Blair Calls for Focus on Poverty, Global Warming, Trade

"This war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger and more just than the alternative," Prime Minister Tony Blair told the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles this week. An extract, was published yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Doing this requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy...Unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win."

Read the full article here: Blair

Categories: climatechange, poverty, trade

Climate Change: US Power Group Funds Global Warming Skeptic

NEW YORK - A Colorado electricity cooperative is urging other power groups to support global warming skeptics and has donated US$100,000 to a climatologist who has labeled some of his colleagues "alarmists," according to Reuters/Planet Ark.

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association's general manager wrote in a letter to other energy cooperatives that it also helped raise contributions from others for Dr. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the CATO Institute in Washington D.C.
Many scientists believe that global warming will lead to catastrophic consequences such as the flooding of low-lying nations and stronger hurricanes.

Power plants emit 40 percent of the world's carbon dioxide, the main gas that most scientists believe causes global warming. Coal emits more CO2 than another other fuel.

Many power companies are watching the federal government's every step on global warming. Any future national plan in the United States, the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases, to regulate such gases could force many companies to shut coal-fired generation or add expensive carbon-capturing devises to their equipment.

IREA General Manager Stanley Lewandowski, in a letter obtained by Reuters, wrote to electric groups through the United States trumpeting Michaels, author of the book "The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming."

Read the full story here: US Power

Categories: climatechange, energy, investments

Globalization: Poor Losers...

Yale Global Online features an article by trade analyst Edward Gresser in which he argues that the poor are the real losers in the collapse of the DOha round of trade talks:

"Leaders of developing nations anticipated that negotiations of the Doha Round could lead to even-handed trade practices, particularly in agriculture. With the talks collapsed, the wealthiest nations will not suffer nearly as much as the developing nations, according to trade analyst Edward Gresser. The real losers, he says, will be cotton farmers in West Africa, textile workers in low-income Asian and Muslim states, and low-income shoppers in the poorest quarters of America and Europe. Previous international trade agreements on manufacturing and services provided substantial economic wealth for the developed nations. Policies on agricultural or textile trade are far more controversial, largely because they often reflect national identity and political clout of groups involved in those sectors. Yet crops and low-cost manufacturing are the best products that poorest countries can offer to the global market."

Read the complete article: All Fall Down

Categories: trade, globalization, agriculture

Climate Change: Global Warming Puts 12 US Parks at Risk

WASHINGTON - Global warming puts 12 of the most famous US national parks at risk, environmentalists said on Tuesday, conjuring up visions of Glacier National Park without glaciers and Yellowstone Park without grizzly bears, according to Reuters/Planet Ark.

All 12 parks are located in the American West, where temperatures have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the United States over the last 50 years, said Theo Spencer of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Rising temperatures, drought, wildfires and diminished snowfalls endanger wildlife and threaten hiking, fishing and other recreational activities" in the parks, Spencer said in a telephone news conference. "Imagine Glacier Park without glaciers or Yellowstone without any grizzly bears."

Most climate scientists believe Earth's surface temperature has risen over the last century or more, spurred by human activities that produce greenhouse gases, which trap heat like the glass walls of a greenhouse. Some skeptics doubt that people affect global climate change and say temperature fluctuations have occurred throughout history.

The report released by the council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization stressed the connection between global warming and environmental damage at the parks, including the loss of specific wildlife, and called on the US government to cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly in 10 years.

Read the full story: Global Warming & National Parks

Categories: climatechange, global-warming, nationalparks

Art: Maya Lin's "Systematic Landscapes"

Maya Lin has a new show -- her first in years -- at the Henry Gallery on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. I went to check it out yesterday while in that town for a meeting. Lin is one of the most enigmatic artists working today and one whose work continually inspires me.

Her work, whether the iconic Vietnam Vets Memorial in DC or her landscape "Wave Field" in front of the aerospace engineering school at the University of Michigan, evokes complex emotional and intellectual responses.

