Sahel over the last quarter-century would mean massive reductions in sulphur dioxide and aerosol combustion, and environmental reparations for the damage that has been caused and is being caused. This would do far more good than any further non-African intervention in Darfur or the Horn of Africa, which is largely opposed in the region, for good reasons.

Read more!