Saturday 20 January 2007

INEQUALTY INCREASES IN THE WORLD

"Inequality growth is fare more important to solve than poverty if the world want to keep peace" said Jean-luc Roux

January 04, 2007
Picturing Global Inequality: Some Preliminary Figures
Posted by Todd Moss at 06:28 PM

Thanks to our friend Nick Seaver for posting on the Huffington Post one of the figures we created after playing around with some of the available stats on global income inequality. The idea was to get a very rough sense of what global income distribution looks like: Is it a bell curve? Where might an average American fit?

Ideally, we would have wanted income information on every person on the planet and then just line them up and see what it looks like. Of course, no such figures exist. The best we have is average income, plus some distribution data for large countries. So we took every country that was at least 1% of global population and disaggregated average incomes by decile (Iran and Japan by quintile), then added in every other country with their total population at the national average. This is far from perfect, we realize. But this may be less of a problem than it first appears because of the dramatic scale difference among countries: Given the relative enormity of China and India and the other big countries, counting all the middle class or millionaires in Togo (or, for that matter, in the UK) has almost no visual effect. Given those caveats, the picture here is one way to see what the figures look like. You can also view the graph (pdf) with the axes flipped in a normal histogram, plus a fuller explanation on what we did with the data. For a more thorough discussion of some of these issues, we recommend the work of economist Branko Milanovic (see, e.g., his figure on p 17 of this paper [pdf]) and the 2005 WIDER Lecture by CGD president Nancy Birdsall, The World is not Flat: Inequality and Injustice in our Global Economy (.pdf).

CO2 growth in 2006 was still higher than average and four of the last five years have been higher than average.


"Co2 emission speed up and scale up. We do not have more time to change our lifestyle and economical model' said Jean-Luc Roux

UPDATE: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has now told us that the story below is based on preliminary data for December, which it should not have published. It has withdrawn the data pending further analysis. As a result, the provisional annual growth rate for 2006 displayed on the Noaa website now does not include December, which means it is now lower than the 2.6ppm we reported. Pieter Tans, the scientist in charge of the data, said: "It doesn't affect the trend, there is definitely something there. CO2 growth in 2006 was still higher than average and four of the last five years have been higher than average."

Article continues
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than scientists expected, raising fears that humankind may have less time to tackle climate change than previously thought.

New figures from dozens of measuring stations across the world reveal that concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, rose at record levels during 2006 - the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase. Experts are puzzled because the spike, which follows decades of more modest annual rises, does not appear to match the pattern of steady increases in human emissions.

To read more please click on the title of this article

Supermarket giant to introduce Carbon emission labels


"This is a real and key first step to reduce the consummer co2 budget and make it concrete" said Jean-Luc Roux
You've checked the price and calorie count, now here's the carbon cost


· Supermarket giant to introduce emission labels
· Tesco promises 'green consumption revolution'

Julia Finch and John Vidal
Friday January 19, 2007
The Guardian

Supermarket chain Tesco pledged last night to revolutionise its business to become "a leader in helping to create a low-carbon economy" with a raft of new measures to help combat climate change.

In the most significant step announced yesterday, the UK's biggest retailer, which produces 2m tonnes of carbon a year in the UK, said it would put new labels on every one of the 70,000 products it sells so that shoppers can compare carbon costs in the same way they can compare salt content and calorie counts.

Article continues
The company also pledged to cut the emissions produced by its stores and distribution centres by 50% by 2020 and slash by 50% within five years the amount of CO2 used in its distribution network to deliver each case of goods.

To get more click on the title of this article

Wednesday 17 January 2007

Toward a Flexible Energy Future



by Lord Andrew Turnbull

London, January 15, 2007 -- With the price of carbon-based fuel becoming increasingly volatile and new sources of alternative energy coming online each year, governments must adopt flexible, market-based approaches to energy investments. This will help establish a framework for energy prices and protect governments from overreliance on any single source of energy. A sensible energy investment strategy, which recognizes the need to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and emphasizes the importance of safe, secure energy sources, will enable governments to avoid major energy catastrophes in the future.

