"Setting out Obama's green agenda
VIEWPOINT
Peter Seligmann
Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the US as the world is engulfed in a global economic crisis, says Peter Seligmann. He calls on the new president not to ignore the environment, which is "rapidly reaching a tipping point".

What an odd juxtaposition of almost giddy anticipation and deep anxiety as we prepare for a US presidential inauguration that will be celebrated worldwide.
Hopes for a new year and a new global leader of vision and courage collide with a tremendous angst as people everywhere are engulfed by the global economic crisis.

Alongside the urgent action needed to keep the economy afloat, there is a course that President-elect Barack Obama can chart that will help our global society move into a new era of sustained security.

This security is not only for our economies, but also for our health and for present and future generations to thrive.

Another young US president, Theodore Roosevelt, summed up that course about 100 years ago when he said: "The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem.

"Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others."

'Tipping point'

As Mr Obama becomes the 44th president, one of his toughest challenges is also his greatest opportunity.

The global environment is rapidly reaching a tipping point, much like our global economy.

Once it passes that point, it will be all the more difficult to pull it back to stability.

Our Earth is being altered to the point where it cannot sustain much of the life that has thrived for millennia; species extinctions today are occurring at an estimated 1,000 times the normal rate.

When our landscapes, rivers and coral reefs can no longer sustain robust species populations, humans are also in trouble.

People depend on healthy ecosystems for the very fundamentals of survival: clean air, fresh water, soil regeneration, crop pollination and other resources that we often take for granted until they are scarce or gone.

Just as the current financial crisis reveals how the world's economies are interconnected, we also must recognise the fundamental links between human well-being and Earth's ecosystems.

When we abuse and degrade the natural world, it affects our health, our social stability and our wallets.

Natural capital

How great is the challenge?

Well, today, 25% of wild marine fisheries are over-exploited, while another 50% are highly degraded.

West African fisheries have declined by 80% since the 1990s, resulting in thousands of fishermen searching for jobs in Europe.

When the Newfoundland cod fisheries collapsed in the early 1990s as a result of overfishing, it meant the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and cost $2bn (£1.4bn) in income support and retraining.

Tropical deforestation and land degradation contributes more global greenhouse gas emissions than all the world's cars, trucks, planes and trains combined.

What is lost in Indonesia or the Amazon affects the climate in New York, Paris and Sydney.

More than a billion people lack access to safe drinking water. In the poorest countries, one in five children dies from a preventable water-related disease.

This is a crisis that is worsening as ecosystems are damaged, increasing droughts and floods.

Mismanagement and corruption tied to natural resource exploitation have fuelled violent conflict in many countries including Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Violence linked to natural resource loss and degradation has led to unimaginable human suffering in such places as Darfur.

Tensions in the Middle East are fed by conflict over water and oil, as well as religion and politics.

Under pressure

Now, climate change exacerbates the threats posed by over-consumption, pollution and habitat destruction.

We are already witnessing rising oceans, spreading disease, reduced freshwater sources and myriad other serious threats.

Recent studies show half of the world's population could face a climate-induced food crisis by the end of this century.

Yet as overwhelming as the global environmental crisis has become, it offers some of today's greatest opportunities.

First, we must make conservation of nature a core principle of development; they cannot be separated.

Often an unintended consequence of development projects is the depletion or degradation of natural systems. We must recognise the value of nature and invest to protect it.

Ecosystem destruction costs our global economy at least $2 trillion (£1.4 trillion) every year.

That is the value forests provide by storing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, cleansing fresh water supplies, and preventing soil erosion.

It includes the value oceans and coral reefs provide in food security for millions who rely on fisheries as their primary source of protein.

Overall, global ecosystems services have been assessed to be worth as much as $33 trillion (£22.6 trillion) a year.

Every home owner understands that restoring and replacing a plumbing system, or a heating unit, is far more expensive than taking care of the system properly.

Well, the same is true for nature's ecosystems.

Restoring a forest costs 10 times as much as maintaining what we have. Building a reservoir and filtration system is far more expensive than preserving the intact forest systems that naturally filter and cleanse our drinking water.

Traditional measures of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) do not reflect changes in the quality and quantity of a nation's natural assets.

Imagine measuring your personal financial condition without factoring in a dramatic and ongoing decline in your assets.

The world needs US leadership to begin honestly accounting for the state our natural assets.

The Obama administration can bring these issues into the mainstream during this critical time of reorienting the US's national priorities.

Initiatives to advance natural resource conservation in other countries have typically lacked strong political support and received only a small fraction of the total resources dedicated to international engagement.

