“One genetic mutation occurs on average for every 15 cigarettes that a typical lung-cancer patient smokes, according to a study that has identified for the first time all of the mutations acquired during the lifetime of a cancer patient.”

“…

Some children no longer look on their homes as a place of safety, security and comfort. Others don’t even have a home to go to. The Israeli bombardment damaged or destroyed more than 20,000 houses, forcing some families into tents and others into crowding in with relatives. Hamas distributed money to displaced families to rebuild their homes but the Israeli blockade has created a desperate shortage of materials. Almost one year later, some children still have no roof over their head.

Hanan Attar, a slight 10-year-old wearing flip-flops several sizes too big for her small feet, is wistful as she recalls the house destroyed by an Israeli tank shell. “”We had land, my father is a farmer,” she says. “We used to grow watermelons, but the land was too close to the border and we can’t get there now.”

….

In the summer months, families flock to the beach on Fridays and Saturdays. The sight of children splashing in the waves is cheering until one remembers that every day 20m gallons of raw sewage is pumped into the water. Since Gaza’s sewage processing plant was bombed after the kidnap of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in July 2006, there has been no alternative means of disposal. Now, according to Save the Children, children are developing skin diseases as well as bacterial infections from swimming in polluted water.

Among all the complex and long-term solutions being sought in Copenhagen for averting environmental catastrophe across the world, there is one place where the catastrophe has already happened, but could be immediately ameliorated with one simple political act.

In Gaza there is now no uncontaminated water; of the 40,000 or so newborn babies, at least half are at immediate risk of nitrate poisoning – incidence of “blue baby syndrome”, methaemoglobinaemia, is exceptionally high; an unprecedented number of people have been exposed to nitrate poisoning over 10 years; in some places the nitrate content in water is 300 times World Health Organisation standards; the agricultural economy is dying from the contamination and salinated water; the underground aquifer is stressed to the point of collapse; and sewage and waste water flows into public spaces and the aquifer.

The blockade of Gaza has gone on for nearly four years, and the vital water and sanitation infrastructure went past creaking to virtual collapse during the three-week assault on the territory almost a year ago.

….

Once again, the so-called developed countries are working against all others – and against their own interests.

Once again, Obama has disappointed those who set their hopes on him (foolishly so).

With a situation as grave and dire as climate change, with scientists saying – again and again – this is our last chance, if we even have that chance, with clear reports of change already upon us, still – a few countries are adamant to play dumb with the lives of us all.

“The secret draft climate agreement [from Copenhagen] leaked to The Guardian newspaper yesterday sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050. This means that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much as those in poor countries. The document also proposes a $10 billion a year fund to help developing nations cut emissions and tackle the effects of climate change. But the fund is far smaller than what many delegates say is necessary to effectively combat the effects of climate change in the most vulnerable nations.”

From that Amy Goodman interview:

ANJALI KAMAT: Martin, can you talk about some of the numbers in the Danish text, the text produced by the circle of commitment? They talk about $10 billion to be invested in this.

MARTIN KHOR: Ten billion dollars for developing countries to take all these actions to prevent climate change and to tackle the effects of climate change is too miniscule, you know? The United Nations recently—

AMY GOODMAN: That’s ten billion a year?

MARTIN KHOR: Ten billion a year, but the UN estimated that we require at least $500 to $600 billion a year. And a new study in London shows that you need at least $500 billion a year. In fact, in my estimation, we need at least two percent of the GNP of the rich countries, and that’s about $800 billion a year.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it pay for?

MARTIN KHOR: You see, you have to allow the developing countries to continue their economic growth and, at the same time, to reduce their emissions. The only way in which they can do this is if we have massive transfers of finance and technology, you know, not for luxuries, but simply to get food production and housing and, you know, to build the seawalls and so on. If this amount of money does not come, then the developing countries are sunk or fried by climate change, and they won’t be able to take their own actions in terms of changing their technology in transportation, in energy, in industry, and so on.

NAOMI KLEIN: I think one of the things that’s so important about this is that everybody has—we all have a vested interest in this. It’s not—first of all, it’s not charity. It is based on the principle that the polluter pays, that the rich world created the climate crisis. So it isn’t a handout. But in addition to it not being a handout, as Martin says, everybody in the world has an interest in helping the developing world to leapfrog over fossil fuels and develop using cleaner, but more expensive technologies, more expensive upfront, because the technologies are expensive at the start. Eventually they actually become cheaper than fossil fuels, but there is a heavy upfront cost. And that’s what these numbers would be covering, in part.

Check it out

Here is Walden Bello’s full article:

Beginning in the second week of December, representatives to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen will wrestle with the challenge of climate change. This week, influential actors in the World Trade Organization Seventh Ministerial Conference taking place in Geneva are trying to push for a conclusion to the nine-year-old Doha Round of trade negotiations.

The two meetings are at cross-purposes and their juxtaposition highlights a profound reality: The world has to choose between free trade and effective climate management.
The Global Downturn: Relief for the Climate

The last 12 months have seen the unraveling of a particular type of international economy: export-oriented and marked by the accelerated integration of production and markets. This globalized economy has been transportation-intensive, greatly dependent on ever-increasing long-distance transportation of goods. For instance, a plate of food consumed in the United States travels an average of 1,500 miles from source to table. Transportation, in turn, is fossil-fuel intensive, accounting in 2006 for 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and 23% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

A downturn in the export-dependent global economy thus brings about a significant downturn in carbon emissions as well. It spells relief for the climate. In 2009, the drop in the level of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) has been the largest in the last 40 years. The thousands of ships marooned by lack of global demand in ports such as New York, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, and Seoul means a significant reduction in the use of high-carbon Bunker C oil, which is used in 80% of ocean shipping. The cutback in air freight has meant a significant reduction in the use of aviation fuel, which has been the fastest growing source of GHG emissions in recent years.

