In spring, all the pigs in Egypt were killed. This was never going to contain swine flu, though it could protect against a worse hybrid virus - meanwhile, food waste piles up in Egyptian cities without the pigs to eat it

The United Nations refugee agency today renewed its appeal to allow humanitarian aid to reach civilians displaced and stranded by fighting in northern Yemen, where clashes renewed over the weekend despite an announced two-week suspension of military operations.

The United Nations refugee agency has appealed to French authorities to consider the protection needs of individuals who had been staying in a makeshift camp in the northern city of Calais which the Government began to dismantle today.

Should we dismiss alarmist language as climate porn, asks Shanta Barley, or has it got to the stage where we need a scary name for environmental woe?

British and European officials have expressed severe doubts about the commitment of the United States to a new global agreement on reducing pollution and global warming.

By Alex Spillius in Washington and Tom Leonard in New York Published: 7:02PM BST 21 Sep 2009
As 100 presidents and prime ministers prepared for the meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York, John Ashton, the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change, lamented the “ambition gap” between Europe and the US.
The US Senate is considered unlikely to approve a new energy-saving bill before the intended signing of a new climate deal in Copenhagen in December, which would replace the Kyoto Protocol.

“There is no technological obstacle, there is no macroeconomic obstacle. The barriers are political,” said Mr Ashton.
John Bruton, the EU ambassador to Washington, said: “Is the US Senate really expecting all the other countries to make a serious effort on climate change at the Copenhagen conference in the absence of a clear commitment from the United States?
“The United States is just one of the 190 countries coming to this conference, but the United States emits 25 per cent of all the greenhouse gases that the conference is trying to reduce,” he added.
Officials fear that the contentious debate in America on health care reform, which has raised accusations of high taxation and excessive government power, could leave President Barack Obama bereft of any political credit to push a bill controlling carbon emissions through the Senate, even though legislation already passed the House of Representatives.
Opponents are gearing up for an intense campaign that will stress the cost to industry and consumers of binding carbon targets.
“It’s going to be a very big issue in this country and in the senate. Many of the same contours can be seen on climate and energy as we see today on health care, though they are not identical,” said a British diplomat.
When Mr Obama took office, hopes were raised in Europe that he would lead the US on a bold reversal of George W Bush’s rejection of Kyoto.
Apart from slow progress in Congress, the administration itself is unwilling to commit the US to internationally-enforced lower emission standards of the type favoured in Europe.
The Americans are determined that any international agreement is acceptable domestically, after Kyoto was signed by then president Bill Clinton in 1997 but rejected by a Republican-controlled Senate and later Mr Bush.
Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said the world needed to make the most of a combination of political factors, including increased interest from China and India, a change of government in Japan as well as President Obama’s first year in office.
“This is a moment you have to seize. This period is a make or break opportunity,” he said. “It may look like the constellation of stars is difficult but it’s actually the best it’s going to be for some time to come.”
Developing countries were past the stage of blaming the First World for global warming and were increasingly convinced of the need to act collectively, he said in New York.
“My impression talking to the administration… is that they realise the need to come to Copenhagen with as concrete an offer as possible,” he added.

