Around this time last year, Anders Fogh Rasmussen posed as a man of peace. “There can be no justification for anyone, political movement or state, to perpetrate violence deliberately targeting civilians,” the NATO secretary-general said in an interview with the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz.
If Rasmussen was true to his words, he would be handing himself into the police. A new report by several organisations has presented evidence indicating that NATO categorised civilian areas of Libya as military targets. Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who helped prepare the report following a visit to Libya, concluded “we have reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated”, identifying NATO’s killing of 47 non-combatants in Sirte during September 2011 as an incident of particular concern.
The truth is that Rasmussen is too busy with high politics to fret about the little people of Libya. Near the top of his “to do” list is the preparation of a summit in Chicago slated for May.
Hosting the event in his adopted hometown, Barack Obama will more than likely use the occasion to boost his prospects of re-election by illustrating how the US controls the alliance and is adamant that it continues doing so. The only caveat I wish to add to this prediction is that Obama may be slightly more nuanced in his choice of words.
“Smart defence”
My forecast is based on two documents published in January (as well as America’s general belligerence).
NATO’s annual report says that “smart defence” will be the hot topic in the Windy City. In his preface, Rasmussen implies that “smart defence” involves making the kind of planes and weapons supplied by the US to attack Libya more available to other members of the alliance. In keeping with these straitened times, it is a question of “doing better with less by working more together,” he wrote.
It would be naive to think that “smart defence” will mean any loosening of America’s iron grip over NATO.
The second document aiding me as an amateur clairvoyant comes from the Pentagon and is called “Sustaining US Global Leadership”. Despite containing some mollifying language about finding “partners” throughout the world, this tract effectively threatens both China and Iran with military action. “Sophisticated adversaries”, it warns, will “complicate our operational calculus” by means ranging from cyber warfare to ballistic missiles.
A wet dream for prospectors
The provocative talk is not confined to the Pentagon. In 2010, Hilary Clinton declared that the US had a “national interest” in the South China Sea. “National interest” is a synonym for “economic interest”; with its vast amounts of unexploited gas and oil, the South China Sea is one big wet dream for prospectors.
Duelling with China should be seen as either a key factor behind or the subtext to the wars Obama has inherited, as well as the fresh ones he has initiated or appears intent on declaring (under pressure from his clients in Israel and the Zionist lobby at home).
Trade magazines for the energy industry have been commenting lately about China’s increasing involvement in Central Asia. A gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and China opened in 2009 and has been extended to carry gas from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
All of those countries are in the same neighbourhood as Afghanistan. The official narrative holds that America and NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan is purely a response to how the Taliban sheltered Osama bin Laden. More quietly, the West’s marauders have been plotting to get their paws on Central Asia’s resources.
Shortly before his death in 2010, the diplomat and businessman Richard Holbrooke was examining ways of increasing energy cooperation between Afghanistan and the surrounding region. Considering Holbrooke’s track record, it’s impossible to believe he undertook that work for benevolent reasons; in the 1970s, the same Holbrooke helped keep up the flow of arms to Suharto’s regime in Indonesia. Holbrooke was unperturbed by the likelihood those weapons would assist the genocide being undertaken in East Timor; rather, his assessment was that the US needed to have cordial relations with Indonesia because it was an “important oil producer”.
Attacking any “enemy”, any time
After the Pentagon issued its aforementioned paper, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta bragged about a “bunker-buster” bomb assembled for the US military by Boeing. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Panetta said the purpose of this Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is to “be able to get at any enemy, anywhere”.
His words are indicative of how there has been no change in mindset between the Bush and Obama administrations on foreign policy. As Tariq Ali wrote in his book The Obama Syndrome, the only differences have been in “diplomatic mood music”.
Later this month George W Bush will be decorated with the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, Estonia’s highest civil award. Why? Because he helped the country join NATO in 2004.
Estonia is one of 13 former Soviet republics so far used by NATO as transit routes to bring troops and equipment to Afghanistan. Obama wants to go a step further; in the past few weeks, he has promised to support Georgia’s bid for full NATO membership.
The consequence of NATO expansion is that Russia is encircled by its Cold War foe. Just as Russia is feeling the heat, the US is stoking the fires of animosity towards China.
