Please sign (I have!), blog, tweet and generally disseminate this petition.
Brown is going to get a huge amount of counter-lobbying from the
banksters, so he needs a positive push. Since it is one of the rare
petitions that is actually supporting what he is saying, it may get noticed.
THE COPENHAGEN CONFERENCE ON FOOD SECURITY
http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2009/update84
By Lester R. Brown
For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought. For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry. This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.
We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century.
The world rice harvest is particularly vulnerable to rising sea level. A World Bank map of Bangladesh shows that even a 3-foot rise in sea level would cover half of the riceland in this country of 160 million people. It would also inundate one third or more of the Mekong delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world's number two rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.
The worldwide melting of mountain glaciers is of even greater concern. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland has recently reported the eighteenth consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, and throughout the mountain ranges of Asia.
It is the disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau that are of most concern, because their ice melt sustains the flow of the major rivers of India and China––the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers—during the dry season. This ice melt thus also sustains the irrigation systems that depend on these rivers.
Yao Tandong, one of China's leading glaciologists, who predicts that two thirds of China's glaciers could be gone by 2050, says "the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau region will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."
It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world's leading producer of wheat. India is number two. (The United States is third.) In contrast to the United States, most wheat grown in China and India is irrigated. With rice, these two countries totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these mountain glaciers in Asia represents the most massive threat to food security the world has ever seen.
The prospects for the harvests of wheat and rice, in these two countries, each with over a billion people, are of concern everywhere. We live in an integrated world food economy, one where harvest shortfalls anywhere can drive up food prices everywhere.
Rising temperature also directly affects crop yields. In a study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists confirmed the rule of thumb emerging among crop ecologists that for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the norm during the growing season, we can expect a 10-percent decline in wheat and rice yields. In a world with limited grain stocks—a world that is only one poor harvest away from chaos in grain markets—a crop-shrinking heat wave in a major grain-producing region could lead to politically destabilizing food shortages.
The delegates are gathering in Copenhagen against a backdrop of spreading hunger. For much of the late 20th century, the number of hungry people was declining, but it bottomed out in the late 1990s at 825 million. It then turned upward, reaching 870 million in 2005 and passing one billion in 2009. The combination of rising seas, melting glaciers, and crop-withering heat waves could push these numbers up even faster, forcing millions more families to try and survive on one meal a day.
We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off crop-withering heat waves of ever greater intensity? These are food security issues. This is what Copenhagen is about.
Read what Google has to say: http://tinyurl.com/lkbxbw
And when you're done, and have set this up on your computer (it will take
you less than a minute - the privacy sacrifice is a relatively small price
to pay, in my view), go visit http://www.nestle.com and see what we've done
to Nestle's website...! See also the sidewiki started I've up on The Sun
homepage, e.g.: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/
...Let's 'get out there' and start having fun!
There are _plenty_ of webpages worth targetting... Suddenly, 'other
people's' websites are open to us as they have never been before... The web
becomes the interactive space it was supposed to be...
The MPs expenses scandal is all about economic inequality. It would never have happened if MPs hadn't been trying to 'earn' as much as others such as headmasters, managers, etc.
For narrowly political reasons, MPs were reluctant to award themselves salary increases. So for years they covertly took 'pay increases' via the route of massive expenses packages.
MPs should not earn way more than the average salaried person that they represent. This is totally inappropriate, because it leads to MPs getting out of touch with their constituents.
But equally, it is dangerous for MPs to earn far less than similar or lower status professionals and private sector workers. If they do, it risks us losing some talented would-be-MPs to these other professions, and it increases the risk of MPs becoming corrupt - being easier to bribe.
So, we are in a cleft stick. But we wouldn't be, in a more equal society.
We need a society where MPs can be paid the average salary in their constituency or at least in their society without that being way less than headmasters, managers etc earn. In other words: we need a much more equal society.
There is no other way in which we can have the kind of MPs we want and need without at some point having a repeat of the expenses scandal...
Reacting to former UK Independence Party Eastern Region MEP Tom Wise's guilty plea today at his trial for false accounting and money laundering, Dr Rupert Read, Councillor for
"If only Tom Wise had had the basic decency to admit that he is an expenses fraudster a few months back, I surely would have been elected Green MEP for
"As it is, his having held out for four years before admitting guilt, wasting huge amounts of public money on the legal process in the meantime, has meant that once again UKIP have two MEPs in Eastern England, managing to hold onto a second MEP by narrowly defeating me, by just one per cent, on June 4th.
"It is shameful that UKIP managed to get in on an 'expenses scandal' vote, under these circumstances.
"The Green Party will be back to defeat UKIP next time, now that it is becoming clearer by the day that it is simply a joke to think that you can vote for clean politics by voting for anyone other than the Green Party."
EU green sector spend is poor relative to that of Asia. A shameful record:
http://www.euractiv.com/en/enterprise-jobs/eu-outflanked-asian-rivals-green-economy/article-186846
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/redefining-prosperity.html
Synopsis - Prosperity without Growth?
The economy is geared, above all, to economic growth. Economic policy in
the current recession is all about returning to growth - but an economic
crisis can be an opportunity for some basic rethinking and restructuring.
Two objectives other than growth - sustainability and wellbeing - have
moved up the political and policy-making agenda in recent years,
challenging the overriding priority traditionally given to economic growth.
SDC's "Redefining Prosperity" project has looked into the connections and
conflicts between sustainability, growth, and wellbeing. This project has
now resulted in a major SDC report: 'Prosperity without Growth?: the
transition to a sustainable economy' by Professor Tim Jackson, SDC's
Economics Commissioner.
Prosperity without growth? analyses the relationship between growth and
the growing environmental crisis and 'social recession'. In the last
quarter of a century, while the global economy has doubled, the increased
in resource consumption has degraded an estimated 60% of the world's
ecosystems. The benefits of growth have been distributed very unequally,
with a fifth of the world's population sharing just 2% of global income.
Even in developed countries, huge gaps remain in wealth and well-being
between rich and poor.
While modernising production and reducing the impact of certain goods and
services have led to greater resource efficiency in recent decades, our
report finds that current aspirations for 'decoupling' environmental
impacts from economic growth are unrealistic. The report finds no evidence
as yet of decoupling taking place on anything like the scale or speed
which would be required to avoid increasing environmental devastation.
Prosperity without growth? proposes twelve steps towards a sustainable
economy and argues for a redefinition of "prosperity" in line with
evidence about what contributes to people's wellbeing.
Posts
All Comments