Trafigura is just another case of global fly-tipping. It’s all too easy for firms to protect profit and pass risk to the poor world
George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 September 2009 21.00 BST
It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Ivory Coast, after the Guardian and the BBC’s Newsnight obtained emails sent by its traders. They reveal that Trafigura knew that the oil slops it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste. But the Ivorian contractor it employed to pump out the hold of its tanker dumped them around inhabited areas in the capital city and the countryside. Tens of thousands of people fell ill and 15 died. While the settlement says that the slops could at worst have caused a range of short-term low-level flu-like symptoms, and anxiety, it is one of the world’s worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable. It’s just another instance of the rich world’s global fly-tipping.
On the day that the Guardian published the company’s emails, it also carried a story about a shipwreck discovered in 480 metres of water off the Italian coast. Detectives found the ship after a tip-off from a mafioso. It appears to have been carrying drums of nuclear waste when the mafia used explosives to scuttle it. The informant, Francesco Fonti, said his clan had been paid £100,000 to get rid of it. What makes this story interesting is that the waste appears to be Norwegian. Norway is famous for its tough environmental laws, but a shipload of nuclear waste doesn’t go missing without someone high-up looking the other way.
Italian prosecutors are investigating the scuttling of a further 41 ships. But most of them weren’t sunk, like Fonti’s vessel, off the coast of Italy; they were lost off the coast of Somalia. When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland. According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste. People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages. The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost “something like $1,000 a tonne.” On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe’s picture of Dorian Gray: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.
The only people who have sought physically to stop this dumping are Somali pirates. Most of them take to the seas only for blood and booty; but some have formed coastal patrols to prevent over-fishing and illegal dumping by foreign fleets. Some of the vessels being protected from pirates by Combined Task Force 151, the rich world’s policing operation in the Gulf of Aden, have come to fish illegally or dump toxic waste. The warships make no attempt to stop them.
The law couldn’t be clearer: the Basel convention, supported by European directives, forbids European Union or OECD nations from dumping hazardous wastes in poorer countries. But without enforcement, the law is useless. So, for instance, while all our dead electronic equipment is supposed to be recycled by licensed companies at home, according to Consumers International around 6.6m tonnes of it leaves the European Union illegally every year.
Much of it lands in West Africa. An investigation by the Mail on Sunday found computers which once belonged to the NHS being broken up and burnt by children on Ghanaian rubbish dumps. They were trying to extract copper and aluminium by burning off the plastics, with the result that they were inhaling lead, cadmium, dioxins, furans and brominated flame retardants. Tests in another of the world’s great fly-tips, Guiyu in China, show that 80% of the children of that city have dangerous levels of lead in their blood.
In February, working with Sky News and the Independent, Greenpeace placed a satellite tracking device in a dead television and left it at a recycling centre in Basingstoke run by Hampshire county council. It passed through the hands of the council’s recycling company, then found its way first to Tilbury docks on the Thames then to Lagos, where the journalists bought it back from a street market. Under EU law, used electronic equipment can be exported only if it’s still working, but Greenpeace had made sure the TV was unusable. A black market run by criminal gangs is dumping our electronic waste on the poor, but since the European directive banning this practice was incorporated into British law in January 2007, the Environment Agency hasn’t made a single prosecution. Dump your telly over a hedge and you can expect big trouble. Dump 10,000 in Nigeria and you can expect to get away with it.
If the mafia were to establish itself as an effective force in this country, it would do so by way of the waste disposal industry. All over the world the cosa nostra, yakuza, triads, bratva and the rest make much of their fortune by disposing of our uncomfortable truths. It suits all the rich nations – even, it seems, the government of Norway – not to ask too many questions, so long as the waste goes to far away countries of which we know nothing. Only when the mobs make the mistake of dumping it off their own coasts does the state start to get huffy.
The Trafigura story is a metaphor for corporate capitalism. The effort of all enterprises is to keep the profits and dump the costs on someone else. Price risks are dumped on farmers, health and safety risks are dumped on subcontractors, insolvency risks are dumped on creditors, social and economic risks are dumped on the state, toxic waste is dumped on the poor, greenhouse gases are dumped on everyone.
Another story that broke on the same day was the shifting, by Barclays, of £7bn of residential mortgage assets and collateralised debt obligations to a fund in the Cayman Islands. These were universally described by the media as toxic assets. Some traders also call them toxic waste. Everyone understands the metaphor even if they haven’t thought it through: the banks seek to dump their liabilities while clinging on to their assets. Perhaps it comes as no surprise to find that Trafigura also runs a hedge fund, or that Lord Strathclyde, leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, is a non-executive director of that hedge fund.
That party, like New Labour, advocates the continuing deregulation of business. The Trafigura case, like the financial crisis, suggests that in business there are people ruthless enough to shut their eyes to almost anything if they think if they think they can make money. Business without regulation is scarcely distinguishable from organised crime. Regulation without strict enforcement is an open invitation to mess with people’s lives. Tedious directives, state power and bureaucratic snooping – the interference that everyone professes to hate – are all that stand between civilisation and corporate hell.

With cutting-edge engineering and new kinds of public-private partnerships, the new age of electric cars exemplifies the powerful opportunities we can grasp as we make the transition to sustainability

Jeffrey Sachs
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 September 2009 15.26 BST
The key to climate change control lies in improved technology. We need to find new ways to produce and use energy, meet our food needs, transport ourselves, and heat and cool our homes that will allow us to cut back on oil, gas, coal, nitrogen-based fertiliser, and other sources of the climate-changing greenhouse gases.
There are enough good options available to suggest that the world can accomplish the goal of controlling climate change at a reasonable cost (perhaps 1% of global income per year) while enabling the world economy to continue to grow and raise living standards. One of the most exciting developments on the horizon is the new generation of electric cars.
In the earliest days of the automobile in the late 19th century, many kinds of cars competed with each other – steam, battery, and internal combustion engine (ICE). The petrol- and diesel-powered internal combustion engines won the competition with the success of the Model T, which first rolled off of the assembly line in 1908.
Now the age of electric vehicles is upon us. The Toyota Prius, a hybrid-electric vehicle first introduced in Japan in 1997, marked an initial breakthrough. By connecting a small generator and rechargeable battery to the braking system of a standard car, the hybrid augments the normal engine with a battery-powered motor. Petrol mileage is sufficiently enhanced to make the hybrid commercially viable, and petrol-saving vehicles will become even more commercially viable when consumers are taxed for the carbon dioxide they emit from their vehicles.
Much more innovation is on the way, led by General Motors’ plug-in hybrid vehicle, the Chevy Volt, at the end of 2010. While the Prius is a normal ICE automobile with a small motor, the Volt will be an electric vehicle with an engine alongside. Based on typical driving patterns, the Volt will get so many miles on the battery that it will achieve around 230 miles per gallon of petrol.
Larry Burns, the visionary head of GM’s research and development until his recent retirement, sees the electric vehicle as much more than an opportunity to save petrol. According to Burns, the electric-vehicle age will reshape the energy grid, redefine driving patterns, and generally improve the quality of life in urban areas, where most of the world’s population will live and drive.
First, there will be many types of electric vehicles, including the plug-in hybrid, the all-battery vehicle, and vehicles powered by the hydrogen fuel cell, essentially a battery fed by an external source of hydrogen.
These different vehicles will be able to tap into countless energy sources. Solar, wind, or nuclear power – all free of CO2 emissions – can feed the power grid that will recharge the batteries or produce the hydrogen to power the hydrogen fuel cell.
Second, the storage capacity of the vehicle fleet will play an important role in stabilising the power grid. Not only will battery-powered vehicles draw power from the electricity grid during recharging, but, when parked, they can also feed additional power back into the grid during periods of peak demand.
Third, electric-powered vehicles will open up a new world of “smart” vehicles, in which sensor systems and vehicle-to-vehicle communications will enable collision protection, traffic routing, and remote management of the vehicle.
These are visionary ideas, yet they are within technological reach. But implementing these concepts will require new forms of public-private partnership. Car-makers, utility companies, broadband providers, and government road builders will each have to contribute to an integrated system. All of these sectors will require new ways of competing and co-operating with the others. The public sector will have to put forward funding to enable the new generation of vehicles to reach commercialisation – through R&D outlays, consumer subsidies, and support for complementary infrastructure (for example, outlets for recharging in public places).
We need to rethink the climate challenge. By harnessing cutting-edge engineering and new kinds of public-private partnerships, we can hasten the worldwide transition to sustainable technologies, with benefits for rich and poor countries alike – and thereby find the basis for global agreements on climate change that have so far proven elusive.
• Jeffrey D Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

