Posted July 16, 2013 in Moving Beyond Oil, Solving Global Warming

An advertisement in the Washington Post featured a letter from ten Nobel Laureates who are asking President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline based on its significant impact to the climate. The advertisement sponsored by NRDC, the Nobel Women’s Initiative, and Environmental Defence Canadareproduced the letter in full which said “as leaders who have spoken out strongly on these issues, we urge you, once again, to be on the right side of history and send a clear message that you are serious about moving beyond dirty oil.”
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Bloomberg News

Keystone Critics Release Report Finding Significant Carbon Rise
By Jim Snyder July 23, 2013

“Tar sands oil production causes the release of huge amounts of carbon pollution, both from its energy-intensive extraction methods and refining processes and also from its destruction of boreal forests, peatlands and wetlands,” the NRDC report states.

The State Department is reviewing the environmental risks of the project, part of an ongoing evaluation of whether the pipeline is in the U.S. national interest.

Keystone’s impact on greenhouse-gas emissions has become perhaps the central issue the department is weighing after President Barack Obama said in an address last month that the pipeline shouldn’t be built if it would significantly exacerbate carbon pollution that most climate scientists believe is causing global warming.
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The Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq shelters 115,000 Syrian refugees, Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

• Exodus from Syrian civil war is overwhelming region – UN
• Aid officials say population flight is becoming permanent

By Martin Chulov in Zaatari, Jordan, and Mark Rice-Oxley, The Guardian - July 24, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/24/syria-refugee-crisis-world

Western countries including the US and Britain may be asked to accept tens of thousands of Syrian refugees because the exodus from the civil war is overwhelming countries in the region, the UN’s refugee chief has warned.

With no end to the war in sight, the flight of nearly 2 million people from Syria over the past two years is showing every sign of becoming a permanent population shift, like the Palestinian crises of 1948 and 1967, with grave implications for countries such as Lebanon and Jordan, UN and other humanitarian aid officials say.

One in six people in Lebanon are now Syrian refugees. The biggest camp in Jordan has become the country’s fourth-largest city. In addition to those who have crossed borders, at least four million Syrians are believed to have been displaced within their own country, meaning that more than a quarter of the population has been uprooted.

In an interview with the Guardian, António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said the situation was already far more than just a humanitarian crisis. If a resolution to the conflict was not found within months, the UN will look to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in countries better able to afford to host them, including Britain. Germany has already offered to take 5,000, but other offers have been limited, Guterres said.

“We are facing in the Middle East something that is more than a humanitarian crisis, more than a regional crisis, it is becoming a real threat to global peace and security,” Guterres said.

“We are already seeing the multiplication of security incidents in Iraq and Lebanon, and Jordan is facing a very difficult economic situation.”

Guterres compared the Syrian refugee issue to that of Iraqis during the last decade, when more than 100,000 were resettled away from the region. “If things go on for a prolonged period of time then resettlement will become a central part of our strategy,” he said. “We would like when the time comes … to be able to launch a resettlement programme as massive as the one for Iraqis.”

The Syrian exodus has already surpassed almost every other refugee crisis that international organisations have dealt with in the past 40 years. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s provide the closest parallel, with both conflicts having a strong ethnic-sectarian dimension and the crumbling of state control raising the spectre of partition.

The knock-on effect on regional countries has been telling. Tensions between refugee communities and local populations have increased dramatically in Jordan and Lebanon, as the influx of people piles pressure on local services such as schools and hospitals, and disrupts job markets. The upshot has been a greater effort by Syria’s neighbours to manage the flow of refugees into their countries.

“Turkey and Jordan have become so overwhelmed. At the same time there are some very worrying consequences on the security point of view, with the infiltration of armed people, that the border has had to be more controlled. This means refugees are still coming, but they have to come in gradually, which means we have a number of people stranded waiting to cross,” Guterres said.

Some refugees have found life so wretched in camps that they have started to return home. But at present this is still a trickle.

“They are not going home, and nor can they be expected to at a time when communities are being slaughtered and Syria is disintegrating,” said one Jordanian official who declined to be named. “We are living the reality of a long and devastating war with perhaps unmanageable consequences for us.”

“The original expectation was that this was going to be a short wave of people that would quickly recede,” said the EU’s humanitarian commissioner, Kristalina Georgieva, who has twice visited Zaatari recently. “It has taken more than a year to recognise that this conflict is going to be long. We have been in contact with development organisations. We need urban managers, we need planners. We need permanent solutions.”

Throughout the year, the UN has steadily increased its humanitarian aid appeal, which now stands at $5bn (£3.3bn) – the largest amount the global body has ever sought for a single crisis. The money would not just help refugees but assist Lebanon and Jordan to make the enormous social adjustments required to deal with rapidly expanding populations.

But Guterres said he was not optimistic the target would be reached. Gulf donors in particular such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar appear to prefer to fund their own humanitarian activities rather than contributing to the general pot.

