Greening The Globe: Earth News

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Published on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by TruthDig.com
Global Consensus, Not Global Conquest
by Amy Goodman

As world leaders gather this week to address the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush’s refusal to negotiate on the two key issues of our day-war and global warming-has been stunning. And the media haven’t helped. Focusing on whether Columbia University should have invited Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, the Bush administration’s drumbeat for war with Iran goes unchallenged. Let this not be a reprise of the war on Iraq.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his new memoir: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq War is largely about oil.” I asked him to elaborate: “It’s clear to me that were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture of how that part of the Middle East developed would have been different.”

It is an obvious point. It’s just too bad that he wasn’t willing to admit this before the invasion; his every utterance during his tenure at the Fed influenced decision-makers around the world, particularly in his own backyard at the White House.

As Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” listened to Greenspan, she pointed out, “Under international law … it is illegal to wage wars to gain access to other countries’, sovereign countries’, natural resources.”

Which brings us to Iran, another oil-rich country. As with Iraq, the Bush administration doesn’t talk about Iran’s oil, but rather claims that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb. Sound familiar? The answer isn’t war; it’s diplomacy. Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Israel’s top political columnists, Akiva Eldar, with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He opposes an attack on Iran: “[T]he Middle East is going to be nuclearized in no time. I think that solution should be a regional agreement … the Middle East should be nuclear-free, including Israel. I think this has to be part of an agreement.”

The U.N. gathering of world leaders is an ideal moment to hammer out agreements like Eldar recommends, as it is to take on the other crisis fueled by oil: climate change.

On the global-warming front, the opening of the U.N. General Assembly this week coincided with a major meeting on climate change, attended by more than 80 world leaders. As U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon kicked off the meeting, he said: “We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we have failed to do the right things and left them to suffer the consequences. So let us send a clear and collective signal to people everywhere. Today, let the world know that you are ready to shoulder this responsibility and that you will address this challenge head-on.”

Yvo de Boer, a top U.N. climate expert, said: “The United States is still the largest emitter worldwide of greenhouse gases. For that reason and for a number of others, the participation of the U.S. is essential.” Yet Bush did not participate in the global meeting. Instead, Bush is hosting an invitation-only gathering of “major economies” in Washington, D.C., to discuss voluntary caps on greenhouse gas emissions. This is simply not enough. Ban Ki-moon criticized the Bush meeting, saying, “The U.N. climate process is the appropriate forum for negotiating global action.”

One of those leaders who came to address the U.N. General Assembly was Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. While the U.S. rarely looks south for leadership, Morales’ example is worth considering. He has restored diplomatic relations with Iran. Against tremendous internal opposition, he nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas fields, transforming the country’s economic stability, and, interestingly, enriching the very elite that originally criticized the move. (Contrast this with the U.S. pressuring the Iraqi parliament to pass an oil law that would virtually hand over control of Iraq’s oil to the major U.S. oil corporations.) President Morales told me: “Neither mother earth nor life are commodities. We are talking about a profound change of models and systems.”

The twin crises of war and climate change, inexorably linked by our thirst for oil, need a concerted global solution-one that won’t be obtained by cowboy diplomacy. The United States must pursue global consensus, not global conquest-before it is too late.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

© 2007 Amy Goodman; distributed by King Features Syndicate

Global Consensus, Not Global Conquest - CommonDreams.org

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The Bush Administration’s Sideshow on Global Warming:
It’s Time to Join The Rest of The World, says Science Advocacy Group
Statement by Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists


WASHINGTON - September 25 - Yesterday, the United Nations convened a high-level global warming summit attended by top officials from more than 150 countries, including 80 heads of state. President Bush will host a meeting of 16 of the world's largest global warming pollution emitters later this week to discuss "aspirational" goals for reducing emissions. Rather than joining with virtually every other industrialized country to lock into place mandatory reductions, the president is expected to propose that each country decide for itself how to reduce emissions.

