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The new age divide
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By CHRIS PATTEN*


LONDON - So what does 2009 hold in store for us? As ever, the unpredictable -- a terrorist atrocity or a rash decision by a national leader -- will take its toll. But much of what happens tomorrow will be a result of history.

In the last century, the world's population increased fourfold, and the number of people living in cities thirteen-fold. The world's output grew by a factor of 40, water use by nine, energy use by 13 and the emission of carbon dioxide by 17. The 21st century has to live with the consequences of all that, good and bad.

Some of the factors that will shape our lives appear to tug in different directions. The age profiles of our societies are changing dramatically. Asia and Europe have experienced sharp falls in fertility rates. The figures in Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea are even more remarkable than those in Catholic European countries such as Spain, Italy and Poland.

At the same time, people are living longer, so that in a generation the number of elderly dependents in some countries will outgrow that of the young. We have been accustomed to societies with a demographic structure that resembles a pyramid -- a broad youth base tapering to an elderly tip. But now the structure is more like the profile of a skyscraper, more or less the same from top to bottom.

Our older populations have to cope with ever younger technology. This expands educational and employment opportunities. Many students today are being prepared for jobs that do not yet exist; moreover, some sorts of knowledge can rapidly become redundant.

Indeed, half of what a student learns in the first year of a four-year technical course will be out of date by the third year. Change itself accelerates. Its results are magnified. Its benefits and its disadvantages penetrate more deeply. Every month there are 31 billion searches on Google. It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million. Facebook.com did that in two years.

We usually reckon that it is easier for young, unformed minds to handle changes such as these. How does someone like me, at university in the early 1960s, adapt and cope? How will older societies manage new technology and remain dynamic?

The biggest challenge for all of us, young and old, next year and for the indefinite future, will result from a different sort of change that is unlikely to respond simply to technological determinism. It results from the way we have been living for two centuries. If older leaders do not produce the right answers soon, younger generations will reap the whirlwind -- sometimes literally.

2009 is supposed to see the conclusion of an agreement on global warming and climate change to succeed and build on the Kyoto Protocol. Copenhagen is the venue for the meeting. Optimists cheer the departure of the Bush administration and assume that the arrival of the Obama presidency, which, unlike its predecessor, is not in denial about the science of global warming, will unlock the prospect of a deal. Pessimists note that our mounting economic woes around the world are being used as an excuse for inaction on cuts in carbon emissions.

But continuing to use energy inefficiently will not mitigate the painful effects of the global economic crisis. If we make today's problems the excuse for failure to save the environment, we will simply pile up much bigger -- and potentially catastrophic -- problems tomorrow.

China, the biggest of the emerging economies, clearly understands this. Whether India does as well seems to me rather more doubtful. China faces its own environmental dangers, for example, water stress. It does not want to see its industries outdated and uncompetitive. China will work for a global consensus on climate change. The big question is whether it will be able to impose tougher environmental standards throughout the whole country.

For America, the problem is also mainly one of domestic politics. There will be no worthwhile American offer on the environment until there is a deal in Congress. This year's task may be to reach a global understanding in Copenhagen that is not too prescriptive, but which is more than aspirational and into which an American domestic political agreement can be incorporated once Obama achieves it.

But all of this sensitive diplomacy could be wrecked if, in response to rising unemployment, there is an outbreak of trade protectionism involving America, Europe and China. That is when the economic and environmental agendas could fatally collide.

So young and old alike should hold onto their hats in the exciting but dangerous years ahead. All of us must hope that the first Internet-generation American president can lead his own country and the rest of humanity into a safer and more sustainably prosperous future.

todayszaman


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Chris Patten is a former EU commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party and was the last British governor of Hong Kong. He is currently chancellor of Oxford University and a member of the British House of Lords.


28 December 2008

December 30, 2008 | 8:43 AM Comments  0 comments


U.S. policy in the Middle East before, during and after Bush
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Maria Appakova) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday issued a "last-minute" appeal to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to reject their Hamas rulers and stop missile fire at Israel, warning them he would not hesitate to use force.

About 210 targets associated with Hamas have been hit since Saturday, while Hamas militants have launched more than 110 rockets into Israel. The UN has called for the hostilities to stop, but Olmert said at Sunday's Cabinet meeting the operation "is liable to continue for some time."

