http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/10/4441/
Nobel Win 'Would Boost Hopes of Gore Candidacy' by Leonard Doyle The Independent/UK: October 10, 2007 Al Gore never quite closed the door on running for president again and his many loyalists are now pinning their hopes on Norway's Nobel committee, in the belief that the prize must be his, this year of all years. The Nobel Prize will be announced on Friday in Oslo and for many, Mr Gore is head and shoulders above the other 181 candidates. The Nobel committee also has a reputation for making political choices. A peace prize may soon be added to the Emmy he won for his Current TV channel and the Oscar that was awarded last February for his call to arms on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. With little debate among candidates about America's role in causing global warming, the Draft Gore movement has been growing by leaps and bounds. It boasts a website that puts most official presidential candidates to shame. It has petitions to sign, a campaign song to sing, Draft Gore buttons, DVDs and ways to contact other Gore enthusiasts. Pre-written opinion articles are on hand on the site urging Mr Gore to run which his supporters are encouraged to plagiarise and send to their local newspaper. The supporters' group has already gathered about 127,000 signatures this year - 10,000 of them in the last week of September alone - and is planning to take out full-page advert in The New York Times as an open letter urging Mr Gore to run. "We feel that if [Mr Gore] wins the Nobel Prize . then he can't not run for president," Roy Gayhart, the man behind California's Draft Gore group, told Newsweek. Mr Gore has said nothing to indicate he might run, and his Nashville headquarters is silent on the question. But people close to the former vice-president are convinced that he is looking for an opportunity to jump in the race as a candidate who really is prepared to bring about urgent change in the face of the looming disaster posed by global warming. So far in the presidential campaign, candidates have run shy of embracing aggressive measures to deal with America's contribution to climate change. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate, has the weakest environmental record of all. And Barack Obama took until this week to come up with proposals that won favour with environmentalists, after first backing a disastrous scheme to subsidise turning coal into petrol. Mr Obama's plan is full of proposals drafted by climate scientists, including limits on carbon emissions, energy-efficiency targets and billions of dollars for energy research. There is not a word about turning coal into liquid. The next few weeks are considered crucial for a Gore candidacy. A petition drive for New York State must gather 5,000 signatures between the end of October and early December if he is to be legally entitled to be on the ballot. In Michigan, Gore supporters must get more than 12,000 signatures, and a signed statement by Mr Gore himself to get on next year's primary ballot. His backers are hopeful, however, looking to a recent local TV poll that had 36 per cent of Democratic voters backing him, beating Mrs Clinton with 32 per cent. But even those who expect him to get the Nobel Prize are unsure they can persuade Mr Gore to run. "I know it's still a real long shot that he'll run," said Fred Koed, of the Massachusetts Draft Gore group. "If I were in his shoes, after the devastating and painful loss in 2000, I'd really have to search inside myself to see if it was all worth doing again. He'll have to determine if this is right for him." © 2007 The Independent *** http://www.alternet.org/environment/64948/ Our Drinkable Water Supply is Vanishing by Tara Lohan AlterNet. Posted October 11, 2007. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine once said, "Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water." We depend on water for survival. It circulates through our bodies and the land, replenishing nutrients and carrying away waste. It is passed down like stories over generations -- from ice-capped mountains to rivers to oceans. Historically water has been a facet of ritual, a place of gathering and the backbone of community. But times have changed. "In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water has become the victim of his indifference," Rachel Carson wrote. As a result, today, 35 years since the passage of the Clean Water Act, we find ourselves are teetering on the edge of a global crisis that is being exacerbated by climate change, which is shrinking glaciers and raising sea levels. We are faced with thoughtless development that paves flood plains and destroys wetlands; dams that displace native people and scar watersheds; unchecked industrial growth that pollutes water sources; and rising rates of consumption that nature can't match. Increasingly, we are also threatened by the wave of privatization that is sweeping across the world, turning water from a precious public resource into a commodity for economic gain. The problems extend from the global north to the south and are as pervasive as water itself. Equally encompassing are the politics of water. Discussions about our water crisis include issues like poverty, trade, community and privatization. In talking about water, we must also talk about indigenous rights, environmental justice, education, corporate accountability, and democracy. In this mix of terms are not only the causes of our crisis but also the solutions. What's gone wrong? As our world heats up, as pollution increases, as population grows and as our globe's resources of fresh water are tapped, we are faced with an environmental and humanitarian problem of mammoth proportions. Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don't have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world's supply by over 50 percent. The biggest drain on our water sources is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of the water used worldwide -- much of which is subsidized in the industrial world, providing little incentive for agribusiness to use conservation measures or less water-intensive crops. This number is also likely to increase as we struggle to feed a growing world. Population is expected to rise from 6 billion to 8 billion by 2050. Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. "Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water's ability to recharge," wrote water experts Tony Clarke of the Polaris Institute and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians in their landmark water book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water. The Ogallala aquifer -- the largest in the North America and a major source for agriculture stretching from Texas to South Dakota -- is currently being pumped at a rate 14 times greater than it can be replenished, they wrote. And, across the country, "California's Department of Water Resources predicts that, by 2020, if more supplies are not found, the state will face a shortfall of fresh water nearly as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today," add Clarke and Barlow. Demand is outstripping supply from the rainy Seattle area to desert cities like Tucson and Albuquerque. And from Midwest farming regions to East Coast cities. The crisis is also worldwide, most noticeable in Mexico, the Middle East, China and Africa. As population growth, development, consumption and pollution take its toll on our water resources, the ability to fight this problem has been further complicated by the spread of neoliberalism. The same ideas that have resulted in the booty of private contracts being doled out in Iraq also have contributed greatly to our water crisis. Neoliberalism is the belief in "economic liberalism," which espoused that government control over the economy was bad. It opened up the commons to commodification and let corporations privatize what once belonged to the public. In 2000 Fortune magazine printed this telling statement: "Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century; the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations." Go to the website at the top for more of this story. 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