Iraqi Widows, Orphans Left Stranded

By KIM GAMEL and BUSHRA JUHI, Associated Press Writers

Sunday, April 6, 2008

BAGHDAD, (AP) --

The car exploded near a popular ice cream parlor, sending flames and shrapnel through the busy square and killing 17 people.

It was another deadly explosion quickly forgotten by the outside world. But Aug. 1, 2007, changed the life of 28-year-old Maysa Sharif. It was the day she became one of nearly a million Iraqi women who have lost husbands as the country has suffered through three wars and Saddam Hussein's murderous regime.

Such vast numbers of widows would tax any society, and all the more Iraq's. With virtually no safety net and few job opportunities, most widows have little choice but to move in with their extended families and depend on their largesse.

Sharif was five months pregnant and preparing breakfast for her children when the blast shook their house in central Baghdad. She ran to the scene where her 39-year-old husband, Hussein Abdul-Hassan, ran a cigarette kiosk, and saw him on the ground. "Shrapnel hit his body and his head was cracked open. His eyes and mouth also were open," she said.

"I wanted to close them," she said, but police dragged her away, fearing a second explosion.

And her nightmare continued. Her 7-year-old son Saif had gone to work with his dad, and she couldn't find him. Only as her husband was being taken to the holy city of Najaf to be buried did she learn her son had died in the hospital.

"The funeral convoy turned around and put Saif's body in the same coffin," she said. "They refused to let me see my son or go to Najaf because I was pregnant. I could not believe that he was dead until I saw the death certificate."

Sharif has three other children — 10-year-old Ali, 2-year-old Tabarak and infant Abdullah, whose name was chosen by his father the night before he was killed. They now live in one room set aside for them in her brother-in-law's compound in central Baghdad.

With the government's attention focused on political crises and the U.S.-led war now entering its sixth year, advocates say the plight of women like Sharif is being ignored.

Women's Affairs Minister Nirmeen Othman warns it could boil up into a peacetime "social crisis."

A family health survey provided by lawmaker Samira al-Moussawi, who champions the widows, counted 738,240 widows ranging in age from 15 to 80 as of January 2007, and dating back to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The figure included those whose husbands died of natural causes and a further breakdown was not available.

Othman estimated the number at closer to 1.3 million.

The problem also threatens the next generation.

A whole new primary school for 640 orphans has opened in Baghdad's Sadr City district, but headmistress Asma Karim says many pupils are failing for lack of support at home.

"Those who are left to care for these children are normally concerned about their survival more than their education," she said.

Al-Moussawi, a geologist-turned-politician, says she has been overwhelmed by petitions for help, including 448 recently delivered to her office in a plastic bag from the predominantly Shiite southern city of Diwaniyah.

"There isn't any strategy, any clear strategy to deal with this social issue — not for women, not for children," she said.

She has proposed legislation to budget $1 million — a tiny fraction of the oil-rich country's $48 billion budget — for educating widows, teaching them skills and raising their tiny pensions. But the Cabinet has rejected the measure.

Umm Hiba, a 38-year-old mother of two in northern Baghdad, blames herself for her husband's death because she sent him to a Baghdad market to buy yogurt for the dinner she was cooking. A mortar attack killed him on Jan. 27, 2007.

"It was all my fault. If I did not send him, he would be alive now with his children," she said, crying as she held her 2-year-old son.

Now she lives with her 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son in a room in the back of the house she and her husband shared with her blind brother-in-law and his family. She has built a makeshift bathroom and kitchen.

Neighbors and relatives collected money for her husband's funeral, but she was forced to sell her furniture to buy a sheep to slaughter on the first anniversary of his death, according to Islamic tradition. The sheep cost more than her monthly $62 pension.

Umm Hiba, who would only give her nickname, which means "mother of Hiba," says she applied unsuccessfully for several jobs but was rejected. She could have sought work as a cleaner in a school, but refused. "I have a high-school degree so it would be shameful for me to take such a job," she said.

The pension, she said, can't keep up with soaring food and clothes prices. "In Iraq, everything is costly, except human beings who are very cheap," she said.

By comparison, war widows under Saddam received plots of land, the cost of the funeral and sufficient pensions.

Jalila Hassan's husband, Kadhum Mohammed was 29 when he was killed in 1984 while fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. She was 17 at the time and said she was given a pension and even offered a choice between a car or the equivalent price. She chose the cash.

"Back then, widows were taken care of better than they are now. We were not left in destitution," she said.