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said the attacks would continue until Hamas militants were ready to "change their behavior."

This is happening less than a month before George W. Bush leaves the White House. A year ago, he pledged to ensure that Israel and Palestinians sign a peace treaty and agree to set up an independent Palestinian state before he leaves.

But peace in the Middle East has no chance because of Palestinian-Israeli differences and internal squabble among Palestinians and in Israel, which neither Bush nor anyone else can stop. On the other hand, Bush had disregarded the Middle Eastern problem for too long to succeed now.

What are the results of Bush's Mideast policy? The shoe thrown at him by a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station? Or was it a much too shallow, even if striking, assessment of the U.S. president's achievements and failures in the Middle East?

U.S. State Secretary Condoleezza Rice said in an interview with AFP: "Do you really think in 10 years anybody will remember this incident? What matters is the U.S. liberated the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein (...) and that he has been replaced with an Iraq that will not attack its neighbors and will not seek weapons of mass destruction, and will be the first multiethnic multi-confessional democracy in the center of the Arab world."

Indeed, it would now be premature to assess Bush's policy in the Middle East.

No one knows the ultimate results of the toppling of Hussein and Washington's attempts to bring democracy to the Arab world, but there are more skeptics than optimists, such as Bush and Rice, who think their sacrifices will eventually "change the face of the Middle East."

Only time will show who of them were right. Now, what does the region expect from the new U.S. president?

It hopes Barack Obama will not start a new war, especially in the Middle East (a reference to Iran), and will put an end to the doctrine of preemptive military actions. The regional countries expect Obama to actively contribute to the Middle East settlement, notably support the Syrian-Israeli track and cooperate with the regional forces on the issue of Iraq.

As for beliefs, the Arab world is wary of the new White House chief. Arabs have no personal concerns over Barack Obama, but think the U.S. has been providing excessive support to Israel and mistrust Washington.

Israel is also worried, but in a different way. On a more practical plane, it wants to know what President Obama will do first, what he will do regarding the states that threaten Israel's security, and who he will choose for his Mideast team.

We will know the answer to these concerns very soon.


14:24 | 29/12/2008


rian.ru

December 29, 2008 | 10:06 AM Comments  0 comments


Inside Gaza: A Living Hell
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By Sami Abdel-Shafi, Independent UK:


I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father's house, to make sure he was OK.

Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.

Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighborhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here?

Perhaps a police station about 200 meters away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometer away, where one of the main police training centers stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement program was under way. These were the young men trained to organize traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip's police chief.

News came by word of mouth. There had been more than 150 deaths and more than 200 people were injured or missing under rubble after the first two hours of bombing. Israel had said it would continue the offensive and deepen it if necessary. Likewise, it was said that Hamas had launched more rockets at southern Israeli towns, causing one death and four injuries. Gaza had never seen anything like the numbers of dead bodies lying on its streets. Hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside.

Bombs targeting a Hamas security force building badly damaged an adjacent school, and several children were injured. We heard of many other targets around the Gaza Strip. It reminds me of the "shock and awe" campaign the Allies launched over Baghdad in 2003. But shock and awe did not bring stability or peace.

These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell.


alternet.org

December 28, 2008 | 2:44 PM Comments  0 comments


It's Official: We're Just a Few Years from Peak Oil
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com:


Can you think of a major threat for which the British government does not prepare? It employs an army of civil servants, spooks and consultants to assess the chances of terrorist attacks, financial collapse, floods, epidemics, even asteroid strikes, and to work out what it should do if they happen. But there is one hazard about which it appears intensely relaxed. It has never conducted its own assessment of the state of global oil supplies and the possibility that one day they might peak and then go into decline.

If you ask, it always produces the same response: "global oil resources are adequate for the foreseeable future." It knows this, it says, because of the assessments made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook reports. In the 2007 report, the IEA does appear to support the government's view. "World oil resources," it states, "are judged to be sufficient to meet the projected growth in demand to 2030;" though it says nothing about what happens at that point, or whether they will continue to be sufficient after 2030. But this, as far as Whitehall is concerned, is the end of the matter. Like most of the rich world's governments, the United Kingdom treats the IEA's projections as gospel. Earlier this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK's Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for global supplies of oil peaking by 2020. The answer was as follows: "the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020."