To read the full Resilience Report:
http://www.strategy-business.com/resilience/rr00040

The Doomsday Clock: Nuclear threat to world 'rising'



The Doomsday Clock: Nuclear threat to world 'rising'
For 60 years, it has depicted how close the world is to nuclear disaster. Today, scientists will move its hands forward to show we are facing the gravest threat in at least 20 years
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 17 January 2007

Five years of international headlines tell of growing turmoil in the Middle East, international terrorism in Western capitals and more countries seeking the ultimate national security insurance policy.

Now climate change and oil insecurity is driving countries to seek nuclear power, bringing with it new dangers of proliferation in volatile parts of the globe.

Today the Doomsday Clock, devised by the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 at the dawn of the nuclear age, will make official what most thinking citizens feel in their bones - that the world has edged closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since the most precarious moments of the Cold War in the early 1980s.

The nuclear threat has also acquired an added and unquantifiable dimension, thanks to global warming - prompting the Bulletin to warn of a "Second Nuclear Age". The existing dangers could not be more obvious: the problem is where to start. What about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, and the thinly veiled warnings from the undeclared but assumed nuclear power Israel that it will strike first to remove what it sees as an existentialist threat comparable to the Holocaust?

Or the nuclear test last year by North Korea, a member of George Bush's "axis of evil", which could have neighbouring Japan and South Korea seeking protection with nuclear weapons of their own? Or the nuclear arsenal of unstable Pakistan, where Islamic extremists have staged several assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf?

Or - perhaps the greatest danger of all - that having visited conventional terror on an unprecedented scale upon New York City on 11 September 2001, al-Qa'ida or some similar organisation will either get hold of a ready-made nuclear device or build one of its own, and then use it?

And why not? Grave doubts surround Russia's ability to secure its nuclear materials, many of them dating from the Soviet era, and to prevent its nuclear scientists from selling their skills to the highest bidder. If a terrorist group did explode even a crude dirty bomb (and the US claims to have disrupted such plots) the taboo that has prevented states from using nuclear weapons in anger since 1945 might be broken.

And in this new nuclear age, the deterrence doctrine of "mutually assured destruction", or MAD, that kept the Cold War cold, would not apply. The US and Russia may have 2,000 launch-ready weapons between them - but these would be of no more use against an amorphous terrorist group than Israel's nuclear arsenal against the Palestinians. Even so, a threshold would have been crossed and a regional, even generalised nuclear war, would become conceivable.

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was first set at seven minutes to midnight, exactly where it has stood since 2002. On the Bulletin's reckoning, the planet's closest brush thus far with Armageddon came in 1953, when the clock's hand moved to two minutes to midnight after the US and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs within nine months of each other.

Thereafter the clock has tracked the chills and thaws of the Cold War, and the successive arrival of Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan as recognised nuclear powers. The hand reached its "safest" point - 17 minutes to Armageddon - in 1991 when the US and the soon-to-disappear Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), and that year's Gulf War, driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, seemed to herald an era when the great powers could work together under the auspices of the UN. The 2003 Iraq invasion destroyed any such illusions. Once there were five proven nuclear powers. Now there are nine.

Global warming, argues the Bulletin, indirectly increases this risk. Civil nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gases, is back in fashion and hundreds of nuclear reactors will be built. Yet enriched uranium, to power them, and plutonium are also the vital raw materials for nuclear weapons.

In this Second Nuclear Age, there will be more of these deadly commodities around. Small wonder the hand on the Doomsday Clock will move towards midnight. The only question is, how close will it get?

To read more click on the title

Wednesday 10 January 2007

EU: Climate change will transform the face of the continent

As many reports hold by the European commission as well as the United Nations they are making the right diagnosis: the world is dying. BUT no one is giving the right scenario to really face the problem. Why? and how could this be taken as an oppotunity by the NGOs, Civil Society and Collective Intelligence?
Your comments are welcome.
Jean-Luc

Article by Michael McCarthy and Stephen Castle
Published: 10 January 2007

Europe, the richest and most fertile continent and the model for the modern world, will be devastated by climate change, the European Union predicts today.