Hassan, who lives with her mother and brothers in Sadr City, still gets a slightly higher pension of $80 a month but its value has fallen sharply.

Afifa Hussein's husband, 58-year-old Uraibi Hamid, was snatched by masked gunmen and shot to death July 14 in the insurgent stronghold of Samarra.

Hussein, in her 40s with eight children, found herself struggling to care for two disabled sons and an ailing daughter. To earn extra money for the family, her 19-year-old son drove a cab, a dangerous occupation in Iraq these days.

Her teenage daughter quit school, unable to cope, and a traumatized son moved out of the house for a month to stay with relatives.

Badriyah Hamid, a 45-year-old Shiite cleaning woman with 10 children, was working late at a school in the predominantly Sunni village of Rashidiyah on May 23, 2007, when she learned her 55-year-old husband, Fadhil Jafar, had been shot to death and dumped on the street.

"I ran to the site and all my children came too, throwing themselves on his body. He was shot six times in his back and head," she said.

The killing left one of her sons with a form of amnesia and no longer able to read or write, causing him to fail in school.

Women in black: the poverty and loneliness of Iraq's war widows

Nearly one million Iraqi women have lost husbands, courtesy of three wars and Saddam Hussein.

Click here for an audio slideshow of one widow's story.

Click on "Captions" for an explanation of each slide.

Text story here.

AP

Also left behind: Orphans of the war dead at a special school in Baghdad.

Comment:

I pray for the Iraqi widows, orphans, siblings, relatives and pets of those who have been killed in this war that has been sold to the American people. I pray for the American troops who have been recruited to continue this insanity. President Bush, I pray for your soulless crusade and I hope you reincarnate as a gnat in your next life.

How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left?

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on April 22, 2008, Printed on April 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/83032/
Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain
economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key
messages of PLAN-B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the newest book
by Lester Brown -- available as a free download at earthpolicy.org.

Plan A -- the western fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway
economic model -- is not going to work for China, India, or the 3 billion
other people in developing countries, and it will not continue to work
for the industrial countries either.

It's time for Plan B -- an all-out response at wartime speed
proportionate to the magnitude of threats facing civilization.

The four overriding goals of PLAN B 3.0 are to stabilize climate and
population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth's damaged
ecosystems. Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to
reach the others as well.

"We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating
deadlines that we do not recognize," says Brown. "These deadlines are set
by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock."

Lester Brown has been described by The Washington Post as "one of the
world's most influential thinkers." After working with the Department of
Agriculture in international agricultural development, Brown helped
establish the Overseas Development Council, then founded Worldwatch
Institute, publishers of annual State of the World and Vital Signs reports.
In 2001, he left Worldwatch, founded Earth Policy Institute, and
published Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth.

TERRENCE McNALLY: When you were involved in agriculture in the Kennedy
administration, few thought about the environment, unless it was about
conservation or wilderness. A bit later, environmentalism was usually
local -- a polluting factory or a threatened forest. Yet very early you
had a global understanding of environmental issues. How did that
happen?

LESTER BROWN: It was probably due to, first, living two and a half
years in villages in India in 1956, where I could see the food/population
problem beginning to unfold; and second, my training in the sciences,
which gave me a feel for how natural systems work.

McNALLY: What has driven you to write Plan B, and then Plan B 2.0 and
Plan B 3.0?

BROWN: One of the goals of the Earth Policy Institute is to provide a
vision of a kind of world we want, and a sense of how we get from here
to there. Plan B was the first version of this.

With 3.0, we've changed the subtitle from Rescuing a Planet Under
Stress and a Civilization in Trouble to simply Mobilizing to Save
Civilization. We used to think about saving the planet, and that's still
essential, but what's really at stake now is civilization itself.

We have a growing backlog of unresolved problems in the world:
deforestation, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, falling water tables,
eroding soils, you can go down the list. The fallout from these problems
is becoming more and more difficult to manage, especially for
governments in developing countries.

A number of countries have developed enough to bring down mortality but
not enough to bring down fertility. With a rapid rate of population
growth, they're caught in what demographers call "the demographic trap."
If you can't break out of it, eventually you begin to break down.

17 of the top 20 failing states have rapid rates of population growth.
These are the countries where most of the 70 million people added each
year are being born. As this list of failing states grows each year, we
have to ask how many failing states before we have a failing
civilization? No one knows the answer. We haven't been there before.