Many of us wept the night Obama was elected. There’s no point in shedding new tears of disappointment. Rage is a better response.
●First published by New Europe, 5-11 February 2012.
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Monday, February 6, 2012
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Why NATO cannot be trusted
What do bagpipes have to do with the war in Libya? On NATO’s website, you can read about Marc Forterre, a French colonel and avid piper, whose musical instrument was mistaken for a weapon by airport staff in Addis Ababa. It would make a charming vignette, if it wasn’t for how the tale segues into editorialising about how the alliance helps the African Union to conduct its own military operations.
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
NATO's dangerous games in Asia
Colin Powell was regularly called a “dove” when he was America’s secretary of state. It was a misnomer. While he may have quarrelled with other members of the Bush administration on tactical issues, Powell’s entire military and political career was dedicated to world domination. One of his first acts as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to lead an invasion of Panama. “We have to put a shingle on our door saying ‘Superpower lives here’,” he said on its first day in December 1989.
Hype would have us believe, too, that there is a substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats on foreign and economic policies. In reality, there is little. Barack Obama has been eager to convince the world that he is not under the spell of the oil industry in the way that George W Bush was. Yet the perks enjoyed by energy giants remain largely unchanged; on top of not having to pay any corporate income tax last year, Exxon Mobil was given a refund worth $156 million.
That businessmen headquartered in the state of Texas continue to wield enormous clout in Washington can be seen from a presentation given by Robert Blake, a State Department official dealing with Central and South Asia, in Houston during January. Blake suggested that the regions covered by his portfolio were replete with untapped resources, declaring – with considerable understatement – that these were bound to be of interest in the Lone Star state. The passage about Uzbekistan read like it was copied from a brochure for an industry fair: “Though often overlooked as an energy source, Uzbekistan has substantial hydrocarbon reserves of its own and produces about as much natural gas as Turkmenistan. Located at the heart of Central Asia, much of the region’s infrastructure – roads, railroads, transmission lines, and pipelines - goes through Uzbekistan, offering it a unique opportunity to expand its exports with little investment in new infrastructure.”
There was no mention of how Uzbekistan is ruled by the brutal dictator Islam Karimov (the same Karimov who was welcomed to the headquarters of NATO and the European Commission recently). Exploiting “overlooked” resources was evidently deemed more important than the lives of the hundreds of unarmed demonstrators killed at Karimov’s behest during the Andijan massacre in 2005.
Blake was – perhaps unwittingly – expanding on a theory posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the political scientist and one-time national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzenzinski argued that control of Asia was essential if the US was to cement its position as the world’s only superpower. “For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power,” he wrote. “Now a non-Eurasian power is pre-eminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
NATO, Brezinski added, would be a vital tool in preserving that dominance. His words appear prescient. According to the official narrative, the invasion of Afghanistan and the consequent expansion of Western military bases in neighbouring countries were a response to how the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden. But can it be a coincidence that the war followed the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation a few months earlier? Was it not a signal to the SCO members like Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that the US was the boss, so they had better reduce their ambitions for greater energy cooperation?
Ever the obedient servant, some of the EU’s most powerful states are helping to increase US penetration into Asia. Following the Andijan massacre, the Union imposed sanctions on Uzbekistan in 2005. The newspaper Tageszeitung revealed last year that Germany defied the sanctions by secretly giving military training to 35 Uzbek soldiers. In 2009, Angela Merkel’s government succeeded in convincing the EU to drop those sanctions. Access to the German military base at Termez in Uzbekistan – which hosts aircraft used in the war in Afghanistan – shouldn’t be affected by something as trivial as human rights, she decided.
NATO has also supplied troops to bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both of which neighbour China. Statements pumped out in Washington and Brussels might habitually describe Beijing as a “partner”. But the games played by NATO in China’s backyard tell another story.
It is a similar situation with Russia. Visiting Georgia last summer, Hillary Clinton effectively told Moscow that only the US and NATO could station troops in the former Soviet Union. Ordering Russia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Secretary of State said: “The United States does not recognise spheres of influence.”