Below is a statement by Alden Meyer, the director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists:

"The vast majority of world leaders at yesterday's U.N. meeting were in agreement that the world must sharply curtail global warming pollution emissions by mid-century and that such reductions must be mandatory for industrialized nations such as the United States. The cost to make these reductions is small compared with the mounting costs of global warming-induced damages to both human communities and natural ecosystems.

"There was also broad consensus that while other processes can help, the U.N. is the only legitimate forum for negotiations on international agreements after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol's first round of binding restrictions expire.

"The U.N. meeting's clarion call to action makes it even more clear that President Bush must put concrete proposals on the table in his speech at the State Department this Friday or risk confirming the belief that he is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world on strategies to confront this global threat.

"He must start by spelling out what reductions in global emissions he believes are needed by mid-century to avert severe, and potentially irreversible, consequences from climate change. If he disagrees with the European Union, Japan and many other countries that global reductions of at least 50 percent are needed by 2050, he should say so, and explain why he's willing to take a greater risk with the Earth's climate than they are.

"The president also must put forward specific new proposals to halt and reverse the inexorable growth in U.S. global warming emissions. In sharp contrast to Europe, Japan and other industrialized countries, U.S. emissions have increased by nearly 18 percent since 1990, and are projected to increase another 35 percent by 2030. This demonstrates the fallacy of the administration's claims that its mostly voluntary approach is working and will get the job done.

"If the president fails to make specific proposals for both long-term global and near-term U.S. emissions reductions, it will confirm the fears of some that his summit is merely an effort to delay, or even derail, meaningful international progress on confronting the climate crisis. It will make it abundantly clear to the entire world that President Bush is continuing to fiddle around while the world burns."

Union of Concerned Scientists: he Bush Administration’s Sideshow on Global Warming: It’s Time to Join The Rest of The World

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Published on Thursday, September 27, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Bush, Oil — and Moral Bankruptcy
by Ray McGovern

<img align="left" src="http://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/569/oil_war.jpg" border="0" style="margin-right:6px" alt="" width="" height="" />It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core “neo-conservative” protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality, to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:

“If we escalate tensions, if we succumb to hysteria, if we start making threats, we are likely to stampede ourselves into a war [with Iran], which most reasonable people agree would be a disaster for us…I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq.”

So why the pressure for a wider war in which any victory will be Pyrrhic-for Israel and for the U.S.? The short answer is arrogant stupidity; the longer answer-what the Chinese used to call “great power chauvinism”-and oil.

The truth can slip out when erstwhile functionaries write their memoirs (the dense pages of George Tenet’s tome being the exception). Kudos to the still functioning reportorial side of the Washington Post, which on Sept. 15, was the first to ferret out the gem in former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan’s book that the Iraq war was “largely about oil.”

But that’s okay, said the Post’s editorial side (which has done yeoman service as the White House’s Pravda) the very next day. Dominating the op-ed page was a turgid piece by Henry Kissinger, serving chiefly as a reminder that there is an excellent case to be made for retiring when one reaches the age of statutory senility.

Dr. Kissinger described as a “truism” the notion that “the industrial nations cannot accept radical forces dominating a region on which their economies depend.” (Curious. That same truism was considered a bad thing, when an integral part of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” applied to Eastern Europe.)

What is important here is that Kissinger was speaking of Iran, which-in a classic example of pot calling kettle black-he accuses of “seeking regional hegemony.”

What’s going on here seems to be a concerted effort to get us accustomed to the prospect of a long, and possibly expanded war.

Don’t you remember? Those terrorists, or Iraqis, or Iranians, or jihadists…whoever…are trying to destroy our way of life.

The White House spin machine is determined to justify the war in ways they think will draw popular support from folks like the well-heeled man who asked me querulously before a large audience, “Don’t you agree that several GIs killed each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?”

Consistency in U.S. Policy?

The Bush policy toward the Middle East is at the same time consistent with, and a marked departure from, the U.S. approach since the end of World War II.

Given ever-growing U.S. dependence on imported oil, priority has always been given to ensuring the uninterrupted supply of oil, as well as securing the state of Israel. The U.S. was, by and large, successful in achieving these goals through traditional diplomacy and commerce.