Deglobalization as Opportunity

In response to the collapse of the export-oriented global economy, many governments have fallen back on their domestic markets, revving them up via stimulus programs that put spending money in the hands of consumers. This move has been accompanied by a retreat from globalized production structures or “deglobalization.” “The integration of the world economy is in retreat on almost every front,” writes the Economist. While the magazine says that corporations continue to believe in the efficiency of global supply chains, “like any chain, these are only as strong as their weakest link. A danger point will come if firms decide that this way of organizing production has had its day.”

For many environmentalists and ecological economists in the South and the North, the unraveling of the export-oriented global economy spells opportunity. It opens up the transition to more climate-friendly and ecologically sensitive ways of organizing economic life. But the fossil fuel-intensiveness of global transport and freight is merely one dimension of the problem. Environmentalists insist there must be a change in the reigning economic model itself. The global economy must make a transition from being driven fundamentally by overproduction and overconsumption to being geared to real needs, marked by moderate or low consumption, and based on sustainable and decentralized production processes.

Accordingly, the assumption of most policymakers in the North that consumption trends can continue — and that the only challenge is the transformation of the energy mix and the adoption of technofixes such as biofuels, “clean coal,” nuclear power, carbon sequestration and storage, and carbon trading — is not only based on illusions but positively dangerous. Indeed, the climate problem cannot be addressed strategically without addressing the inherently environmentally destabilizing dynamics of capitalism — its incessant drive, motivated by the search for profit, to transform living nature into dead commodities.

Instead of heralding this transition to a much less fossil-fuel-intensive and ecologically sustainable production, most technocrats and economists see only a temporary retreat from export-led growth until global demand makes the latter viable again. The policy debate in establishment circles focuses on who will replace the bankrupt American consumer as the engine of global demand. With Europe stagnant and Japan in almost permanent recession, the hope is that China’s growth will be the basis of global reflation. This is a mirage. China’s 8.9% annualized growth in the last quarter is due to their current stimulus, a $585 billion program that has been funneled mainly to the countryside. Domestic demand will likely cease to grow once the money is spent. A limited spurt of cash will not transform Chinese peasants into the saviors of the global economy. After all, because they bore the costs of the country’s export-oriented economy, these peasants have seen their incomes and welfare severely erode over the last quarter of a century.

The Doha Dead End

But however this debate over the global consumer of last resort is resolved, the World Trade Organization and its most influential members, both from the North and the South, hope that completing the Doha Round at the Seventh Ministerial Meeting in Geneva will bring about a resumption of the carbon-intensive march toward globally integrated production and markets.

The preoccupation of economists and policymakers with the export engine to revive the global economy, which often excludes concerns about the negative impact of export-led globalization on the climate, is a dangerous divide leading up to Copenhagen. Says John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies: “We have economic policymakers concerned with reversing recession and ecological economists concerned with strategic ways of reversing climate change talking past one another.”

The climate negotiations have their own share of problems, even without the WTO threat. In the lead-up to Copenhagen, the focus of the climate discussions has been on two issues: mitigation and adaptation. Both are stymied, largely owing to the positions of the industrialized (Annex 1) countries. On mitigation, pivotal developed countries have so far resisted offering legally binding cuts. And what voluntary cuts they have offered are slight. In the case of the United States, President Obama’s nonbinding commitment is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 17% from 2005 levels. This translates into an insignificant 4% reduction from 1990 levels, which serve as the benchmark for serious cuts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asserted that a 25-40% cut in GHG by 2020 is the minimum figure that would keep global mean temperature from rising above two degrees centigrade during this century. And, already, the latter is said to be an underestimate.

In the area of adaptation — assisting the poorer countries to prepare themselves for the consequences of climate change — the negotiations have been held up by the rich countries’ reluctance to come up with the minimum amounts of aid necessary, to transfer technology unconditionally, and to channel the sums to the developing world through institutions apart from the World Bank, which they control.

The challenges in these two areas are daunting enough. And yet, unless the question of which economic model or strategy the countries of the world should move toward is front and center in Copenhagen, even the most ambitious agreements arrived at on mitigation and adaptation will be simply a Band-Aid. Unless the negotiators in Copenhagen dethrone the Doha model, the fundamental driver of climate change — an export-oriented globalized capitalist economy based on perpetually rising consumption — will continue to reign.

*Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines on the platform of the Akbayan! (Citizens’ Action Party), president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, a senior analyst of Focus on the Global South, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

… and the government is silent

There is much I want to write and say about the proceedings in Copenhagen – and the Lebanese government’s (led by Saudi Arabia) truly pathetic position. For now, this article will suffice. and read this article as well

Like I said to a neighbor, even the ants in Panama are amazing. (ferjee, as I told him).  Check them out, these magnificent leaf cutter ants!

for stunning pictures of my time here in Panama, see these pictures taken by my colleague and amateur photographer Stefan

here is pepita, a female white-headed capuchin monkey that was greedily taking bananas from our hands this morning

(thanks anastasiya for the picture