During his aforementioned trip to Houston, Robert Blake told his audience that Turkmenistan may hold the key to one of the five largest reserves of gas on the planet. To emphasise their interests in getting hold of gas from the Caspian Sea, delegations from the European Commission and the US government visited Turkmenistan in January. It is hard to imagine that those delegations had not seen a warning issued late last year from Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, about certain countries wishing to “interfere” in the Caspian region.
The scholar Edward Herman has described NATO as a “US and imperial pitbull”. The pitbull is barking simultaneously in the directions of Russia, China and Iran. It needs to be sedated.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 February 2011
Hype would have us believe, too, that there is a substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats on foreign and economic policies. In reality, there is little. Barack Obama has been eager to convince the world that he is not under the spell of the oil industry in the way that George W Bush was. Yet the perks enjoyed by energy giants remain largely unchanged; on top of not having to pay any corporate income tax last year, Exxon Mobil was given a refund worth $156 million.
That businessmen headquartered in the state of Texas continue to wield enormous clout in Washington can be seen from a presentation given by Robert Blake, a State Department official dealing with Central and South Asia, in Houston during January. Blake suggested that the regions covered by his portfolio were replete with untapped resources, declaring – with considerable understatement – that these were bound to be of interest in the Lone Star state. The passage about Uzbekistan read like it was copied from a brochure for an industry fair: “Though often overlooked as an energy source, Uzbekistan has substantial hydrocarbon reserves of its own and produces about as much natural gas as Turkmenistan. Located at the heart of Central Asia, much of the region’s infrastructure – roads, railroads, transmission lines, and pipelines - goes through Uzbekistan, offering it a unique opportunity to expand its exports with little investment in new infrastructure.”
There was no mention of how Uzbekistan is ruled by the brutal dictator Islam Karimov (the same Karimov who was welcomed to the headquarters of NATO and the European Commission recently). Exploiting “overlooked” resources was evidently deemed more important than the lives of the hundreds of unarmed demonstrators killed at Karimov’s behest during the Andijan massacre in 2005.
Blake was – perhaps unwittingly – expanding on a theory posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the political scientist and one-time national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzenzinski argued that control of Asia was essential if the US was to cement its position as the world’s only superpower. “For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power,” he wrote. “Now a non-Eurasian power is pre-eminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”
NATO, Brezinski added, would be a vital tool in preserving that dominance. His words appear prescient. According to the official narrative, the invasion of Afghanistan and the consequent expansion of Western military bases in neighbouring countries were a response to how the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden. But can it be a coincidence that the war followed the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation a few months earlier? Was it not a signal to the SCO members like Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that the US was the boss, so they had better reduce their ambitions for greater energy cooperation?
Ever the obedient servant, some of the EU’s most powerful states are helping to increase US penetration into Asia. Following the Andijan massacre, the Union imposed sanctions on Uzbekistan in 2005. The newspaper Tageszeitung revealed last year that Germany defied the sanctions by secretly giving military training to 35 Uzbek soldiers. In 2009, Angela Merkel’s government succeeded in convincing the EU to drop those sanctions. Access to the German military base at Termez in Uzbekistan – which hosts aircraft used in the war in Afghanistan – shouldn’t be affected by something as trivial as human rights, she decided.
NATO has also supplied troops to bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both of which neighbour China. Statements pumped out in Washington and Brussels might habitually describe Beijing as a “partner”. But the games played by NATO in China’s backyard tell another story.
It is a similar situation with Russia. Visiting Georgia last summer, Hillary Clinton effectively told Moscow that only the US and NATO could station troops in the former Soviet Union. Ordering Russia to withdraw its troops from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Secretary of State said: “The United States does not recognise spheres of influence.”
During his aforementioned trip to Houston, Robert Blake told his audience that Turkmenistan may hold the key to one of the five largest reserves of gas on the planet. To emphasise their interests in getting hold of gas from the Caspian Sea, delegations from the European Commission and the US government visited Turkmenistan in January. It is hard to imagine that those delegations had not seen a warning issued late last year from Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, about certain countries wishing to “interfere” in the Caspian region.