Granted, it would overthrow duly elected governments, when it felt it necessary-as in Iran in 1953, after its president nationalized the oil. But the George W. Bush administration is the first to start a major war to implement U.S. policy in the region.

Just before the March 2003 attack, Chas Freeman, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia for President George H.W. Bush, explained that the new policy was to maintain a lock on the world’s energy lifeline and be able to deny access to global competitors.

Freeman said the new Bush administration “believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them” and that, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. is uniquely able to shape global events-and would be remiss if it did not do so.

This could not be attempted in a world of two superpowers, but has been a longstanding goal of the people closest to George W. Bush.

In 1975 in Harpers, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger authored under a pseudonym an article, “Seizing Arab Oil.”

Blissfully unaware that the author was his boss, the highly respected career ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, committed the mother of all faux pas when he told a TV audience that whoever wrote that article had to be a “madman.” Akins was right; he was also fired.

In those days, cooler heads prevailed, thanks largely to the deterrent effect of a then-powerful Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in proof of the axiom that bad ideas never die, 26 years later Kissinger rose Phoenix-like to urge a spanking new president to stoke and exploit the fears engendered by 9/11, associate Iraq with that catastrophe, and seize the moment to attack Iraq.

It was well known that Iraq’s armed forces were no match for ours, and the Soviet Union had imploded.

Some, I suppose, would call that Realpolitik. Akins saw it as folly; his handicap was that he was steeped in the history, politics, and culture of the Middle East after serving in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia-and knew better.

The renaissance of Kissinger’s influence in 2001 on an impressionable young president, together with faith-based analysis by untutored ideologues cherry picked by Cheney explain what happened next-an unnecessary, counterproductive war, in which over 3,800 U. S. troops have already been killed-leaving Iraq prostrate and exhausted.

A-plus in Chutzpah, F in Ethics

In an International Herald Tribune op-ed on Feb. 25, 2007, Kissinger focused on threats in the Middle East to “global oil supplies” and the need for a “diplomatic phase,” since the war had long since turned sour. Acknowledging that he had supported the use of force against Iraq, he proceeded to boost chutzpah to unprecedented heights.

Kissinger referred piously to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which left the European continent “prostrate and exhausted.” What he failed to point out is that the significance of that prolonged carnage lies precisely in how it finally brought Europeans to their senses; that is, in how it ended.

The Treaty of Westphalia brought the mutual slaughter to an end, and for centuries prevented many a new attack by the strong on the weak-like the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003.

It was, it is about oil-unabashedly and shamefully. Even to those lacking experience with U.S. policy in the Middle East, it should have been obvious early on, when every one of Bush’s senior national security officials spoke verbatim from the talking-point sheet, “It’s not about oil.”

Thanks to Greenspan and Kissinger, the truth is now “largely” available to those who do not seek refuge in denial.

The implications for the future are clear-for Iraq and Iran. As far as this administration is concerned (and as Kissinger himself has written), “Withdrawal [from Iraq] is not an option.” Westphalia? U.N. Charter? Geneva Conventions? Hey, we’re talking superpower!

Thus, Greenspan last Monday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

“Getting him [Saddam Hussein] out of the control position…was essential. And whether that be done by one means or another was not as important. But it’s clear to me that, were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture…would have been different.”

Can we handle the truth?

“All truth passes through three stages.
“First, it is ridiculed.
“Second, it is violently opposed.
“Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
-Schopenhauer

When the truth about our country’s policy becomes clear, can we summon the courage to address it from a moral perspective? The Germans left it up to the churches; the churches collaborated.

“There is only us; there never has been any other.”
-Annie Dillard

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This article originally appeared on Consortium News. Bush, Oil — and Moral Bankruptcy - CommonDreams.org

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Bush Agenda on Climate Change at Odds with International Push

NEW YORK - September 27 – While dozens of heads of state convened at the United Nations (UN) in New York this week for a forum to address the threat of climate change and the need for a global reduction in emissions, President Bush did not attend these discussions. Instead, today the US will begin a two-day parallel conference, setting forth the Bush administration’s approach in a meeting of sixteen nations. MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, today highlighted the need for worldwide partnership to tackle climate change and condemned President Bush’s lack of engagement.