On top of traditional environmental problems, we now have new stresses
like soaring oil prices that put a lot of pressure on low and
middle-income oil-importing countries. Then as the United States converts a
growing share of our grain into fuel, we drive world grain prices to
all-time highs, creating instability in low and middle-income countries that
import grain. We face the risk that the combination of rising oil and
food prices will greatly increase the number of failing states. I think
the number of failing states in the world is now the key indicator as
to whether civilization is going to succeed or fail.

McNALLY: The enormous global inequity in income and wealth breeds
inequity in health, in education, and in all phases of life, doesn't it?

BROWN: There is a vast opportunity gap, and those born into societies
with few opportunities become recruits for international terrorist
groups. In Africa, revolutionaries who want to overthrow governments simply
recruit kids -- 10, 12, 14 years old -- give them guns and let them go.
As I look at the world today, terrorism is a problem and a threat, but
even bigger threats are the persistence of poverty, continuing
population growth, and climate change.

McNALLY: In one of the earlier versions of Plan B, you pointed out the
danger of our attention to terrorism distracting us from these other
issues. In 3.0, you've knit those problems together even more clearly.
Now you're saying they're no longer "either/or", but they are
inextricably linked.

BROWN: No question. The money we lay out to deal with things like
population growth, environmental degradation, spreading water shortages,
climate change, etc. is really the new security budget because these are
the real threats.

The climate change threat is enormous. Last August an area of Arctic
sea ice twice the size of Britain melted in one week. Scientists have
never seen anything like this before.

Greenland has an ice sheet a mile thick or more, covering almost the
entire island, which is three times the size of Texas. The rate at which
it's melting now is extraordinary. There's a large glacier on the west
coast, where the ice sheet flows into the sea, 3 miles wide and a mile
deep, and it's flowing at 2 meters an hour. Glaciers normally flow at
80-100 meters per year. This is 2 meters per hour!

McNALLY: How much has global temperature risen so far?

BROWN: About one degree Fahrenheit over the last several decades. By
the end of this century, temperature could rise anywhere from 3 to 10
degrees Fahrenheit.

McNALLY: But it's much greater than that at the poles, isn't it?

BROWN: Yes. We report temperature changes as a global average, but we
have to keep in mind that temperature rises faster over land than over
oceans, faster near the poles than near the equator, and faster in the
interior of continents than in coastal regions. In parts of Alaska,
Northern Canada, Siberia and areas around the Arctic Circle including
Greenland, temperatures have already gone up 3 to 7 degrees.

The west Antarctic ice sheet is not really on the continent itself, but
is supported by a number of islands. When it starts to go, it could
break up very quickly.

McNALLY: What might be the repercussions of that?

BROWN: If Greenland melts entirely, that adds 23 feet to the sea. The
west Antarctic ice sheet adds 16 feet -- so together almost 40 feet. If
that happens, many of the world's coastal cities would be under water.
This is not going to happen in years or decades, but will be spread out
over we hope at least a century or two. But still the rate becomes
alarming. Even a one-meter rise in sea level threatens a lot of cities.

A large share of the world's population lives pretty close to the
coast. If sea level were to rise 39 feet, there would be at least 600
million rising sea refugees. What happens to the price of land in the
interior, if vast numbers are forced inland?

McNALLY: When people talk about melting glaciers, they usually refer to
Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica. You point out that throughout
the world we depend on mountainous glaciers for a steady supply of water.
Los Angeles, for instance, is vulnerable to this.

BROWN: Mountain glaciers are melting everywhere. The Alps and Andes
could be almost entirely gone in half a century. But I'm even more
concerned about the Tibetan plateau. All the major rivers in Asia originate in
the Himalayas: the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the
Yellow River.

McNALLY: These rivers sustain huge numbers of people.

BROWN: During the dry season, the Ganges is fed by the ice melt from
the Gangotri glacier, a vast glacier that could be gone entirely by mid
century. If we can't close enough coal-fired power plants fast enough to
save it, then the Ganges will become a seasonal river that no longer
flows during the dry season. Imagine the consequences of that. Think
about the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers that irrigate the wheat and rice
fields of Asia.

McNALLY: Along with the US, China and India are two of the three
largest grain-producing countries.

BROWN: The two countries most affected by the melting of the glaciers
in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau will be India and China, which
happen to be the two countries now building most of the world's coal
fired power plants.

McNALLY: In other words, they're putting up more and more greenhouse
gases at a time when their very survival is dependent upon cutting them
back. Those kinds of connections and interactions are some of our
biggest blind spots, aren't they?

BROWN: We face four big challenges right now. We need to stabilize
climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty and restore the earth's
damaged eco systems.

