Did Montreal Talks Avert Climate Catastrophe?

News from Radio Ecoshock.

As the climate shifts, animals and plants are being displaced. Humans also suffer from severe storms, drought, and heat. New evidence proves the ocean conveyor currents, including the Gulf Stream, are weakening, due to arctic melting.

So we all need to know: Did the world avoid climate catastrophe, in last week's climate negotiations in Montreal? Nature's jury is still out.

[the audio podcast contains three quotes from Margaret Beckett, the UK Environment Minister, from EU press conferences in Montreal. She warns about false euphoria and false despair, but thinks the UN conference was a success - if only because the world's nations agreed to keep on talking. According to her, that was the most the negotiators could expect. No action, just talk.]

Most environmentalists are positive, even jubilant. Here is a press release from Greenpeace International:
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"How often does one walk into one of these things and come out at the end of it at 6 in the morning with just about everything you asked for coming in? Not very often." That was Greenpeace climate campaigner Steve Sawyer's reaction at the end of the Climate summit in Montreal.

"The Kyoto Protocol is stronger today than it was two weeks ago. This historic first Meeting of the Parties has acknowledged the urgency of the threat that climate change poses to the world's poorest people, and eventually, to all of us. The decisions made here have cleared the way for long term action," said Bill Hare, Greenpeace International Climate Policy Advisor in Montreal.

The meeting agreed the following:

--To start urgent negotiations on a new round of emission reduction targets for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2013-2017). A special group has been established to ensure that these negotiations are concluded "as soon as possible". This is necessary to ensure the continuity of carbon markets, and to allow governments to put policies and measures in place to ensure that the new, deeper emission reduction targets are met

--To start now to review and improve the Kyoto Protocol. Mandated under the existing treaty, this review will formally begin at next year's meeting.

--A Five Year Plan of Action on Adaptation, to assist least developed countries to cope with the impacts of climate change. This programme will begin to address the fact that climate change already impacts the world's poorest, and that it will get much worse in the coming decades. It is the ethical, political, and legal responsibility of the industrialised countries to provide for this.

As expected, the Bush administration attempted to derail the process, at one point even walking out of the negotiations, but the rest of the world showed a resolve to move ahead regardless. For once, the Bush administration was forced back to the table and into agreement with the international community. No doubt the overwhelming presence of U.S. civil society at these talks has had a positive effect.

The US has continued to attempt to lure countries away from the UN multilateral climate regime with its international emission trading to an ineffective approach based on voluntary actions and "partnerships".

Today, however, governments have agreed to hold substantive talks beginning in May 2006 on the Kyoto Protocol's second commitment period, sending an unmistakable signal that we are on the road to new and more ambitious targets.

According to Sawyer, "What will be remembered is that this was the moment when the future of the Kyoto Protocol and legally binding emissions reductions and the cap and trade system was secured...Australia and the US are isolated as never before, and the overwhelming presence of US state governments, cities, trade unions, businesses, churches, youth and many other parts of civil society gave the rest of the world confidence that Americans do care about climate change, and that the Bush administration's intransigence will sooner
rather than later be remembered as an unfortunate historical footnote."

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That was from Greenpeace, at www.greenpeace.org

Other environment groups, such as Friends of Earth, are equally enthusiastic. Canada's Elizabeth May, from the Sierra Club, was teary eyed as she commended, quote, "a series of agreements that may well save the planet."

So are the government negotiators.

Canada's environment Minister, the host for the United Nations conference on climate change announced the final compromise just after dawn on Saturday morning, following more than 48 hours of intense negotiations, saying: "We delivered."

What did they agree on? The Toronto Star sums up two main accomplishments, quote:

"Canada and the 39 other developed countries already bound by the protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average, and ineffective, 5 per cent by 2008-2012 established a process to negotiate deeper cuts to follow. Efforts to include a firm deadline for those negotiations failed; the countries agreed only that they "shall aim" to finish the work in time to ensure there is no gap between the current round of cuts and the next.

All of the countries at the conference will begin a "dialogue" about any and all possible measures to cut emissions. This "non-binding" process, watered down several times to overcome American objections, has neither deadlines nor specific objectives.

But the Star continued:
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"On the face of it, any action that flows directly from these and other conference decisions seems certain to be too little and too slow to head off climate catastrophe.

Some scientists say the world has no more than a decade to get things on track.

So, some are disappointed.

"The negotiators seem to operate in their own world, largely divorced from the science," John Stone, a Canadian climate scientist who holds a key position with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in an interview yesterday. "There doesn't seem to be any understanding that time is running out."
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Back on earth, the natural world has little to celebrate. Essentially, the humans have agreed there is a problem to their carbon economies, and maybe, someday, they will have to do something about it. In reality, none of the big polluters in the Kyoto deal, in Europe or anywhere else, has reduced carbon pollution. Everyone continues to pump out more CO2 each year, setting records for consumption of fossil fuels and forest destruction.

Since all this carbon stays in the atmosphere for at least one hundred years, every oily day adds to the century sentence we hand our children and grand children. Our great leaders have only agreed to agree.

The Montreal conference will not save the world, but you can succeed where they failed, by burning and consuming less.
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This has been news from Radio Ecoshock at www.ecoshock.org

Ecoshock News Dec 15 Arms, Coal Protests, Safe Bears & Toxic Food

Friends, the nuclear arms race is still a growing threat to us all. Although you won't find it in the newspaper, or in what passes for television news, the United States and Russia have entered a new contest to build the worst weapons of mass destruction. It's a missile race not seen since the bad old days of the 1970's.