Political mobilization at the UN has intensified, in preparation for a climate conference to be held in Bali, Indonesia in December. This gathering is set to forge commitments for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases to pre-1990 levels. While the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, the US has refused to sign on and continues to oppose international limits on emissions, citing a risk to the US economy.

Vivian Stromberg, Executive Director of MADRE, said today, "In a time when the focus of governments around the world must be on working together to counter the dangers of climate change, Bush has, time and again, chosen unilateralism over cooperation. Meanwhile, reports from the UN warn that soaring temperatures are likely to lead to rising seas and droughts. These dramatic changes threaten the lives of millions of people across the planet, and women—who are responsible for food production and maintaining natural resources in much of the world—will bear the brunt. This is the time for urgent action to halt this trend and for the Bush administration and the US Congress to require US industries to curb emissions."

President Bush’s proposals center on allowing industries to regulate themselves and on promoting "clean" energy, including "biofuels." However, MADRE cautions that the promises of these "biofuels" are a false remedy and are more likely to perpetuate the injustices of land rights violations against Indigenous and local people, increase global hunger and destroy biodiversity. More information can be found in the MADRE statement "Feed People, Not Cars: Agrofuels are no Solution to Climate Change," located here: Feed People, Not Cars: Agrofuels are no Solution to Climate Change | MADRE: An International Women's Human Rights Organization.

MADRE emphasizes that the damages of climate change will be felt most severely among those least at fault and at the greatest risk. The organization further stresses the centrality of Indigenous Peoples, particularly women, in this discussion, whose input is often ignored by governments but whose knowledge is essential to preserve local biodiversity and food security.

Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s Communications Director, worked for several years as part of a joint Israeli-Palestinian human rights organization in Jerusalem before joining MADRE. She has written extensively on US foreign policy and women’s human rights; her critical analysis has appeared in online and print publications such as TomPaine.com, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The W Effect: Bush’s War on Women, published by the Feminist Press in 2004. Ms. Susskind has been featured as a commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and BBC Radio. She is the coordinator of MADRE’s upcoming Food for Life Campaign.

Victoria Tauli Corpuz is Executive Director of the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Center for Policy Research & Education), which has United Nations consultative status and is based in Baguio City, Philippines. Ms. Tauli Corpuz was the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Populations; serves as the Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples (UNPFII); and is a member of the Asia Indigenous Women's Network. She has a Nursing degree; is an Indigenous activist who is committed to the recognition, protection, and promotion of Indigenous Peoples' rights worldwide; and has been defending the rights and cultures of Indigenous Peoples for more than 30 years.

MADRE is an international women's human rights organization that works in partnership with community-based women's organizations worldwide to address issues of health and reproductive rights, economic development, education, and other human rights. MADRE provides resources, training, and support to enable our sister organizations to meet concrete needs in their communities while working to shift the balance of power to promote long-term development and social justice. Since we began in 1983, MADRE has delivered over 22 million dollars worth of support to community-based women's organizations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the United States.

MADRE: Bush Agenda on Climate Change at Odds with International Push

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Published on Friday, September 28, 2007 by Reuters
Arctic Thaw May Be at ‘Tipping Point’
by Alister Doyle

<img align="left" src="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/0928_06.jpg" border="0" style="margin-right:6px" alt="" width="" height="" />OSLO - A record melt of Arctic summer sea ice this month may be a sign that global warming is reaching a critical trigger point that could accelerate the northern thaw, some scientists say.

“The reason so much (of the Arctic ice) went suddenly is that it is hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years,” James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Reuters.

The Arctic summer sea ice shrank by more than 20 percent below the previous 2005 record low in mid-September to 4.13 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles), according to a 30-year satellite record. It has now frozen out to 4.2 million sq km.