The scholar Edward Herman has described NATO as a “US and imperial pitbull”. The pitbull is barking simultaneously in the directions of Russia, China and Iran. It needs to be sedated.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 February 2011
Monday, October 11, 2010
Europe sleepwalks into climate disaster
Brussels turns into a different city on Car Free Day. For 10 hours on an autumn weekend, the traffic that normally clogs our roads is replaced by the hypnotic sound of bicycle gears being shifted and leg muscles being toned. The resulting ambience has a feminine quality; for once we are given a respite from speed freaks displaying a phallic pride in their gleaming vehicles.
Why can’t we have a car free day throughout Europe every week? That would give everyone on this continent a sound reason to lampoon those “drill, Baby, drill!” Americans, who think that they are more entitled to own an SUV than to have health insurance. As things stand, though, the EU has for the most part refused to take the kind of radical green initiatives that are worthy of celebration.
Under some circumstances I would applaud European commissioners who have the temerity to criticise the ruinous policies of the US. Yet I was less than impressed with the recent speech given by Connie Hedegaard, the climate “action” chief, in Harvard, in which she berated American legislators for failing to approve a bill on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Hedegaard, the EU would be prepared to accept a legally-binding accord at the international climate change negotiations in Cancún this December but dithering in Washington has made such a breakthrough impossible.
Although the US has correctly been cast as the biggest villain in the epic global warming drama, the EU has been far from virtuous. George W. Bush’s umbilical relationship with the oil industry and Barack Obama’s all-mouth-and-no-trousers posturing have created a convenient situation for senior European politicians, allowing them to pose as environmental leaders without having to do very much.
The Union’s emission reduction targets offer a case study in how us journalists are frequently duped by unscrupulous spin-doctors. On paper, the goal is to cut the amount of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. The all-important caveats flanking this target are usually ignored. Did you know that that most of the reductions do not have to take place within the EU? In 2008, the European Parliament decided that about three-quarters of the cuts would be achieved through a process of creative accounting. Essentially, this means that we can carry on polluting here and then “off-set” our emissions by financing “clean development” projects in other parts of the world.
Just imagine that this approach was taken in other policy fields. Would anyone treat seriously a campaign against tobacco where we paid foreigners to ban smoking in the workplace, while we continued lighting up at our own desks?
Not only was the off-setting decision morally deplorable, it could transpire to be counterproductive in practical terms, if recent experience is anything to go by. When the Kyoto protocol to the UN’s climate change convention finally came into effect in 2005, it allowed rich countries to buy “clean development” credits in poorer parts of the world. Over half of the 420 million credits issued until now have related to the destruction of HFC-23, a gas used in refrigeration which is 11,700 more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Evidence gathered by environmental watchdogs in the past few months indicates that because the system is market-based, manufacturers were deliberately producing HFC-23 so that they could be paid to destroy it. In other words, a system nominally encouraging clean development was rewarding decidedly grubby activities.
The Parliament behaved disgracefully again two weeks ago when its environment committee voted for less stringent pollution thresholds for vans than those advocated by the European Commission. Whereas the EU executive had proposed that an average van should release no more than 135 grams per kilometre by 2020, MEPs increased the limit to 140g/km, playing blind to how transport is the economic sector with the fastest growth in emissions. Hedegaard nonetheless sounded an upbeat note in her reaction to the vote, claiming that the Parliament is committed to an “ambitious” goal.
This is hogwash. But sadly it is typical of the EU’s entire agenda on climate change. Rather than trying to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe that is already claiming 300,000 lives per year (as Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum has estimated), the Brussels institutions have become fixated on avoiding any short-term pain for polluting industries.
BusinessEurope, the employers’ confederation, has been adamant that the EU must not move beyond its target to cut overall emissions by 20%. Its pressure has paid off. Reluctant to do anything that would harm “competitiveness” – a quasi-religious concept in this city – the Commission has so far declined to recommend tougher goals. As a result, the Brussels bureaucracy is out of step with the Union’s three most powerful governments. Environment ministers from Britain, France and Germany have all publicly declared that they would be in favour of a 30% goal for 2020.
