Terrence McNally interviews author/columnist, Mark Hertzgaard, just
back from the conference. Sun., December 20th, 1-2pm PT (4-5pm ET)
China Wins Struggle For Pipelinestan
"The Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get
resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like
hell, and it all falls into your lap."
Juan Cole
Informed Comment: December 15, 2009
A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington's
interest in Central Asian fuel sources-- natural gas in Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and
others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to
energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991,
making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in
the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.
If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid
to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to
Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow
instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.
So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running
off with the big regional prize.
On Tuesday, radical guerrillas deployed a bomb to kill 8 persons and wound
40 in an upscale area of Kabul where foreigners, including Indian aid
workers, live-- in another sign of the deterioration of security in
Afghanistan's capital. It is obvious how long a gas pipeline would last
under these circumstances.
I'm not sure very many politicians in Washington were ever really so
interested in the gas pipeline. For someone like then Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, making Afghanistan a US base may have aimed at surrounding
and weakening Russia and keeping it from reemerging as a peer (a la the
attempted push of NATO into places like Georgia.)
Some US leaders, however, were pushing for it. In recent years a
Turkmenistan pipeline was seen as a way of forestalling India from breaking
the embargo on Iran. And I remember that in fall 2001, when congressmen
asked Colin Powell how the Afghanistan war would be paid for, he replied
that the region is rich in resources. Since Afghanistan is not, he must have
been speaking of places like Turkmenistan.
In any case the Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get
resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like hell, and it
all falls into your lap.
***
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/18-11
Copenhagen Negotiators Bicker and Filibuster While the Biosphere Burns
Denouement of a chaotic, disastrous climate summit
by George Monbiot
The Guardian/UK: December 18, 2009
First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from
the text. This is no longer about saving the biosphere: now it's just a
matter of saving face. As the talks melt down, everything that might have
made a new treaty worthwhile is being scratched out. Any deal will do, as
long as the negotiators can pretend they have achieved something. A clearer
and less destructive treaty than the texts currently being discussed would
be a sheaf of blank paper, which every negotiating party solemnly sits down
to sign.
This is the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous
summit. The event has been attended by historic levels of incompetence.
Delegates arriving from the tropics spent 10 hours queueing in sub-zero
temperatures without shelter, food or drink, let alone any explanation or
announcement, before being turned away. Some people fainted from exposure;
it's surprising that no one died. The process of negotiation is just as
obtuse: there's no evidence here of the innovative methods of dispute
resolution developed recently by mediators and coaches, just the same old
pig-headed wrestling.
Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn't allowed in either), it
strikes me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years.
There's a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or
pickelhaubes, but otherwise, as the world's governments try to decide how to
carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of
Berlin in 1884. It's as if democratisation and the flowering of civil
society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments,
whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone
those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global
commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere
comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.
At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed
or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the
world's people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In
this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these
talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they
can - to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process
couldn't have been better designed to produce the wrong results.
I have spent most of my time at the Klimaforum, the alternative conference
set up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a
hitch. (I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There
the barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration
of planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to
those won by humans after the second world war. It changes the legal
relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from ownership
to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation which gives
nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the people who
depend on them.
Even before this new farce began it was beginning to look as if it might be
too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation
states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of
responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost
17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could
have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of
a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by
the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations
characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm
commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and
outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term
welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved
more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human
civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main
function of government: to protect us from each other.
Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral
reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The
governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and
filibustered while the biosphere burns.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
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