The idea of climate tipping points — like a see-saw that suddenly flips over when enough weight gets onto one side — is controversial because it is little understood and dismissed by some as scaremongering about runaway effects.

The polar thaw may herald a self-sustaining acceleration that could threaten indigenous peoples and creatures such as polar bears — as Arctic sea ice shrinks, the darker ocean soaks up ever more heat than reflective snow and ice.

In Germany, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research says Arctic sea ice has “already tipped.”

Among potential “tipping elements” that are still stable, it lists on its Web site a melt of Siberian permafrost, a slowdown of the Gulf Stream and disruptions to the Indian monsoon.

“I’d say we are reaching a tipping point or are past it for the ice. This is a strong indication that there is an amplifying mechanism here,” said Paal Prestrud of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

“But that’s more or less speculation. There isn’t scientific documentation other than the observations,” he said.

Many experts now reckon Arctic ice may disappear in summer before mid-century, decades before earlier forecasts. The thaw would open the region to oil and gas exploration or shipping.

Reuters will host a summit of leading newsmakers on Oct 1-3 to review the state of the environment. Speakers will include Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Climate Panel and Michael Morris, chief executive of American Electric Power.

“All models seem to underestimate the speed at which the ice is melting,” said Anders Levermann, a Potsdam professor.

“I do not believe that this is alarmist… not all tipping points are irreversible,” he said. And societies can weigh up remote risks, such as planes crashing or nuclear meltdowns.

Hansen said he is seeking more study of causes of the melt, widely blamed on greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels but perhaps slightly stoked by soot from forest fires or industries in Russia and China. Ice darkened by soot melts faster.

“It is a very good lesson, because the ice sheets (on Greenland and Antarctica) have their own tipping points, somewhat harder to get started but far more dangerous for humanity around the globe,” he said.

A melt of floating Arctic sea ice does not affect sea levels but Greenland has enough ice to raise oceans by 7 meters and Antarctica by about 57 meters, according to U.N. estimates.

Pachauri’s authoritative climate panel, in a summary report due for release in November, does not use the phrase “tipping point” but does say: “Climate change could lead to abrupt or irreversible climate changes and impacts.”

It says, for instance, that it is “very unlikely” that the Gulf Stream bringing warm water north to Europe will switch off this century. That could bring a big regional cooling.

And it says that a melt of ice sheets could lead to big sea level rises over thousands of years. “Rapid sea level rise on century time scales cannot be excluded,” it adds.

© 2007 Reuters

Arctic Thaw May Be at ‘Tipping Point’ - CommonDreams.org

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Greenpeace Activists Protest US Inaction on Global Warming
Nearly Fifty Arrested at International Climate Meeting at State Department

WASHINGTON, DC - September 28 - Greenpeace USA Executive Director John Passacantando and nearly fifty other activists were arrested at a protest today outside the Bush administration’s ‘Big Emitters’ meeting on global warming as they sent the message: “Bush: Wrong way on global warming.” “We’re here to register our protest at this charade,” Passacantando said. “President Bush is trying to take the world in the wrong direction on global warming, and this meeting is nothing more than a propaganda effort to deflect international criticism.”

The four environmental organizations involved in the protest are calling on the countries attending the meeting to take real action on global warming and resist endorsing the Bush agenda of undermining the Kyoto Protocol and substituting voluntary pledges for binding commitments. Those groups include: Greenpeace; Oil Change International; Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the U.S. Climate Emergency Council.

“This week’s meeting is all about talk with no word of action by the Bush administration,” said Christopher Miller, global warming campaigner with Greenpeace USA. “And it is an effort to deflect the criticism that Bush deserves for refusing to introduce mandatory emissions cuts and targets in the U.S. The Bush administration has called the meeting under the guise of appearing concerned about global warming. However, the U.S. is one of only two countries at this week’s meeting that are not engaging with the Kyoto Protocol; the other is Australia.”