We probably cannot stabilize population growth humanely unless we
eradicate poverty. Stabilizing population means making sure that all
youngsters get at least an elementary school education, girls as well as boys.
It means providing basic health care, immunization against childhood
diseases, the basic fundamentals of health care at the village level.

We have to provide reproductive health care and family planning
services as well. There are at least 200 million women in the world who want
to limit their number of children, but who lack access to family
planning programs. The cost of family planning for these women over a year
would be a tiny fraction of what we're spending in Iraq.

McNALLY: Iraq is now about 3 billion a week. Two years of Iraq funding
could solve almost all the biggest problems we're facing. Talk about
misspent resources!

BROWN: In terms of annual expenditures, the total bill for Plan B is
less than $200 billion a year. I call it the New Defense Bill, because --
terrorism notwithstanding -- the real threats to our future now are
climate change, continuing rapid population growth, continuing
destruction of the economy's environmental support systems, the things that lead
to failing states.

McNALLY: I've always said that the key to minimizing the threat of
terrorism is to make terrorists pariahs in their own societies.

BROWN:

I can remember what we did in the post World War II period. Normally
after you win a war, you pillage. Instead we launched the Marshall Plan
to rebuild the very countries with which we'd been engaged in one of the
most deadly wars in history.

McNALLY: We did the opposite after World War I, and the result of that
was World War II.

Let's imagine civilization is our patient. We've talked about some of
the symptoms: climate change, peak oil, loss of water and soil. Briefly,
what are the diagnosis and the recommended treatment?

BROWN: Looking at the world through an ecological lens, I see a
mounting backlog of unresolved problems, many of them associated with
population growth including deforestation, expanding desert, deteriorating
grasslands, eroding soils, falling water tables. Very few of these trends
have been turned around; instead they're getting worse and becoming more
difficult to manage. Now add to that climate change and peak oil.

McNALLY: Peak oil is the moment at which we've taken half of the oil
out of the earth. One might say, "Only half ... we're in good shape."
But, once we reach peak oil, we've used up the easiest half, and every
subsequent barrel becomes more expensive.

BROWN: We have spent our lifetimes in a world where, except for an
occasional blip here and there, oil production has always been increasing.
In a world where oil production is no longer increasing, no country can
get more oil unless another gets less, and that's a very different
world. It creates a lot of tensions. It creates a politics of scarcity and
rising oil prices.

As the United States shifts an ever larger share of its grain harvest
into the production of fuel, the world is now facing quite possibly the
worst food price inflation in history.

McNALLY: When we did an interview on Plan B four or five years ago, you
predicted the current battle for grain. Does it go into the gas tank
of a rich person or the mouth of a poor person?

BROWN: Nearly 20 percent of the 2007 grain harvest has been used to
produce ethanol to satisfy, at most, 4 percent of our automotive fuel
needs. From an agricultural point of view, the automotive fuel demand is
insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol
would feed one person for a year.

McNALLY: So the shift of grain to ethanol raises grain prices for us
and the rest of the world, condemns millions to starvation -- all to
supply a speck of our energy demand.

BROWN: We're in an ironic situation where as taxpayers we are
subsidizing the conversion of grain into ethanol, and therefore a rise in our
own food prices. So we pay twice, on April 15 when we settle our taxes
and then every time we go to the supermarket checkout counter.

McNALLY: Let's shift to solutions -- eradicating poverty, family
planning, education and so on. You say that for $200 billion a year we could
solve them.

BROWN: Yes -- one fifth of global military expenditures which are now
over a trillion, or 1000 billion per year. $100 billion weapon systems
are almost useless now. You can't use them to deal with the problems
we're facing.

McNALLY: What are the solutions?

BROWN: To slow climate change, we've devised a plan to cut carbon
emissions 80 percent -- not by 2050, which is what politicians like to talk
about -- but by 2020.

McNALLY: An 80 percent reduction in 12 years. How do we do it?

BROWN: There are three components to the plan: first, dramatically and
systematically raise the efficiency of the world energy economy;
second, massive investment in renewable sources of energy; and third,
increase the earth's tree cover by planting billions of trees.

On efficiency, let me offer one simple example that most people are
familiar with. If we replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents,
we can cut global electricity use 12 percent, allowing us to close 700
of the world's 2360 coal fired power plants.

40 percent of the world's electricity currently comes from coal, but by
2020 we see wind providing 40 percent.

McNALLY: In a dozen years you see wind replacing coal as the dominant
energy source?

