Here's a small measure of peace and hope, on this morning of death and destruction. Williams' crimes paled in comparison and his redemption shone. Mercy, Mercy Me. Ed
By Andrew Buncombe in Montreal, and Geoffrey Lean Published: 11 December 2005 The Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article332384.ece The fight against catastrophic global warming scored its greatest success to date yesterday, when negotiators from more than 180 nations unexpectedly agreed to develop far-reaching measures to combat climate change. In the process, the delegates to the climate summit in Montreal dealt a humiliating blow to President George Bush's five-year attempt to destroy the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, which tried to sabotage the meeting at the last minute by walking out of the negotiations, was forced to join the agreement after failing to persuade a single nation to join it. Many delegates - including Margaret Beckett, the UK's Secretary of State for the Environment - were openly in tears when agreement was finally reached yesterday morning after two successive all-night sessions and as many dramas and cliff-hangers as a second-rate soap opera. Mrs Beckett told The Independent on Sunday that it represented an even greater breakthrough than the original agreement of the Kyoto Protocol almost exactly eight years ago. Environmentalists hailed the agreement - which exceeded the most optimistic expectations - as "historic". The agreement marks the culmination of a remarkable year for the world's attempts to bring global warming under control before it is too late. Not much more than a year ago, the Kyoto Protocol had yet to come into force, many leading commentators were writing its obituary, and the US administration was blocking any attempts even to talk about future negotiations. Then Russia - the key hold-out - ratified the protocol, enabling it to come into force in February, and Tony Blair made climate change one of the top priorities of Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of industrialised nations this year. At the G8 Gleneagles summit this summer President Bush had to agree to further talks. Yesterday's agreement - far from burying the Kyoto Protocol as the US wanted - has confirmed it and extended it. The 39 nations governed by it - all the industrialised countries apart from the US and Australia - have agreed in principle to make deeper cuts in the pollution emissions causing climate change when their present clean-up commitments run out in 2012. They have decided to agree the new cuts by 2008, far faster than expected. Meanwhile the US has, against its will, had to agree to talks with both rich and developing countries to new measures that all nations can take on combating the threat. The resolution is vague and the talks are only "open and non-binding", but it is far more than the US wanted or most people expected. The atmosphere at the Montreal meeting was far more determined to reach agreement than either the US or its bitterest critics had expected, following a year of constant, alarming evidence that climate change is happening far faster than scientists had predicted. These included a record hurricane season, record melting of sea ice and glaciers in the Arctic, and disturbing signs that the Gulf Stream - which makes Britain inhabitable - may be beginning to fail. So when the US walked out, it failed to find any support, despite intensive lobbying of delegation after delegation, as the rest of the world resolved to go ahead without it. At the same time, the Bush administration has come under enormous pressure at home with three-quarters of Americans now demanding action on climate change and nearly 200 cities and many states taking their own far-reaching measures to cut pollution. Bill Clinton also fatally undermined the US position by calling it "dead wrong". Last night, Tony Juniper, a director of Friends of the Earth, called the deal "excellent". Phil Clapp, head of the US National Environmental Trust, said it was "absolutely extraordinary". The fight against catastrophic global warming scored its greatest success to date yesterday, when negotiators from more than 180 nations unexpectedly agreed to develop far-reaching measures to combat climate change. In the process, the delegates to the climate summit in Montreal dealt a humiliating blow to President George Bush's five-year attempt to destroy the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, which tried to sabotage the meeting at the last minute by walking out of the negotiations, was forced to join the agreement after failing to persuade a single nation to join it. Many delegates - including Margaret Beckett, the UK's Secretary of State for the Environment - were openly in tears when agreement was finally reached yesterday morning after two successive all-night sessions and as many dramas and cliff-hangers as a second-rate soap opera. Mrs Beckett told The Independent on Sunday that it represented an even greater breakthrough than the original agreement of the Kyoto Protocol almost exactly eight years ago. Environmentalists hailed the agreement - which exceeded the most optimistic expectations - as "historic". The agreement marks the culmination of a remarkable year for the world's attempts to bring global warming under control before it is too late. Not much more than a year ago, the Kyoto Protocol had yet to come into force, many leading commentators were writing its obituary, and the US administration was blocking any attempts even to talk about future negotiations. Then Russia - the key hold-out - ratified the protocol, enabling it to come into force in February, and Tony Blair made climate change one of the top priorities of Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of industrialised nations this year. At the G8 Gleneagles summit this summer President Bush had to agree to further talks. Yesterday's agreement - far from burying the Kyoto Protocol as the US wanted - has confirmed it and extended it. The 39 nations governed by it - all the industrialised countries apart from the US and Australia - have agreed in principle to make deeper cuts in the pollution emissions causing climate change when their present clean-up commitments run out in 2012. They have decided to agree the new cuts by 2008, far faster than expected. Meanwhile the US has, against its will, had to agree to talks with both rich and developing countries to new measures that all nations can take on combating the threat. The resolution is vague and the talks are only "open and non-binding", but it is far more than the US wanted or most people expected. The atmosphere at the Montreal meeting was far more determined to reach agreement than either the US or its bitterest critics had expected, following a year of constant, alarming evidence that climate change is happening far faster than scientists had predicted. These included a record hurricane season, record melting of sea ice and glaciers in the Arctic, and disturbing signs that the Gulf Stream - which makes Britain inhabitable - may be beginning to fail. So when the US walked out, it failed to find any support, despite intensive lobbying of delegation after