All the developing countries attending the meeting – including China and India – have signed, and are actively working with, the Kyoto Protocol and its mechanisms. China also has introduced its own binding renewable energy targets of 15 percent by 2020 along with energy efficiency targets. In contrast, Bush has threatened to veto the energy bill currently on the table in the U.S. Congress.

Greenpeace pointed to the Kyoto negotiations in Bali in December as the “only legitimate game in town.” If successful, the meeting would establish a two-year timetable for negotiating a strengthened second phase of Kyoto, beginning in 2013.

Kyoto received widespread support at the UN High Level meeting in New York on Monday. Greenpeace is calling for cutting emissions by more than half globally by mid-century, with industrialized countries leading the process by cutting emissions by at least 30 percent by 2020 and at least 80 percent by 2050 – from 1990 levels.

Greenpeace Activists Protest US Inaction on Global Warming

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Published on Sunday, September 30, 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Bush’s EPA Pursues Fewer Criminal Cases
Civil lawsuits also decline; critics see other efforts flag
by John Solomon / Juliet Eilperin

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency’s pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data.

The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics.

Critics of the agency say its flagging efforts have emboldened polluters to flout U.S. environmental laws, threatening progress in cleaning the air, protecting wildlife, eliminating hazardous materials and countless other endeavors overseen by the EPA.

“You don’t get cleanup, and you don’t get deterrence,” said Eric Schaeffer, who resigned as director of the EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement in 2002 to protest the administration’s approach to enforcement and now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group. “I don’t think this is a problem with agents in the field. They’re capable of doing the work. They lack the political support they used to be able to count on, especially in the White House.”

The slower pace of enforcement mirrors a decline in resources for pursuing environmental wrongdoing. The EPA now employs 172 investigators in its Criminal Investigation Division, below the minimum of 200 agents required by the 1990 Pollution Prosecution Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush.

The actual number of investigators available at any time is even smaller, agents said, because they sometimes are diverted to other duties such as service on EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson’s eight-person security detail.

Johnson, President Bush’s chief environmental regulator, foreshadowed a less confrontational approach toward enforcement when he served as the EPA’s top deputy in late 2004. “The days of the guns and badges are over,” Johnson told a group of farm producers in Georgia the day before Bush won re-election, according to a news account of the speech.

Administration officials said they are not ignoring the environment but are focusing on major cases that secure more convictions against bigger players.

“We have been on an unprecedented run of success in the enforcement arena,” said Granta Nakayama, EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance. “These are major cases we are pursuing.”

Nakayama said that in the past three fiscal years the EPA has cut between 890 million and 1.1 billion pounds of air pollution through enforcement.

He added that he hopes to boost the number of criminal investigators and said that over the past five years the agency has won convictions against 95 percent of the people indicted for environmental crimes.

Administration officials acknowledge taking a new approach to environmental enforcement by seeking more settlements and plea bargains that require pollution reductions through new equipment or participation in EPA compliance programs.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department secured $13 billion in such corrective measures from polluters in 2005-06, up from about $4 billion in the final two years of the Clinton administration.

“Environmental prosecutions continue to be very important to the department,” Roehrkasse said. Settlements and judgments that impose corrective measures “protect the nation’s environment and safeguard the public’s health and welfare,” he said.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, whose panel oversees environmental enforcement, disagrees. “Where once a polluter could expect criminal prosecution, there are now civil settlements. Where once there were criminal penalties, there are now taxpayer subsidies,” said Dingell, D-Mich.

The environmental crimes unit at Justice Department headquarters in Washington has grown to a record 40 prosecutors. Last year, it secured near-record highs in years of confinement and criminal penalties, Roehrkasse said.

But environmental prosecutions by U.S. attorneys’ offices have sharply dropped as prosecutors facing new pressures on issues such as terrorism and immigration take away resources for environmental prosecutions and try to divert cases to the main Justice Department, EPA agents said.

Prosecutors counter that the EPA has fewer agents and is bringing them fewer cases. “We’re not turning away environmental crimes in order to prosecute other crimes. They are just not being presented in the first case,” said Don DeGabrielle, the U.S. attorney in Houston.