BROWN: There's 100,000 wind turbines in operation today, so that means
building about a million and a half more producing two megawatts each:
3 million megawatts in global wind generating capacity. But a million
and a half wind turbines over a dozen years is peanuts compared with
producing 65 million cars a year, which we do now.

The Texas state legislature and the Republican governor, Rick Perry,
are putting together a package to harness that state's abundant wind
energy. They're planning about 23,000 megawatts of wind energy, which will
do away with 23 coal-fired power plants and supply half the state's
residential electricity.

McNALLY: How quickly will that happen?

BROWN: By 2020. They're moving very fast.

We can install a million and a half wind turbines and combine that
technology with plug in hybrids. Add a second storage battery and a plug-in
to a Toyota Prius and you can recharge the batteries at night. The
car's batteries become a storage facility for wind energy.

McNALLY: Toyota says they'll have plug-ins by 2010, and they're in
competition with other companies who say they'll have it quicker.

BROWN: The big competition right now is between Toyota with the
modified Prius and GM with the Chevrolet Volt. The gasoline equivalent cost of
running cars on cheap wind-generated electricity is less than a dollar
a gallon.

McNALLY: Wow! Will it take tax subsidies or incentives to get us to
ramp up wind and renewables?

BROWN: The key is to get the market to tell the environmental truth,
and right now the market does not do that. The market does a lot of
things well, but it does not do a good job of incorporating what we call the
"indirect cost" or what economists call "externalities." For example,
the climate change and pollution costs of fossil fuels. The simple way
to do that is to add carbon taxes and offset that increase by lowering
income taxes.

McNALLY: Make it tax neutral, so that your pocket book bite is the same
at the end of the year. But instead of taxing labor or work, which we
want more of; we tax pollution and greenhouse gases, which we want less
of.

BROWN: So we end up with more jobs and less climate destruction -- a
win/win situation.

McNALLY: In terms of transforming our industries, you point to World
War II, which you lived through.

BROWN:

In his State of the Union address one month after Pearl Harbor,
President Roosevelt announced that we were going to produce 25,000 tanks,
60,000 planes, 20,000 artillery planes. It was extraordinary. No one had
ever seen arms production like this.

Then he called in the leaders of the auto industry and said, "Guys,
guess what, we're going to ban the sale of private automobiles in the
United States." The automobile industry had no choice but to switch to
producing arms. And we didn't produce just the 60,000 planes, which was the
goal, we produced 229,000. We exceeded every one of those arms
production goals.

McNALLY: So it is your sense that we could make that same kind of a
massive shift if leaders take this seriously?

BROWN: No question. It didn't take decades to restructure the US
industrial economy. It didn't take years. We did it in a matter of months.
That's the exciting and encouraging thing about what we're challenged
with now. It is entirely doable.

We have it in our power to restructure the world energy economy and
avoid disastrous climate change. All we need is the leadership, the
vision, and the will.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los
Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/83032/

Welcome to 2007

food and fuel stoking global riots

submitted by Piper

MSM news gets hip to biofuels

Hey, we knew and we told them; now that they realize that this effects THEM, the editorialist at major papers are getting hip and posting OpEds such as the following - GO SOLAR! Insulate your homes, demand public policy be changed before more damage is done.

I resent opeds like this that suggest that none of us knew and that no one was warned. They was WARNED and the effects on the poor by the use of biofuels deserves coverage in their newspapers - but hey! we don't talk about poverty and hunger in the MSM in north america, do we??

Veeger

This is from Newsday:

Editorial: Don't be biofooled about biofuels

February 18, 2008

The nation's enthusiastic embrace of biofuels as a greener alternative to imported petroleum has run afoul of the law of unintended consequences.

Two authoritative studies show that ethanol and other biofuels actually hurt the environment. When the full emission costs of producing these "greener" fuels are considered, they create more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.

Global warming, the studies demonstrate, is increased by the destruction of natural ecosystems - rain forests in the tropics and grasslands in North America - taken over for biofuel production.

The results of these studies, published in this month's issue of the prestigious journal Science, should not be lost on Congress and President George W. Bush. Both have pushed hard for the production of biofuels in crafting the latest energy bill, offering generous subsidies to farmers in the nation's corn belt to distill ethanol - the least efficient and most energy- and petroleum-intensive way of producing this type of biofuel.

Already, gasoline sold at Long Island pumps and elsewhere in the Northeast is at least 10 percent ethanol in the winter. Achieving Bush's goal of replacing 15 percent of gas with ethanol and other biofuels would eat up the whole U.S. corn crop.