Mr Obama and his team should fully integrate and fund ecosystem conservation priorities within US national security considerations, as well as foreign policy and development assistance.

By helping restore and protect developing nations' natural heritage throughout the world, the US will strengthen the bonds of friendship and trust through sustainable collaborations.

The stakes are high, and the benefits of bringing ecosystem conservation to the forefront of our foreign policy will be enormous.

As 2009 begins, we face a new era of unprecedented global economic, health and security challenges.

Confronting these challenges requires a bold new commitment to protect our most valuable joint asset - planet Earth.


Peter A Seligmann is chairman and chief executive of US NGO Conservancy International

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

Do you agree with Peter Seligmann? Do you think Barack Obama's administration will take the environment seriously? Do you think the US will be a serious player in the global green agenda? Or are the problems facing the world too big for one nation to make a difference?"


Hunger. Water pollution. Air pollution. Global warming. Climate change. Geopolitical unrest. We can work together. There is an answer: please see http://www.campaignforgreen.com/.

Geopolitics-free Research Into Energy Alternatives

In a recent article----
Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: January 12, 2009

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.

Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7.

Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. *****

The world is now consuming 80 million barrels of oil a day, and that could continue to rise steeply over the coming decades if population and consumption trends continue. That could mean having to add six Saudi Arabias worth of oil output just to keep up, according to Mr. Barker-Homek, at a time when scientists are warning that carbon levels need to be cut significantly to avoid potentially disastrous global warming.
****
For the rest of the world, the enormous cash infusion may provide the important boost experts say is needed to get dozens of emerging technologies — like carbon capture, microsolar and low-carbon aluminum — over the development hump to make them cost-effective.
“The impact has been enormous,” said Michael McGehee, the associate professor at Stanford who received the $25 million Saudi grant. “It has greatly accelerated the development process.”

Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. Research money is tight, he noted.

With the Saudi money he has hired 16 new researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. “People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,” he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were one-fiftieth that amount.

Experts say the vast investments from the gulf states have already restarted stalled environmental technologies.

Hooray for them!!!! They are trying to solve problems. Why can't we do that here????? But we can, and for how we can, please see www.campaignforgreen.com for a totally sustainable, totally green energy free of emissions and more cost effective than even the alternatives already available.

Geopolitics and . . . Nukes

It's so duh that something so inefficient from an energy-producing point of view (takes years to finish and there are so many considerations of climate, ecology, health, safety, etc.) should also be used as a weapon (but do those take as long? yet I don't really want to find out) and cause so much tension regional and global tension. Perhaps if people would just realize how inefficient nukes are, they'd stop using them for weapons too. And anyway, there's another answer, a more-efficient-with-time-and-money answer, that can't be fashioned into a weapon. For more info, please see www.campaignforgreen.com.

Geopolitics and . . . Oil

Geopolitics: how land and particularly fuel derived from land influences, even determines, politics. And the influence can be bad when people use geopolitics as an excuse for trying to get their own way about something else. On an individual basis we've all done it: started an argument or done something because we're unhappy or downright angry about something, but used something else as an excuse, for whatever reason. That is understandable, but it's not helpful to us as individuals or to us on a national and global level, even though it might make us feel better at the time, better in the sense of anger vented. However, when it comes to, well, anything, but perhaps as per politics and land, especially fuel, globally, we need to use domestic resources first, without destroying the land itself (but that's a whole 'nother blog), and then, if we need to, buy from other countries.


According to the Department of Energy, “fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas -- currently provide more than 85% of all the energy consumed in the United States, nearly two-thirds of our electricity, and virtually all of our transportation fuels” (http://www.energy.gov/energysources/fossilfuels.htm).


According to the Energy Information Administration,
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm,
the United States bought oil from eighty-five countries from May 2008 to October 2008, for a total of 2,364,640 barrels.

From the Persian Gulf countries: 434, 714

Iraq: 115,201

Saudi Arabia: 284,238

Venezuala: 222, 175

Russia: 94,327

Why depend on foreign oil? What happens when all the oil other places is used up? And don't they need some of their own fuel?

But why depend on oil at all? We don't need it.

For what we do need, see http://www.campaignforgreen.com/

But Then Why . . . ???

But the why should we wait? People need clean water now, need reliable heating and cooling systems now, need minimal carbon emissions now, need to take care of the planet now.
Can't we all do something right now to change things? Something in addition to recycling, turning off lights when we leave the room, etc.? Can't we?
For more info, see http://www.campaignforgreen.com/.