Her new show, "Systematic Landscapes," juxtaposes land- and waterscape forms with out-of-context materials often distorting size and dislocating connections. The forms are familiar, yet strange at the same time. The landscapes appear more fragile in this context.

An architectural-scale wire sculpture, Water Line, is suspended or rather draped over a gallery room. You walk over, under, around, and within what is really a topographic rendering of the underwater landscape that forms an island off the coast of Antarctica.

In Blue Lake Pass, a mountain pass is rendered in giant, multi-layered particle board cut in such a way to reveal topographic relief contours. What in nature would be a solid mass is further dissected: the mountain has been cut into cubes, separated enough to allow viewers to pass through as in a maze. It is as if the fissures and crevasses of the mountain broke apart dramatically and landed on the gallery floor.

Finally, Lin builds an imagined landscape out of 2x4s filling one room with what at first glance appears to be an oversized pile of construction debris or a tremendous spill of child's blocks. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that Lin is asking us to again rethink what is natural in form.

The hill is manufactured as much as is the material from which it is built. In other words, it is constructed in the true nature of its materials. You want to reach out and touch it, interact with the pile, build your own. (I was a day late for the opportunity to walk on the installation; the next one is 10 August from 5-7 PM, I'm sorry to have missed that!)

As impressive and stimulating as the large pieces are, the smaller works are more dislocating. Atlases with precise, reverse topographic cuts down into their pages create a new sort of geography, contour lines drilling down through pages. One such cut resembles a pool, perhaps a volcanic lake; another appears to be the outline of Antarctica (I'm trying to recall what was the base map on the top page...); still another conjures a meteor crater.

Lin is exploring how form indicates geography, how topology sends indicators to us everyday. And, as if to remind us how precarious our world is, the replicas of inland saltwater seas -- Caspian, Black, and Red -- made of sculptured layers of beech plywood, teeter on their lowest points.

The flow of the Columbia River from its headwaters to the Pacific is reproduced in large scale upon one wall. From a distance, it resembles flowing mercury. Up close, however, you realize the sculpture is made entirely of 15,000 metal straight pins pushed into the wall with unnerving precision.

The Columbia River has been much on Maya Lin's mind of late. Included in the show are her plans, models, and sketches for the Confluence Project, a series of designed stations at the points where its infamous tributaries meet up with the River.

In Lin's view of the world, form and landscape not only inspire replication or reproduction, but challenge us to see the fragile in the familiar. Ultimately, Lin's message is one of hope: hope that we'll change the way we live in the world by looking at our Earth in new ways.


For more on the show at the Henry, which runs through 3 September 2006: henry

A review of the show from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
p-i review

and from the vroom journal blog: vroom

and the short video Steven Michael Vroom made at the press opening: video clip

and the Seattle Times review: seattle times

and from the electric goddess blog: electric goddess

For more on Maya Lin's Confluence Project: confluence

The Maya Lin art:21 pages from PBS: art:21

Maya Lin's "Earth Day Message of Hope" from The Nature Conservancy's web site: maya's message of hope

Categories: art, landscape, conservation

Globalization: Last chance on trade deal?

GENEVA (Reuters) -- Trade powers make what could be a final bid to rescue floundering global free trade negotiations at the weekend, but with few signs yet that they will be bringing the needed life-lines, diplomats say.

World Trade Organization (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy, who has warned the trade round is sunk deep in crisis, will chair ministerial-level talks between the so-called G6 -- the United States, the European Union, Australia, Brazil, India and Japan -- which has taken the lead in the search for a deal.

After similarly-billed "last ditch" attempts by the G6 in recent weeks, diplomats said that the sessions set for Sunday and Monday really were the last hope for the WTO's Doha round, which aims to boost global growth and reduce poverty.

Another failure would not only mean the WTO had probably run out of time for a free trade treaty by the end of the year, it would lay bare the fact that the G6, whose agreement is seen as vital for a pact within the wider membership, was unable to agree on the core issues of farm and industrial goods, diplomats said.

Read the full story: Trade

Categories: trade, globalization, agriculture