The head of the U.S. delegation—Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky—was booed Saturday afternoon when she announced that the United States was rejecting the plan as then written because they were “not prepared to accept this formulation.” She said developing countries needed to carry more of the responsibility.

Just five minutes later, when it appeared the conference was on the brink of collapse, Dobriansky took to the floor again to announce the United States was willing to accept the arrangement. Applause erupted in the hall and a relative level of success for the conference appeared certain.... http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/15/bali.a greement/index.html

And then there’s the cola companies mining all the water out of places like India.  Farmers there are committing suicide because they can’t get loans for deeper wells, then their families hit the cities and the land is scooped up for pennies. 

Sick.

We’re next.

#119651 by Verne Arnold on 12/12 at 4:54 am
(486 comments total)

#119564 by Lefty on 12/11 at 6:39 pm
(709 comments total)

I thought Nestle already owned all of the water in the world!

Lefty, do you live in Asia, because so did I.

====================
Well Verne,

They’ve (Nestle) sucked out a large part of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan as well. (don’t know about the others). So, the fish have all left, and there’s nothing to eat, and only the water that they bottle, so you have to buy it from ‘em if you’re thirsty.

Yep, good ol’ Nestle.

The “....scientific solutions....” Ernest Canning (#119855) advocates so sincerely along with Al Gore are also (like the institutional ones) nothing but more of the same exercises-in-futility that all the other abstract virtualized approaches are bound to be.  The fault lies not in mere machinery or methodology, though, but in the fatally false premises on which the domesticated nations continue vainly trying to remedy their partly self-inflicted predicament.

What “ails” our Mother Earth is entirely organic in both its causes and its consequences.  She Herself has a specific “condition”....call it Induced Immune Deficiency Syndrome (IIDS).  Her “fever” is a natural response to that condition.  It WILL run its course, to whatever natural outcome these specifics lead-to. 

What actually ails the domesticated peoples is also purely “biological” it its particulars.  Technology and philosophy ultimately cannot get at it, because the ailment involves what is primary and generative in our essential nature.  Electro-mechanical systems are all at-best secondary (most even more abstract than that) and completely derivative in theirs.  All the various man-made institutional and ideological arrangements suffer from the same inescapable deficiencies.

The domesticated peoples suffer terribly from a congeries of lethal misconceptions about their own essential nature and about the essential nature of Nature Herself. All of their efforts, including “scientific” ones, are mired in these mistaken notions, and thus doomed to come to nothing but more of the grief they are already so prolifically productive-of.  No blame....just fact.

It’s true us surviving free wild natural Human Beings are with Her to “THE END”....whether bitter or better.  Our tame Sisters and Brothers, on the other hand, have nearly all of them been turned against Her, and so are mostly milling around these days in fear and confusion, having lost the very Living Ground from under their feet.  Their fate, as the fever does its work, looks to be orders-of-magnitude more difficult and painful than ours.

Unless (again) they wake-up, wise-up, and take The Medicine....which, as it happens, is US.

HokaHey!

Global warming is here the ice shelf continues to melt. Greenland’s outer perimeter is shrinking as well.  According to Al Gore and his presentation of the Inconvenient Truth, the trend for warming has been going on for years. He presents the issue in such a way that who could deny the issue.  Our Federal Government is. G. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Why well he loves his oil belching companies in his pocket. We aboval all other nations in the world emit the most greenhouse gases. 
However, my friend today actually believes too that we are slipping back into a paelentolgy era. If this combination is true, there is not going to be a mother earth anymore and we that survive are going to be living in a world like Mad Max and the science fiction novels.
What in world should we do? We need to reduce our wasteful ways, take care of our mother earth. Because frankly I like it here!

What we gotta do:

It is clear that our leaders have no vision.
It is clear that our leaders have vested interests.
It is clear that the citizens of the most powerful, and thereby responsible, nation will not remove the renegade businessmen from leading the earth into disarray.

The oil-buoyed leaders believe that they will emerge as the neo-aristocracy in the post-environment world. I know that I will not be included as the ‘surviving class’, and that is unacceptable. The leaders offer nothing to us anymore.  They have overstayed their welcome. 

If they won’t commit to targets, we make our own targets:
self-sufficiency, a true economy, evolution, innovation.

And for the leaders and their ilk:
obstruction, revulsion; at the very least removal of potential for human annihilation.

What are we really talking about? Do you think having a vote means you live in a democracy? You need to do your job:

Simulate a carbon tax on polluting industries by disrupting their profit-making from the 7th to the 11th of every month. This is 15%, the amount economists say a carbon tax would recess the economy.

If government won’t make polluters pay, we must force their pocketbook. As Cheney has said, ‘This is our due.’

The problem of our overheating the planet, TAO, is global and will affect the “free wild people” alongside the domesticated two-leggeds.  Without application of the scientific solutions proposed by Mr. Gore, there will be no place for the free wild folks like you to survive.

HokaHey!

Now here’s someone I’d love to see on DN:

Blue Covenant:The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
by Maude Barlow

“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert.”

“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities who will sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remote parts of the world left or sucked from the clouds by machines, while the poor die in increasing numbers. This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course.”

Video of her book launch:
http://www.workingtv.com/blue-covenant.html

About the book and an excerpt:
http://www.canadians.org/about/Maude_Barlow/Blue_Coven ant/index.html

Al Gore continues to preach that there’s an institutional remedy of some kind for our Mother Earth’s fevered condition....more hair-of-the-dog that’s gnawing at Her vitals, in-effect.  How’s that any more sensible than Senate Republicans suggesting their “resolution” might somehow result in the restoration of that comatose Florida woman to health and happiness?