So the IEA had better bloody well be right. In the report on peak oil commissioned by the US Department of Energy, the oil analyst Robert L.Hirsch concluded that "without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs" of world oil supplies peaking "will be unprecedented." He went on to explain what "timely mitigation" meant. Even a worldwide emergency response "10 years before world oil peaking", he wrote, would leave "a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked." To avoid global economic collapse, we need to begin "a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking." If Hirsch is right and if oil supplies peak before 2028, we're in deep doodah.

So burn this into your mind: between 2007 and 2008 the IEA radically changed its assessment. Until this year's report, the agency mocked people who said that oil supplies might peak. In the foreword to a book it published in 2005, its executive director, Claude Mandil, dismissed those who warned of this event as "doomsayers". "The IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern," he wrote. "Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future." In its 2007 World Energy Outlook, the IEA predicted a rate of decline in output from the world's existing oilfields of 3.7 percent a year. This, it said, presented a short-term challenge, with the possibility of a temporary supply crunch in 2015, but with sufficient investment any shortfall could be covered. But the new report, published last month, carried a very different message: a projected rate of decline of 6.7 percent, which means a much greater gap to fill.

More importantly, in the 2008 report the IEA suggests for the first time that world petroleum supplies might hit the buffers. "Although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period." These bland words reveal a major shift. Never before has one of the IEA's energy outlooks forecast the peaking or plateauing of the world's conventional oil production (which is what we mean when we talk about peak oil).

But that is as specific as the report gets. Does it or doesn't it mean that we have time to prepare? What does "towards the end of the projection period" mean? The agency has never produced a more precise forecast -- until now. For the first time, in the interview I conducted with its chief economist Fatih Birol, it has given us a date. And it should scare the pants off anyone who understands the implications.

Fatih Birol, the lead author of the new energy outlook, is a small, shrewd, unflustered man with thick grey hair and Alistair Darling eyebrows. He explained to me that the agency's new projections were based on a major study it had undertaken into decline rates in the world's 800 largest oil fields. So what were its previous figures based on? "It was mainly an assumption, a global assumption about the world's oil fields. This year, we looked at it country by country, field by field and we looked at it also onshore and offshore. It was very very detailed. Last year it was an assumption, and this year it's a finding of our study." I told him that it seemed extraordinary to me that the IEA hadn't done this work before, but had based its assessment on educated guesswork. "In fact nobody had done this research," he told me. "This is the first publicly available data".

So was it not irresponsible to publish a decline rate of 3.7 percent in 2007, when there was no proper research supporting it? "No, our previous decline assumptions have always mentioned that these are assumptions to the best of our knowledge -- and we also said that the declines [could be] higher than what we have assumed."

Then I asked him a question for which I didn't expect a straight answer: could he give me a precise date by which he expects conventional oil supplies to stop growing?

"In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel]", he replied, "we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view."

Around 2020. That casts the issue in quite a different light. Mr Birol's date, if correct, gives us about 11 years to prepare. If the Hirsch report is right, we have already missed the boat. Birol says we need a "global energy revolution" to avoid an oil crunch, including (disastrously for the environment) a massive global drive to exploit unconventional oils, such as the Canadian tar sands. But nothing on this scale has yet happened, and Hirsch suggests that even if it began today, the necessary investments and infrastructure changes could not be made in time. Fatih Birol told me "I think time is not on our side here."

When I pressed him on the shift in the agency's position, he argued that the IEA has been saying something like this all along. "We said in the past that one day we will run out of oil. We never said that we will have hundreds of years of oil … but what we have said is that this year, compared to past years, we have seen that the decline rates are significantly higher than what we have seen before. But our line that we are on an unsustainable energy path has not changed."

This of course is face-saving nonsense. There is a vast difference between a decline rate of 3.7 percent and a rate of 6.7 percent. There is an even bigger difference between suggesting that the world is following an unsustainable energy path -- a statement almost everyone can subscribe to -- and revealing that conventional oil supplies are likely to plateau around 2020. If this is what the IEA meant in the past, it wasn't expressing itself very clearly.