delegation, as the rest of the world resolved to go ahead without it. At the same time, the Bush administration has come under enormous pressure at home with three-quarters of Americans now demanding action on climate change and nearly 200 cities and many states taking their own far-reaching measures to cut pollution. Bill Clinton also fatally undermined the US position by calling it "dead wrong". Last night, Tony Juniper, a director of Friends of the Earth, called the deal "excellent". Phil Clapp, head of the US National Environmental Trust, said it was "absolutely extraordinary". To subscribe: http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside *** http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051209/sc_afp/franceenvironment AFP 9 December 2005 Activists' destruction of GM crops was justified: French court Orleans, France - In a judgement expected to send a chill through companies growing genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe and embolden their opponents, a French court Friday acquitted 49 activists who destroyed GM plants after ruling their actions were justified. The court in the central city of Orleans dismissed the criminal charges of organised vandalism against the 49, who had uprooted GM maize in the region planted by the US biotechnology group Monsanto in two incidents, one last year and the other in 2005. "The defendants have shown proof that they committed an infraction of voluntary vandalism in a group to respond to a situation of necessity," the court said. That situation of necessity "resulted from the unbridled distribution of modified genes that constitutes a clear and present danger for the well-being of others, in the sense that it could be the source of contamination and unwanted pollution," it said. The court, however, upheld the civil complaint against the 49, ordering them to pay a total of 6,000 euros (7,000 dollars) to Monsanto in damages and interest -- although that sum was a small fraction of the 398,000 euros the US company had been seeking. One of the activists, Jean-Emile Sanchez, called the verdict "a huge victory for the anti-GM side" and said the judgement would form an important legal precedent. The state prosecutor in the case, Alex Perrin, immediately said both his office and Monsanto would appeal the decision. He had pressed for prison terms of up to three months for each of the defendants, who included two Green Party politicians, one of whom, Yves Contassot, is a Paris deputy mayor in charge of environmental issues. *** Where is Ansel Adams When We Need Him? by Derrick Z. Jackson Boston Globe Published on Saturday, November 5, 2005 Ansel Adams came to the White House in 1975 to deliver a print of a photograph from Yosemite National Park desired by President Ford and Betty Ford. Adams, still smarting from President Nixon's neglect of public lands, asked Ford to redefine the meaning of our parks, maintain their funding, and put a ''new emphasis on preservation and environmental responsibilities." In 1983, Adams met with President Reagan, and not to deliver a photograph. He was a vocal critic of Reagan's rollbacks on environmental protection and preservation of wild areas. He said Reagan's land policies were ones of ''rape, ruin, and run!" According to Adams, had the nation been under the vision in the 1930s of Reagan's infamous Interior Secretary James Watt, Kings Canyon National Park would today ''look like part of the outskirts of Las Vegas." After Adams told Playboy magazine in 1983, ''I hate Reagan," an embarrassed White House had the beloved photographer sit with Reagan for nearly an hour. Adams left unimpressed, borrowing from Oscar Wilde to say, ''They know the price of everything and the value of nothing." One can only guess what sparks would fly if Adams, who died in 1984, could witness President Bush's resurrection of Reagan's rape, ruin, and run. This week the Senate passed a budget bill that would allow for drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The House Budget Committee, at the urging of Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo of California, voted to include in its budget bill a proposal to lift moratoriums on offshore oil drilling in the lower 48 states. In September, Pombo got the House to weaken the Endangered Species Act under the ruse that it oppressed landowners. Pombo wants to relax rules on public land for mining and oil interests. He even floated an idea to sell off 15 national parks. Public outrage made him drop that idea, but he and the Interior Department are floating other ideas that would turn national parks into NASCAR tracks and football stadiums, ideas that include everything from selling advertising space on park buses and trams to selling naming rights to rooms, information centers, and park museums. There is talk of corporate sponsoring of trailheads. That talk was in my head when my wife Michelle Holmes and I visited Zion National Park in Utah a month ago. The trip began three days after I saw the exquisite Ansel Adams exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. The closest airport to Zion is Adams's feared Las Vegas. There is still plenty of desert between the casinos on the strip and the canyon two and a half hours away, but as someone who visits an uncle periodically in America's fastest growing city, it is still stunning to see how fast the miles of earth become the outskirts and how fast the landscape becomes obliterated by billboards. In Zion our most perfect moment, our ''Ansel moment," one of unthinkable beauty, came on a day in which we waded upstream in the Zion Narrows. The narrows is where the grand panoramic views of red and white spires at the beginning of the park close in like a vise at the end of the line for the public tram. We waded upstream in the narrows, until we were specks at the bottom of a chasm of walls 1,000 feet high and only 20 feet apart. Orange light snaked down upon us. The contrast between daylight and dimness made the canyon a sandstone pumpkin. At one point, I took a picture of Michelle with the glowing walls behind her. For us, it was a moment of serenity and humble awe at a spot only our chilled legs could get us to. In Pombo's world, the wall behind Michelle would blaze, ''McDonald's Super- Size Narrows." Ansel Adams said in his autobiography that ''Starry- eyed reaction to the splendors of nature is an invaluable experience for everyone, provided it is tempered in time with a realization that this reaction hopefully exists for the many rather than the few." As beautiful as our Ansel moment was, it is also haunting because too many politicians see dollars instead of stars. Last month the National Park Service announced a $270,000 Save America's Treasures grant to help preserve Adams's works. This is while Congress assaults public lands and Bush ignores the call for environmental responsibility that Adams had issued to Ford. The outskirts of Las Vegas creep toward the day where all we may have left of our natural treasures is a photograph. http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1105-20.htm ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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