The United States has destabilized the balance of arms established long ago, by developing an anti-missile star wars space shield. According to United Press International, in mid-November, the U.S. Navy completed the first successful test of an anti-ballistic missile interceptor, launched from a cruiser in the Pacific Ocean. This test allegedly succeeded where multiple land-based tests from Fort Greeley, Alaska, have failed, despite billions of dollars poured into the big defense contractors.

In response, Russia is creating a new type of missile designed to evade such interceptors. President Vladimir Putin, a friend to the military, has $1.8 billion in new oil money to pour into missile development. A new variety of the land-based SS-27 Tool-M missile, and upgraded Beloved ICBM's launched from submarines, aspire to evade American defensive missiles.

One American military analyst wrote in the Washington Times: "You would think the Cold War never ended."

While we hear about Russian space station launches, and commercial rockets, we hear less about continuing testing of new nuclear missiles from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia's northern Arkhangelsk Region. These solid fuel monsters have such rapid acceleration they leave little or no time for detection and defensive action. They can also alter course with defensive maneuvers in mid-flight.

The new Russian submarine missiles use a different tactic: they fly absolutely flat across the ocean or land at a low level, making it difficult to find, and hard to predict.

Maybe we are going back to mutually assured destruction after all.

The Chinese, and even India, are also moving into space based nuclear capability.

Meanwhile, the nuclear peace movement has all but disbanded, while the arms race becomes still more threatening. This is why Doctor Helen Caldicott has returned to the United States to kick start a new nuclear awareness. Her book "THE NEW NUCLEAR DANGER: GEORGE W. BUSH'S MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX" is selling well. Find her web site at www.helencaldicott.com.

While major countries pour zillions of dollars into a crazy non-functional arms race, more than a billion humans go to be hungry. Many of our beloved cities could still be exterminated by an insane exchange of nuclear weapons. Wake up your friends to this danger.
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Nuclear weapons spread, and are fueled, by the civilian nuclear power industry. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced November 30th new plans to expand nuclear power in Britain. Never mind the industry's long record of accidents and grave risks to whole regions of the country, we need more juice for wasteful electric gadgets.

But Blair's announcement was delayed at least a little bit, when Greenpeace climbers appeared out of the ceiling of the building where Blair was supposed to speak. At the Confederation of British Industry conference, the Greenpeace spider men lowered banners saying "Nuclear - Wrong Answer" and then sprayed confetti representing radioactive particles.

The security breach was considered risky enough to move Blair to a smaller room to announce his new risky strategy.

Stephen Tindale, the Director of Greenpeace UK, said:

"Today Blair is trying to launch a new nuclear age and we are here to stop him. Nuclear power is not the answer to climate change - it's costly, dangerous and a terrorist target."
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Greenpeace was also active in Thailand this week. The group ended its three day occupation of the Map Ta Phut power plant, when the government agreed to a full review of its energy policy.

The protest was part of an extended tour of South East Asia by the flagship Rainbow Warrior. In the Philippines the group climbed and blocked the loading crane at a massive coal plant. In each country, Greenpeace has been trying to raise awareness about the severe climate consequences if Asia continues to build more and more coal-fired generating power plants.

It may seem far away to you, but we all get to enjoy the climate change resulting from carbon pollution. Greenpeace says Asia must find clean energy alternatives to power its economic growth.

The same for Europe. This week, Greenpeace planted a giant banner saying "CO2 Kills" on the most polluting coal plant in Germany. The owner is planning another ten new brown-coal fired units, which together will emit more CO2 than the entire country of New Zealand.
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Greens go hunting?

An environment group in British Columbia has paid to end the killing of wildlife in the a vast region known as the Great Bear Rainforest. It's the first time a conservation group bought the guide-oufitting rights - to prevent hunting.

According to a front page story in the Vancouver Sun, in late November the Raincoast Conservation Foundation paid $1.35 million to get guide-outfitting rights to five regions along B.C.'s central coast. Instead of bringing in foreign hunters to bag grizzlies, black bears, wolves, cougar, mountain goats, moose and deer - the group will end foreign hunting.

The move comes in concert with the aboriginal tribes in all six nations in that territory, who have called for an end to American and European hunters arriving for the annual slaughter. Trophy hunting will become a thing of the past, but local residents and aboriginal people will be allowed to hunt for food.

The First Nations people are turning to eco-tourism, and say that people arrive now to look at the wildlife, not to kill it.

Ian McCallister of Raincoast said:

"There is no other example in North America where conservation interests have bought out such a large commercial hunting area before."

One of the major contributors to the stop hunting fund was Michael Mayzel, an executive vice-president of Daymen Photo Marketing. The former license holder, Leonard Ellis, has converted his guide outfitting business to leading wildlife viewing tours.


Finally, as we all suspected, a new study has found a common packaging material is highly toxic to the brain, even in low doses.

A research team at the University of Cincinnati has published a study in the journal Endocrinology. It shows that a chemical called bisphenol A, known as BPA, disrupts estrogen in the developing brain.

This chemical is widely used in consumer products as a lining for food cans, like soup for example, in milk container linings, and even in water pipes. The food industry continues to use BPA, even though it has been implicated in a variety of diseases - and developmental problems in babies and children.

BPA is an equal opportunity killer. It has been shown to increase breast cancer cell growth, and to increase the development of prostate cancer. Even tiny doses can affect the unborn fetus.

BPA is used to create plastic polymers, and it leaches into the food.

The author of the recent study, Doctor Belcher of the University of Cincinnati, questioned why industry and regulator agencies have failed to remove BPA from our food supply, even though plastics without BPA or other toxic chemicals are already available.

Apparently, the big food companies, and your government, just don't care what poisons you eat. Food for thought, or food for disease.

This has been news from Radio Ecoshock at www.ecoshock.org