Environmentalists, who had been early promoters of biofuels, have been taken aback by this scientific controversy. They had argued that biofuels would emit less carbon dioxide than petroleum products, but now many recognize what the new studies show: that the effects on land use had not been taken into account in the broader calculations on climate change. As a result, the European Union is now considering a ban on some biofuels.

Ethanol production is already jacking up food prices, another unintended consequence. A sound energy policy must take all this into account in the rush for greener alternatives.

The results of these studies, published in this month's issue of the prestigious journal Science, should not be lost on Congress and President George W. Bush. Both have pushed hard for the production of biofuels in crafting the latest energy bill, offering generous subsidies to farmers in the nation's corn belt to distill ethanol - the least efficient and most energy- and petroleum-intensive way of producing this type of biofuel.

Already, gasoline sold at Long Island pumps and elsewhere in the Northeast is at least 10 percent ethanol in the winter. Achieving Bush's goal of replacing 15 percent of gas with ethanol and other biofuels would eat up the whole U.S. corn crop.

Environmentalists, who had been early promoters of biofuels, have been taken aback by this scientific controversy. They had argued that biofuels would emit less carbon dioxide than petroleum products, but now many recognize what the new studies show: that the effects on land use had not been taken into account in the broader calculations on climate change. As a result, the European Union is now considering a ban on some biofuels.

Ethanol production is already jacking up food prices, another unintended consequence. A sound energy policy must take all this into account in the rush for greener alternatives.

From the comments left:

Well here is my assumption on ethanol or at least corn ethanol:

>not enough corn to produce ethanol
>takes three times the water to make ethanol
>it is corrosive and you need to use trucks not pipes
>it is corrosive and will wear your engine out sooner
>less fuel efficiency
>takes just as much fuel to make ethanol, so you gain nothing
>this is a money grab for the farm lobby
>this will not make a dent into the oil we get from the Middle East
>prices will go up in the stores on food and it already has
>will not be able to feed the world
>too much planting will ruin the soil

don't know if "Environmentalists", in general, have been supporters of biofuels, I'm one who has not been. Many environmentalists have been skeptical, as many are skeptical of the folks, especially politicians, that jump on easy fix bandwagons for environmental problems. we've been working on environmental problems for many years and know the solutions won't be so easy. they can be fixed, but it won't be easy.

Biofuels cannot reduce greenhouse gases--simple consideration of the fact that all the carbon they remove from the atmosphere is subsequently released back into the atmosphere when they are burned shows that. and they can't even be carbon neutral, because farmers must burn carbon to produce biofuels, it takes fuel to get them to market, and we can't turn them into transportation and heating with perfect efficiency.

Biofuels might be good for other reasons--they might be good for fuel independence, they might be good for farmers. but so far even the latter is far from clear, as the ag bill clearly shows. Support for biofuels is just a price support (=welfare) for the big businesses that own corn farms in the midwest.