What we have here, Sisters and Brothers, is a LIVING ARRANGEMENT.  Make-believe abstractions can (and invariably DO) put people in a virtual world-o’-hurt, but are powerless to address the organic conditions that’re always the “unintended side-effects” of delusional true-believers’ behavior.

Us surviving free wild natural Peoples ARE the Medicine for what ails our domesticated relatives here in these latter days.  We will be “easy to swallow”?  No!  Is there any viable alternative treatment?  Hell no!! 

HokaHey!

This article contains perhaps one of the most important reasons why, in the next election, we must work to defeat every Republican:  “The Senate Republicans are now blocking a federal energy bill that would create funding for the development of renewable energy sources in the U.S., while stripping away billions of dollars worth of tax breaks for big oil and coal.”

Of course, the accelleration of disasters by global warming also provides opportunity for what Naomi Klein has dubbed the disaster capitalism complex.  In “The Shock Doctrine,” she writes:

“At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq.  Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitiouns between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

“It happened in New Orleans.  After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones--the result not of water damage but of the ‘free-market solutions’ embraced by the president.* The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand in a month in the months after Katrina.  Amng them were sixteen of the city’s planning staff--with shades of ‘de-Baathification,’ laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desparate need of planners....
....
“Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water..., New Orleans’ public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse....Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mold belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.”

*Amongst the Republican free-market “solutions” to Katrina was an opening up of the Alaskan wild life refuge to oil drilling, proving that one man’s disaster is another’s business opportunity.

Meanwhile, here at Truthdig, posters still taken in by the global warming denial propaganda cite Michael Crichton’s work of fiction as the answer to the body of academic work produced by the world’s scientific community.

#119564 by Lefty on 12/11 at 6:39 pm
(709 comments total)

I thought Nestle already owned all of the water in the world!

Lefty, do you live in Asia, because so did I.

In 2004 Michael Crichton wrote “State of Fear” for which he was roundly condemned.  It is a very thought provoking read which should appeal to the more open minded out there (and here).  The old saw; “The mind is like a parachute; it only works when opened” is true and point on. 
Humans are having a profound effect (on the planet)…no doubt.  But, big but, water is now and has been a life and death thing for years.  Think about it; we can live without oil, but we cannot survive without water.  This battle has been going on behind the scenes for years (more than a century in America) and it will erupt on the world more fiercely than the battle for oil ever has been or will be in the future.  There is not enough potable water now.  Countries like the U.S. use drinking quality water to flush toilets, water gardens and wash cars and water lawns.  Here in Asia, drinking water is purchased in carboys, potable water is at a premium and the water supplied by the cities and villages is not for human consumption.  If we’re lucky as in my village we can shower in it.  Do not take you precious water for granted.
My only criticism of Amy Goodman is she didn’t go into one half of the title enough.  This is way too big for an adequate comment in the posting/comments section. 
How does this bode for the future?  There are forward thinkers and schemers so far ahead of our thinking that it should scare the pants off of us.  There will be many wars over water.  Actually it should make us think so we can counter those that would betray us.  If we are smart, oil will soon (4 years) start fading as the prime energy source for our planet.  There are so many viable alternatives we would be insane not to develop them, but then maybe we are insane; then it all makes sense.

Now that Doug the climatologist has cleared away all those nagging doubts that the best scientists in every western country have we can now relax.Doug do you remember the Tobacco Insitute of 30 years ago they had all kinds of graphs and charts and some toadie scientists who showed that cigarette smoking was not bad for you.You are falling prey to the American Oil Institute.
Amy please do not mention Al Gore again I start feeling so bad for my country in what might have been.At the very least a President who could communicate in his native tongue.I might not have wanted to have beer with Al Gore but I know he would have been a great President.

Gore will not debate the scientists who do not believe that global worming is caused by human activity.  All reputable scientists believe that global worming is a reality, but they disagree on the causes.  In her efforts to go mainstream, Amy Goodman has closed the door to any debate on global warming on her democracynow! program.  That’s just what the corporate media does with the positions they take.

I thought Nestle already owned all of the water in the world!

I agree with the fact that water will be as oil is now if we don’t act with best interests of worlds population. Just as ethanol from corn is being manopolized by the large oil companies of the world, water will be seen as a commodity that can be held hostage and used to manipulate the countries of the world.
I do have a problem with Amy Goodman’s credibility after her article about Lou Dobbs. Amy Goodman is an intelligent woman and I do appreciate her alternative views (many times I agree her) but, she lost much of her journalistic stature with me as I read her article and viewed the program on Democracy Now. The interview was like something you would see on the “Jerry Springer” show rather than the debate I would have expected from her.
We all make mistakes and I hope that is all it was; Amy is a much better journalist than what her program reflected.

We have to increase our reliance on coal because there is coal to mine.......

We have to increase our reliance on nuclear power because there is uranium to mine......

What a fatal mindset to maintain, uhh!

Investing in infrastructure around the world in past decades would have brought peace and prosperity and healthy living for all. Spending on wars instead will now bring the inevitable results - more wars!

One thing you can be sure of, though - neither the USA or Israel cares. In the 1970’s, the cry was “Nuke the Ayatolla!” (in Iran) over a few dollars extra for oil. What is different today?!?!

Time to start these algae biofarms to clean the water, reduce CO2 and provide the next generation of domestic fuel.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html