During 2009, the medical journal The Lancet described climate change as the biggest threat to human health this century. Once global temperate levels rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the serious consequences will no longer be confined to the poor parts of the world that our governments frankly do not care about. Heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions will affect our health in Europe, too.
By prioritising corporate profits over the future of humanity, the EU’s representatives are sleepwalking into a disaster.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 October 2010
Why can’t we have a car free day throughout Europe every week? That would give everyone on this continent a sound reason to lampoon those “drill, Baby, drill!” Americans, who think that they are more entitled to own an SUV than to have health insurance. As things stand, though, the EU has for the most part refused to take the kind of radical green initiatives that are worthy of celebration.
Under some circumstances I would applaud European commissioners who have the temerity to criticise the ruinous policies of the US. Yet I was less than impressed with the recent speech given by Connie Hedegaard, the climate “action” chief, in Harvard, in which she berated American legislators for failing to approve a bill on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to Hedegaard, the EU would be prepared to accept a legally-binding accord at the international climate change negotiations in Cancún this December but dithering in Washington has made such a breakthrough impossible.
Although the US has correctly been cast as the biggest villain in the epic global warming drama, the EU has been far from virtuous. George W. Bush’s umbilical relationship with the oil industry and Barack Obama’s all-mouth-and-no-trousers posturing have created a convenient situation for senior European politicians, allowing them to pose as environmental leaders without having to do very much.
The Union’s emission reduction targets offer a case study in how us journalists are frequently duped by unscrupulous spin-doctors. On paper, the goal is to cut the amount of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. The all-important caveats flanking this target are usually ignored. Did you know that that most of the reductions do not have to take place within the EU? In 2008, the European Parliament decided that about three-quarters of the cuts would be achieved through a process of creative accounting. Essentially, this means that we can carry on polluting here and then “off-set” our emissions by financing “clean development” projects in other parts of the world.
Just imagine that this approach was taken in other policy fields. Would anyone treat seriously a campaign against tobacco where we paid foreigners to ban smoking in the workplace, while we continued lighting up at our own desks?
Not only was the off-setting decision morally deplorable, it could transpire to be counterproductive in practical terms, if recent experience is anything to go by. When the Kyoto protocol to the UN’s climate change convention finally came into effect in 2005, it allowed rich countries to buy “clean development” credits in poorer parts of the world. Over half of the 420 million credits issued until now have related to the destruction of HFC-23, a gas used in refrigeration which is 11,700 more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. Evidence gathered by environmental watchdogs in the past few months indicates that because the system is market-based, manufacturers were deliberately producing HFC-23 so that they could be paid to destroy it. In other words, a system nominally encouraging clean development was rewarding decidedly grubby activities.
The Parliament behaved disgracefully again two weeks ago when its environment committee voted for less stringent pollution thresholds for vans than those advocated by the European Commission. Whereas the EU executive had proposed that an average van should release no more than 135 grams per kilometre by 2020, MEPs increased the limit to 140g/km, playing blind to how transport is the economic sector with the fastest growth in emissions. Hedegaard nonetheless sounded an upbeat note in her reaction to the vote, claiming that the Parliament is committed to an “ambitious” goal.
This is hogwash. But sadly it is typical of the EU’s entire agenda on climate change. Rather than trying to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe that is already claiming 300,000 lives per year (as Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum has estimated), the Brussels institutions have become fixated on avoiding any short-term pain for polluting industries.
BusinessEurope, the employers’ confederation, has been adamant that the EU must not move beyond its target to cut overall emissions by 20%. Its pressure has paid off. Reluctant to do anything that would harm “competitiveness” – a quasi-religious concept in this city – the Commission has so far declined to recommend tougher goals. As a result, the Brussels bureaucracy is out of step with the Union’s three most powerful governments. Environment ministers from Britain, France and Germany have all publicly declared that they would be in favour of a 30% goal for 2020.
During 2009, the medical journal The Lancet described climate change as the biggest threat to human health this century. Once global temperate levels rise by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the serious consequences will no longer be confined to the poor parts of the world that our governments frankly do not care about. Heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions will affect our health in Europe, too.
By prioritising corporate profits over the future of humanity, the EU’s representatives are sleepwalking into a disaster.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 October 2010
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