EPA memos show that investigators also have encountered new obstacles to their long-standing practice of directly referring cases to federal or state prosecutors. A new policy distributed May 25 requires agents to seek prior approval from the head of their division and establishes new paperwork procedures. This has slowed agents’ ability to make referrals, congressional investigators said.

The number of environmental prosecutions plummeted from 919 in 2001 to 584 last year, a 36 percent decline, according to Justice Department statistics collected by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Those same Justice Department data also show that the number of people convicted for environmental crimes dropped from 738 in 2001 to 470 last year.

Similarly, the number of cases opened by EPA investigators fell 37 percent, from 482 in 2001 to 305 last year, according to data that the EPA provided to congressional investigators.

Bush's EPA pursues fewer criminal cases / Civil lawsuits also decline; critics see other efforts flag

This article appeared on page A - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Bush’s EPA Pursues Fewer Criminal CasesCivil lawsuits also decline; critics see other efforts flag - CommonDreams.org

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Published on Saturday, September 29, 2007 by Reuters
Bush Draws Fire at Climate Talks

WASHINGTON - Some of the world’s biggest greenhouse polluters took aim at President George W. Bush on Friday, calling him “isolated” and questioning his leadership on the problem of global warming.

Bush, who convened the two-day meeting of the 17 biggest emitters of climate-warming gases, stressed new environmental technology and voluntary measures to tackle the issue.

“Our nations have an opportunity to leave the debates of the past behind and reach a consensus on the way forward and that’s our purpose today,” Bush told an audience that included delegates from Europe, Japan and Australia as well as fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.

But his speech did little to dampen doubts from participants and environmentalists that the climate session at the State Department would help advance crucial U.N. talks in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

“It is striking that the (Bush) administration at the moment in the international conversation seems to be pretty isolated,” said John Ashton, Britain’s climate envoy. “I think that the argument that we can do this through voluntary approaches is now pretty much discredited internationally.”

Bush’s rejection of mandatory limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that warm the planet is at odds with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and with many who attended on Friday.

“Our message to the U.S. is this: what they placed on the table at this meeting is a first step, but is simply not enough,” South African Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a statement. “We think that the U.S. needs to go back to the drawing board.”

The United States has long been the world’s biggest greenhouse emitter but at least one study this year put China in the lead. Given the U.S. role in contributing to the problem, van Schalkwyk said the United States should contribute its “fair share” to a solution.

LOOKING TOWARD BALI

By mid-2008, Bush said heads of state of the biggest emitting countries should set a long-term target to fight climate change and that there should be “a strong and transparent system for measuring our progress toward meeting the goal we set.”

That drew a muted response from delegates, according to Yvo de Boer, the special U.N. envoy on climate change.

De Boer said he found Bush’s speech “encouraging” because it acknowledged the urgency of the issue.

But asked to predict the outcome of the Washington meeting, de Boer replied, “The very strong indication I got is that people said, ‘This is a very interesting discussion but we need to continue it after Bali.’”

In fact, delegates applauded when Bush stressed this meeting was meant to lay the groundwork for the Bali conference. Some critics have questioned whether the Bush administration was attempting to get around the U.N. climate process with its own set of meetings.

At the meeting’s conclusion, James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and chairman of the conference, described “very vigorous discussion” and said the parties were committed to continuing the talks among the big emitters as a contribution to U.N. climate negotiations.

There was no consensus document. Instead, Connaughton offered a chairman’s summary: “I think different participants would emphasize different aspects of the summary so this is merely my attempt to capture the sense of the meeting.”

Bush said a long-term goal for reducing global warming was needed but that each nation should design its own strategy. He suggested a global clean-technology fund could be led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to be financed by global contributions.

The Bali talks will aim to launch a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that set limits on industrial nations’ emissions. Its first phase ends in 2012. (Additional reporting by Caren Bohan)

© Reuters 2007.
Bush Draws Fire at Climate Talks - CommonDreams.org