And needs are outstripping even the money raised so far. “The conflict produces more victims faster than our collective capacity to help,” said Georgieva.

“When we look at the prospects, one that we all have to face is that this conflict is creating a large risk of sectarian cleansing. This is how Srebrenica happened, how Rwanda happened, by gradually building up this enormous wave that leads to catastrophic consequences. This is the [crisis] that makes me lose sleep.”

Controversial Video Highlighting Issue of Child Marriage Goes Viral

A version of the video with English captions received more than 5.6 million views in two days.

In a follow-up report by the pan-Arab television channel Al Mayadeen, Nada’s father pledged not to marry her off until she is 17-years old. He did not say what pushed him to change his mind.

The clip, which aired on July 21, also shows Nada speaking to a group of lawyers at the Seyaj Organization for Childhood Protection and hugging her parents.

Another local report states that Nada will be living with her uncle, who has assumed full financial responsibility for her.

Though the story was reported by several Arab outlets, some focused on the organisation that uploaded the English version of Nada’s video, The Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI). Based in the US and founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer, MEMRI has been criticised for selectively translating Arabic broadcasts and providing a consistently negative portrayal of Muslim countries.

In the video, Nada mentions other children who are put in the same situation: “I managed to solve my problem, but some innocent children can’t solve theirs, and they might die, commit suicide, or do whatever comes to mind… I’m not the only one. There are many cases like that.”

By Sarah McFarlane

CAIRO (Reuters) - The biggest mistake deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi made during his year in power was dramatically reducing wheat imports, according to Mohamed Abu Shadi, the country's new minister of supplies.

Lack of money and a quixotic attempt at making Egypt self-sufficient spurred the decline, say officials familiar with the matter. Mursi dreamt of making Egypt grow all its own wheat and allowed imported stocks to fall to precariously low levels. It hurt both the country's wheat stocks and Mursi's government.

With a quarter of Egypt's 84 million people living below the poverty line of $1.65 a day, millions depend on subsidized bread that sells for less than 1 U.S. cent per loaf. That supply relies on foreign wheat.

The country is the world's largest wheat importer, bringing in about 10 million tonnes a year, around half its annual consumption. Keeping the system running smoothly was vital when Mursi, backed by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, took over as president in June 2012.

Mursi appointed Bassem Ouda, a 43-year-old engineer, as minister of supplies. Ouda, who took office on January 6, said Egypt's $3 billion program for subsidized bread would be his top priority. However, he and Mursi promptly began talking about Egypt becoming self-sufficient by more than doubling its wheat production to meet its needs of over 18 million tonnes a year; at the same time they made big reductions in wheat imports and began eating through stocks.

In May, Mursi was quoted during a festival to celebrate the harvest season at a farm near the northern city of Alexandria as saying: "By God's will, in two years we will be achieving more than 80 percent of our needs, and seek in four years not to import wheat." It was a an ambitious target; critics called it foolhardy.

"Many people were disconcerted and unhappy with the government for making statements that we would become self-sufficient," said Adel Beshai, professor of economics at Cairo's American University. "Every villager knows we cannot become self-sufficient, any illiterate farmer could tell you we could not be self-sufficient, so people felt they were being lied to."

While Egypt is one of the oldest agricultural civilizations, once the granary of the Roman Empire, it can no longer feed its modern population, which is mostly crammed into the fertile Nile valley and delta, a narrow strip surrounded by huge areas of arid land. Egyptian agriculture is almost entirely dependent on irrigation with more than 90 percent of the country desert.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated Egypt's latest harvest at 8.5 million tonnes of wheat. The subsidized bread program alone requires around 9 million tonnes of wheat. Local wheat is low in gluten so it is mixed with foreign wheat in roughly equal parts to produce flour suitable for making bread. Much of what remains of the Egyptian crop is consumed on farms.

A lack of funds also played a part in Egypt's failure to import wheat, according to a government source familiar with the matter. As it faced economic crisis, the Islamist government began exploring alternative methods of procuring wheat.

"They were looking at barter deals for oranges and potatoes," said a second source with experience of the inner workings of GASC, the state grain buying agency, adding that Russia imports a lot of Egyptian potatoes and oranges and is a key supplier of wheat.

The result was inaction. "This was an extension of what was happening in the rest of the ministries and the rest of the country," said the government source.

On July 10, days after Mursi was ousted and Ouda resigned, Ouda said government stocks were 3.5 million tonnes, including 500,000 tonnes of foreign wheat. This compared with 4.9 million tonnes on July 1 last year, including 1.2 million tonnes of imported wheat.

The government source said that the risk of shortages could be reversed with proper management: "All you need is speedy decisions to enter the market at the right times."

(Additional reporting by Maha El Dahan in Abu Dhabi; Editing By Richard Woods)