81 year old Roland Micklem isn’t living a quiet live in his eighties. Currently he is in jail for protesting against mountaintop removal mining. In addition, he is organizing a march of senior citizens to bring attention to the evil practice.

Roland Micklem is a hero. He was arrested after protesting at mountaintop remover Massey Energy’s regional offices. Twilight Earth picked up his statement made from jail from blog Climate Ground Zero, it follows in full:

The action went well. Police arrived on the scene shortly after we had formed our human chain across the road, cut us loose, and hauled us to the courthouse in Madison to be indicted. We appeared before the magistrate a few hours later and we were charged with trespass, conspiracy to commit a crime, and damage to private property. Bail was set at $5,000 apiece. As I write the rest of my fellow activists are being released on bail.

The language of the indictments may have made us sound like seasoned criminals, but as we are quick to point out, the real criminals are those in charge of the demolition operations that are wiping out such mammoth sections of Appalachia’s mountains. Among our charges was conspiracy. There’s is an ongoing conspiracy with their political hacks in Charleston and Washington which legalizes MTR (mountaintop removal), and they damage more property on any one of their sites than the combined efforts of all of the vandals in all of the major cities of the nation.

Many of us do not think of this campaign in terms of winning or losing. I, as many of my companions are here to make a statement with our lives; we are announcing to the world that we will no longer tolerate the business-as-usual policies of a power structure that are largely responsible for our economic, health, and environmental crises. The forces arrayed against us are powerful and perhaps overwhelming. But when I am called upon for an accounting of what I have done with my life, I want to be able to say that I have done everything humanly possible to implement my convictions.

This is the reason I’m prepared to carry on, regardless of the outcome.

Mr. Micklem is organizing a march for senior citizens to highlight the evil practice of blowing up mountains and plowing over valleys to get at coal cheaper. Mr. Micklem and his fellow marchers will set out from West Virginia’s state capitol building in Charleston and will travel four to six miles a day until they reach the entrance of the Mammoth Coal mine site. To register (marchers need to be 55+, though they welcome supporters of any age) and for more info, swing over to Climate Ground Zero.

Source:
Mother Nature Network, “Senior citizens to march against mountaintop removal mining“, accessed September 18, 2009

Live in Small Bitescopyright Annie Kate2008

By David Usborne
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
On jetting into New York last night ahead of this morning’s climate change talks, Barack Obama did the important stuff first: appearing on the late night television show hosted by David Letterman. There he was able to ponder such things as heart-shaped potatoes and the role played by race in recent attacks on his healthcare plan.
“First of all, I think it’s important to realise that I was actually black before the election,” Mr Obama quipped when prodded again on the race question. Not to be outdone, Mr Letterman responded: “How long have you been a black man?”
The appearance on the Late Show did have a serious purpose of course – Mr Obama is still trying to boost popular support for his healthcare overhaul – now at a critical stage of negotiation in the US Congress. But he mostly kept things light-hearted. Before he came on the set, Mr Letterman rehearsed 10 reasons why Mr Obama would have agreed to come on the show. Among them: because he said yes without thinking about it, rather like George Bush did when he invaded Iraq.
But Mr Obama had overheard from offstage an exchange between Letterman and a woman in the audience who had come with a heart-shaped potato. “The main reason I’m here?” Mr Obama began. “I want to see the heart-shaped potato.” The woman tossed it to him and told him he could keep it. When Mr Obama sees that I “heart” NY logo in future he will immediately think spud.