It's not the time for "Good Germans". It's a time for honesty - no matter how brutal. Too bad that honesty in our society is being bombarded by war. It's hunkered down while lies and deceit drag our country further into the abyss. Our country is going backwards in terms of freedoms and civil rights. Our government has gotten into bed with Corporate America and are using the media to further their imperial agenda. To achieve their goal they must first destroy the Constitution because the Constitution is the "union" of the people. So just like they have been destroying unions for a century, they are now working on destroying the only union that can protect Americans.
Hoa binh

Concentrating wealth/power and overpopulation have collided with limits to growth.

Living in An Age of Consequences!

"In the course of writing this report we found inescapable, overriding conclusions. In the coming decade the United States faces an ominous set of challenges for this and the next generation of foreign policy and national security practitioners. These include reversing the decline in America's global standing, rebuilding the nation's armed forces, finding a responsible way out from Iraq while maintaining American influence in the wider region, persevering in Afghanistan, working toward greater energy security, re-conceptualizing the struggle against violent extremists, restoring public trust in all manner of government functions, preparing to cope with either naturally occurring or manmade pathogens, and quelling the fear that threatens to cripple our foreign policy—just to name a few.

"Regrettably, to this already daunting list we absolutely must add dealing responsibly with global climate change. Our group found that, left unaddressed, climate change may come to represent as great or a greater foreign policy and national security challenge than any problem from this list. And, almost certainly, overarching global climate change will complicate many of these other issues.

"While all those who collaborated in this study completed the process with a profound sense of urgency, we also collectively are encouraged that there is still time for the United States and the international community to plan an effective response to prevent, mitigate, and where possible adapt, to global climate change. We hope this study will help in that endeavor.

"Indeed, the overall experience of these working groups helped underscore how much needs to be done on a sustained basis in this emerging field of exploration. This study hopefully will help illuminate how security concerns might manifest themselves in a future warming—and worrisome—world. Moving forward, the United States and other nations must chart a new path, for we already live in an age of consequences."

Source: The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, Center for Strategic & International Studies, Nov. 2007

What "loss"? Everyone forgets all the positive improvements in quality of life - totally aside from avoiding the climate impacts - that would come from addressing climate change. A few to consider:

1. Quiet, clean, safe, car-free cities where community and solidarity is reborn and children can play.

2. Locally produced (lower energy-input) healthir food.

3. Simple, psychologically healthy domestic life, where pursuit of energy-intensive plastic consumer crap is replaced with kinship, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual pursuits.

4. Fulfilling livlihoods in coopertive workplaces where ever-increasing energy-intensive producton for the benefit of a few power-hungry at the top is hsitory.

5. No more oil wars.

I guess ideas like those above are evidence of the usual, Chritchton-eque accusations of "global warming as a backdoor to socialism" stuff. But, I am a socialist, so guilty as charged...

PJD You sure as hell don't have to apologise for your ideals to me. It's our only hope to reverse the awful downward spiral. Keep dreaming and keep blogging!

http://www.socioambiental.org/e/nsa/detalhe?id=2551

Brazil's Minister of the Environment in Norway at the Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity. The link is to an english translation of the report posted by Instituto Socioambiental (Socio Environmental Institute).

Once again justice and constitutional rights of Indigenous Peoples (having for thousands of years stewarded forests and other lands both north and south) represent cultures that will be sources of education in the coming years. These alliances and the necessity for our attention on their immediate situations of threats at the local level and disenfranchisement at the federal level are elements of social evolution and growth. The industrialized nations need to, in the most elemental sense, humbly begin to prepare for new ontological encounters.

This sort of shift in respect and attention will undoubtedly provide insights that are not even framed yet.

Not to mention, as Naomi Klein discussed last night on "Democracy Now, disaster services, pandering to those who can afford it, is becoming big business.

It is interesting that the WH is not allowing details regarding the expected near term damage and affected areas. This will give people in the know a sizable advantage when it comes to real estate values in the year 2030. Of course, no one would take advantage of that prior knowledge, right? Business as usual. The people are mushrooms, let them grow in the dark. Check the Sea Level and Flood Plains closely in upcoming R.E. transactions

What strikes me is that right wingers are convinced global warming is a hoax and that countering its effects would involve a massive expense and a huge loss in standard of living.

Meanwhile all the evidence I've seen suggests precisely the opposite. See, for example, the "Economists' Statement on Climate Change" http://dieoff.org/page105.htm

WmC

When right-wingers equate countering the effects of global warming with the loss of lining standards, I always give myself a moment to laugh silently.

When did right-wingers ever care about raising, much less sustaining the average person's living standards?

They have always struggled to get workers to labor longer for less. It is the exact opposite of what workers desire: to work less for more.

Furthermore, right-wingers are the same sad bunch whom support, for example, lumber companies cutting down as many trees as quickly and effeciently as possible without regardless of environmental consequences.

And if someone or a group points out the negative consequences of clear-cutting and the need to regulate it, these self-same rightists whine: "it will cause corporations to cut jobs."

However, after these lumber companies oversee sawing down the useful trees (or if these companies locate overseas to exploit cheaper labor and less environmental regulations), they quickly disappear without much regard for employees or their communities.

In the end, the unemployed lumberjacks are left with denuded forests and polluted streams, rivers and lakes...so they can't even hunt or fish for the food that can't afford to buy.

With capitalists it is always "profits before people."

In other words, capitalists want nature and humans to adapt to the every increasing rhythms of machinery and money.

They are horrified if they, as a group, are asked or forced to adapt to the needs and rhythms of nature and human biology.