The ecosystems that have underpinned all European societies from Ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Britain and France, and which helped European civilisation gain global pre-eminence, will be disabled by remorselessly rising temperatures, EU scientists forecast in a remarkable report which is as ominous as it is detailed.

Much of the continent's age-old fertility, which gave the world the vine and the olive and now produces mountains of grain and dairy products, will not survive the climate change forecast for the coming century, the scientists say, and its wildlife will be devastated.

Europe's modern lifestyles, from summer package tours to winter skiing trips, will go the same way, they say, as the Mediterranean becomes too hot for holidays and snow and ice disappear from mountain ranges such as the Alps - with enormous economic consequences. The social consequences will also be felt as heat-related deaths rise and extreme weather events, such as storms and floods, become more violent.

The report, stark and uncompromising, marks a step change in Europe's own role in pushing for international action to combat climate change, as it will be used in a bid to commit the EU to ambitious new targets for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.

The European Commission wants to hold back the rise in global temperatures to 2C above the pre-industrial level (at present, the level is 0.6C). To do that, it wants member states to commit to cutting back emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, to 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as long as other developed countries agree to do the same.

Failing that, the EU would observe a unilateral target of a 20 per cent cut.

The Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, gave US President George Bush a preview of the new policy during a visit to the White House this week.

The force of today's report lies in its setting out of the scale of the continent-wide threat to Europe's "ecosystem services".

That is a relatively new but powerful concept, which recognises essential elements of civilised life - such as food, water, wood and fuel - which may generally be taken for granted, are all ultimately dependent on the proper functioning of ecosystems in the natural world. Historians have recognised that Europe was particularly lucky in this respect from the start, compared to Africa or pre-Columbian America - and this was a major reason for Europe's rise to global pre-eminence.

"Climate change will alter the supply of European ecosystem services over the next century," the report says. "While it will result in enhancement of some ecosystem services, a large portion will be adversely impacted because of drought, reduced soil fertility, fire, and other climate change-driven factors.

"Europe can expect a decline in arable land, a decline in Mediterranean forest areas, a decline in the terrestrial carbon sink and soil fertility, and an increase in the number of basins with water scarcity. It will increase the loss of biodiversity."

The report predicts there will be some European "winners" from climate change, at least initially. In the north of the continent, agricultural yields will increase with a lengthened growing season and a longer frost-free period. Tourism may become more popular on the beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic as the Mediterranean becomes too hot, and deaths and diseases related to winter cold will fall.

But the negative effects will far outweigh the advantages. Take tourism. The report says "the zone with excellent weather conditions, currently located around the Mediterranean (in particular for beach tourism) will shift towards the north". And it spells out the consequences.

"The annual migration of northern Europeans to the countries of the Mediterranean in search of the traditional summer 'sun, sand and sea' holiday is the single largest flow of tourists across the globe, accounting for one-sixth of all tourist trips in 2000. This large group of tourists, totalling about 100 million per annum, spends an estimated €100bn (£67bn) per year. Any climate-induced change in these flows of tourists and money would have very large implications for the destinations involved."

While they are losing their tourists, the countries of the Med may also be losing their agriculture. Crop yields may drop sharply as drought conditions, exacerbated by more frequent forest fires, make farming ever more difficult. And that is not the only threat to Europe's food supplies. Some stocks of coldwater fish in areas such as the North Sea will move northwards as the water warms.

There are many more direct threats, the report says. The cost of taking action to cope with sea-level rise will run into billions of euros. Furthermore, "for the coming decades, it is predicted the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events will increase, and floods will likely be more frequent and severe in many areas across Europe."

The number of people affected by severe flooding in the Upper Danube area is projected to increase by 242,000 in a more extreme 3C temperature rise scenario, and by 135,000 in the case of a 2.2C rise. The total cost of damage would rise from €47.5bn to €66bn in the event of a 3C increase.

Although fewer people would die of cold in the north, that would be more than offset by increased mortality in the south. Under the more extreme scenario of a 3C increase in relative to, there would be 86,000 additional deaths.