So what do we do? We could take to the hills, or we could hope and pray that Hirsch is wrong about the 20-year lead time, and begin a global crash programme today of fuel efficiency and electrification. In either case, the British government had better start drawing up some contingency plans.


alternet.org

December 23, 2008 | 9:31 AM Comments  0 comments


From Bush’s idealism to Obama’s realism?
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

By ÖMER TAŞPINAR:


When President George W. Bush entered office, he promised to follow a "realist's" foreign policy. His secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was a student of Brent Scowcroft, who, together with Henry Kissinger, is an icon of American realpolitik.

Cheney, his vice president, was known as somebody who practiced such realism. Rice, like Scowcroft, was a strong believer in a balance of "power politics" and the need to prioritize American national interests above any idealistic vision based on morality, freedom or nation building. As Bush himself promised during the 2000 presidential election campaign, his administration wanted to follow a "humble foreign policy." And then Sept. 11 happened. The whole world turned upside down and realism was thrown out the window. Overnight, Bush turned into a Wilsonian idealist and embraced the "freedom agenda" as a cornerstone of his war on terrorism.

Now America is taking a sharp turn toward what appears to be realism again. President-elect Barack Obama has signaled that foreign affairs will not be his primary concern. As Fouad Ajami recently wrote: "If Mr. Bush believed he could remake that old and broken and wily region, Mr. Obama signals a fatigue with it, an acceptance of its order of power. If Mr. Bush believed that he could insert himself into the internal affairs of distant Islamic lands, Mr. Obama and his foreign-policy advisers portend a return to realpolitik and to a resigned acceptance of the ways of foreign autocracies. We have erred, the Obama worldview preaches, and overreached. We have over-read the verdict of 9/11, and it is time to make our peace with regimes we have offended in the Bush years. It is the Scowcroftian way -- other lands, other ways."

We know Obama wants to talk to Iran and Syria. We also know that he wants to revitalize the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process. But Obama is conspicuously silent about democratization in the region and beyond. So will Obama's presidency be the end of American idealism and the agenda of freedom? The answer is likely to be "yes." It looks like the fixing the US economy will trump all other pursuits and temptations of the next administration. And the Democrats are simply tired of the Middle East and Bush's theology of freedom.

As Ajami rightly argues, the last eight years have provided an odd spectacle: " … a conservative American president preaching the gospel of liberty for lands beyond, [while] his liberal detractors at home [are] giving voice to a deep skepticism about liberty's chances in inhospitable settings. No one was more revealing of the liberal temper -- and of things to come -- than Vice President-elect Joe Biden (then the point man for foreign policy among the Democrats) speaking in December 2006 about the hazards of believing in liberty's appeal to Muslim lands. Of President Bush, he said: 'He has this wholesome but naive view that Westerners' notions of liberty are easily transported to that area of the world.' Mr. Biden knew better: He warned the president, he said, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's view of liberty differed from 'our view of liberty … I think the president thinks there's a Thomas Jefferson or Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up. And there are none'."

Part of Obama's reluctance to push for democracy comes from familiarity with the region. "Obama's reticence about those burning grounds of the Islamic world is, in part, a matter of biography," argues Ajami. "The Islamic faith was the faith of his father. A candidate with the middle name of Hussein could not afford soaring rhetoric about the ability of freedom to survive on Islamic soil." Having lived in Indonesia as a child and having studied and traveled the world, Obama is intellectually much better equipped than Bush about the Muslim world. But with too much knowledge, confusion, hesitation and nuance often come.

Ajami is quick to remind us: "Bush had been free and confident enough to take up the cause of reform and drastic change in the Islamic world, because he did not know much about the ways of those lands. But Wilson did not know the region either. Yet, his doctrine of self-determination in the aftermath of the Great War, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 'endures as the most consequential and revolutionary American message taken to the lands of old empires'."

It is with a certain sadness that I agree with Ajami. Pushing for democracy in the Islamic world requires idealism and sometimes "blind" faith. The world needs America's determination to push for democracy and I hope Obama will not turn his back to democratization in the Islamic world. Bush was right when he identified the absence of freedom as the root cause of problems in the Islamic world. Yet, he had no clue about how to promote it. Let's hope Obama knows better. Because without democracy, neither radicalism nor poverty is likely to come to an end in the greater Middle East.


todayszaman

December 21, 2008 | 11:33 PM Comments  0 comments


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