Pakistan editorial about destabilization

Unbroken cycle of violence and state myopia

By Shireen M Mazari 2/13/2008

The extent of the lawlessness prevalent in the country today had never been so stridently evident before May 12 last year with the carnage in Karachi. Since then, violence on all sides has become the hallmark of our state and society. First there has been the US-led war on terror, in which Pakistan has become a frontline state. Unfortunately, that has meant accepting a US-formulated military-centric strategy which has brought disaster for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan; and has merely increased the violence and mayhem in Pakistan. Today, there is a near-anarchic situation that has moved beyond the tribal belt into the settled areas of the NWFP and is creeping into the rest of the country as well. The disappearance of our ambassador to Afghanistan on Monday, 11 February, as well as the kidnapping of two PAEC personnel, reflects the declining security in the NWFP. Is it a mere coincidence that these incidents occurred after the wounding and capture of Dadullah, who was attempting to cross into Pakistan from Afghanistan after his dismissal from the Taliban movement of Afghanistan by Mullah Omar. With the denunciation of Baitullah Mehsud and Dadullah by the Afghan Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid (27 December, 2007) – who had said that there is a purely Afghan movement aimed at fighting a jihad against foreign occupation and that Pakistani extremists are irritants for them -- these extremists and their followers are on a weaker wicket within Pakistan. The kidnapping incidents come in the wake of some seeming success the military has had in recent weeks against the militants in Pakistan. Whatever the US failures in its own war on terror, it has managed to successfully shift the centre of gravity of this war from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Given the various levels at which Pakistan is being targeted in the US, the aim is clearly to destabilise Pakistan, which is why one does need to ask the question: Is there some US linkage to certain acts of destabilisation, especially in terms of the kidnapping of PAEC personnel -- despite the fact that they are not linked to SPD -- given the numerous US personnel roaming around Pakistan in native dress and beards? After all, with the assertive and public manner in which we have countered the absurd allegations regarding safety and command and control of our nuclear assets, the US could become more desperate in its efforts to continue to raise the bogey of loose nukes -- even though they should now be the central concern in this context, given their B-52 incident of August 2007. Of course, more pertinent is the question why we are falling prey to this nefarious US design of destabilisation of Pakistan? First, it is the sheer level of violence emanating from all sides. Targeting of political rallies through bombs and suicide attacks, kidnappings, political murders, and collateral damage of civilians in drone attacks in the tribal belt -- all these bode ill for the health of the Pakistani state and its civil society. Worse still, instead of moving into the tribal belt and other parts of NWFP where there is unrest and violence, with a holistic policy of economic incentives, health and education initiatives and political mainstreaming, alongside law and order enforcement and a visible judicial redress set up, the state is seeming to offer controversial sops like the imposition of Qazi courts through a new Shariah Regulation 2008 -- which presently rests with the president -- which will create further cleavages between the troubled areas and the rest of the country. This regulation is for the Malakand division, which will be governed by a different legal system than the rest of the country. So, the message being sent out to civil society at large is if you can use enough violence to challenge the state's authority, you can have the legal system of your choice. Let us recall the strong links between the extremists of Malakand with the clerics of Lal Masjid especially in terms of snowballing effects. For the people of Malakand division, the establishment of the Qazi courts will deprive them of any judicial redress at the highest level, since the Shariah Court at the division level will be the apex court for the people of the seven districts of Malakand division. So these poor people will not have the freedom to appeal against the decision of the Shariah Court in the Peshawar High Court or in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. How can we deny some of our citizens these fundamental rights which other citizens of Pakistan have? Is this the way to build a cohesive and modern polity? Such short term controversial moves on the part of the state can, in the long run, negate social and political cohesion of the nation. After all, what did the earlier measures, similar in nature, do for Malakand except create more space for local extremists and criminals? One should recall that during 1994, the provincial government in Peshawar was terrorised into negotiating with radical mullah Sufi Mohammed and into conceding a Qazi system in Malakand which eventually led to the NWFP's Shar'i Nizam-e-Adl Regulation of 1999, for this division. Learning from history may be painful but not learning from even recent history is our national tragedy. If the state is now committed to bringing the tribal areas into the mainstream than how can it deny some of its own people in the settled areas their fundamental right of access to the highest court of the land, simply because they happen to live in an area being terrorised by a minority of terrorising extremists? We seem to have no clear long term policy direction in terms of the tribal belt and the trouble spots of the NWFP, which is why there is a growing sense of lawlessness, rendering the ordinary citizen insecure and overcome with fear, while the extremists and terrorists continue to be emboldened. Instead of overcoming the deficient state performance in the troubled areas by asserting the will of the state and providing basic amenities so that the ordinary citizen has a stake in the system, short term sops are being offered to the trouble makers at the expense of the innocent. Also of interest is what one hears when one talks to people from areas such as Mohmand and Bajaur. There is a repetitive theme that outsiders are offering lucrative lures to the locals to get them to use violence and destabilise the state. Perhaps that is why one is seeing young teens offering themselves as suicide bombers in return for money for their poverty-stricken families. That is why, unlike in Palestine, we are not seeing the farewell videos or notes of bombers in which their religious and political commitment is frighteningly evident. But that is also why the state of Pakistan can, with a commitment to bringing in development at the economic, social and political levels, counter the suicide recruitment trend effectively. The poverty and neglect of the people has created a human dignity deficit and its restoration requires the state to show itself as a responsive and positive entity. Putting in place discriminatory procedures of justice, and denying the people of some areas the rights available to other citizens is hardly the answer. In fact that will only ensure a continuing cycle of violence, radicalisation and hatred in the tribal belt and the surrounding settled areas. The writer is director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. Email: smnews80@hotmail.com

Operaton Shanti : Empowering the poorest and the neediest

http://drbenkim.com/operation-shanti

Check it out. Very worthwhile!

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Gratitude & Thankfulness to All of Us

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Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with joy & glory.

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FUEL POVERTY UPDATE

Britain: Rising fuel prices blight millions

By Peter Reydt

There are many ways in which poverty affects people’s quality of life. One of these is the ability to keep warm. The recent hike in oil and gas prices has seen a sharp increase in what is termed fuel poverty in the UK. The consumer group Energywatch estimates that about 4.4 million are now affected by fuel poverty, amounting to one in six people in Britain.

People are deemed to live in fuel poverty when they need to spend more than 10 percent of their income to heat and light their house. However, this rough definition is only part of a more complex situation that also involves a number of deprivations. These include poor housing stock with bad insulation and inefficient heating systems, rising fuel prices and low incomes. Fuel poverty therefore provides a good indication for the general level of poverty in society.

Based on the figures of Ofgem, which regulates electricity and gas markets in the UK, the last time fuel poverty levels were as high was in 1999, a period affected by broad world economic turmoil. Figures then fell until about 2005, but started to rise in the following years.

For many, fuel poverty is a question of life and death. The sick, the disabled and older people on low incomes are especially affected. Every year, tens of thousands die because they cannot afford to adequately heat their homes. Some 93 percent of these so-called “excess” winter deaths occur among those over the age of 65. Last winter, there were an estimated 23,900 such deaths.

Fuel poverty cannot be regarded separately from the general rise in poverty. The recent turbulence on the world markets following the US credit crunch crisis is leading to a further increase in attacks on the living conditions of millions, as the major corporations and banks seek to offset their losses onto the backs of the working class. In addition, many small and medium-sized companies are facing severe difficulties, if not being driven to the wall. This will have a devastating impact on the lives of millions of workers, increasing poverty in general and fuel poverty in particular.

This general trend can be seen in the pricing policies of the six corporations that dominate the energy markets in Britain. The latest rise in fuel poverty is directly linked to a hike in prices by these major energy suppliers. Three have raised their prices significantly this year. British Gas, the UK’s biggest power provider, announced increases in gas and electricity bills of 15 percent. Npower raised its electricity prices by 12.7 percent and gas by 17.2 percent, and EDF Energy put up its electricity tariffs by 7.9 percent and gas bills by 12.9 percent. E.On, Scottish Power and Scottish & Southern Energy are expected to follow soon. These increases will inflate household energy bills by well over £100 a year, pushing the average yearly cost to more than £1,000. It is estimated that each 1 percent increase in energy bills sends 40,000 more households into fuel poverty.

At the same time, the energy companies are making massive profits. There are many indications that the recent price hikes are nothing but a shameless attempt by these corporations to line their pockets. They seek to justify the consumer price hikes by pointing to a rise in wholesale costs for oil and gas on the world markets. While the energy companies claim they are simply passing on these extra costs to the customer, at best this is only half the truth. According to consumer groups, the current rises faced by domestic customers are far above the increased wholesale costs faced by these corporations.

British energy suppliers are holding the working class to ransom. For example, EDF claimed that “wholesale gas prices had risen 117 percent since February last year, with electricity up 90 percent over the same time,” whereas Ofgem put these figures at 31 percent for gas and 40 percent for electricity.

Research sponsored jointly by UNISON, the public service trade union, and the National Right to Fuel Campaign found that the average household prices charged to customers had increased by £2.3 billion more than the costs of producing and selling the electricity and gas that was supplied. In other European countries, such as Germany and France, price rises have been on a far lower level, even falling in some cases.

Consumer groups are demanding the government order a Competition Commission investigation into whether there has been “tacit collusion” by the power suppliers that dominate the UK market. Allan Asher, chief executive of Energywatch, told BBC News 24 that the entire energy market should be reviewed by the Competition Commission. “The price rises we’ve seen are not justified,” he said, adding, “There’ll be more, but sadly the market is not working well and that’s leading to consumers paying much, much more than they need to.”

Following a meeting between Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Ofgem last week, a spokesman said the chancellor was “not minded” to call for an inquiry after “he had been reassured the market was working properly.”

This response reflects the contemptuous attitude of the government to the problem of fuel poverty. In 2001, the government announced a target to eradicate fuel poverty for all vulnerable and low-income households by 2010 and all other households by 2016. But in practice, it was adding to the problem by raising VAT (value-added tax) on consumer bills. A research commissioned by the Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes—a group of 700 industry bodies concerned with domestic energy efficiency—pointed out that electricity prices surged by 39 percent and gas prices by 61 percent between 2003 and 2006.

The eradication of fuel poverty and poverty as a whole is only possible through ending the domination of society by the transnational corporations, including the energy companies. The economy must be organised not for the profit of a few but to meet the needs of all; bringing the utility companies under the democratic control of the working class to guarantee that every household receives the basic necessities of heat and light.