HUGE TURNAROUND: TONY BLAIR NOW A SELF-DECLARED CLIMATE "HERETIC"

Tony Blair has defended the achievements of the G8 summit at Gleneagles and said yesterday that "very substantial progress" had been made on aid to Africa and climate change.... Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, he said that African leaders must "abide by the proper rules of governance" or risk throwing the package into jeopardy. He also said that he took a "heretical view" on climate change - because he believes that the United States is not necessarily the massive block to progress that many commentators allege.

The G8 meeting was condemned for producing a stalemate on climate change, with the only concrete proposal for Britain to host a meeting in November to "assess progress". Through the summit, President Bush barely shifted the US position at all. Mr Blair said: "The ambition I had for this summit in respect of climate change was limited. But in my view it offers a better way forward. "It is to get people to accept there is a problem, agree we had to act urgently and most important of all to agree a process of dialogue that would involve not just America but also China and India and the emerging economies."

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BUSH VICTORY AT G8

The official communique of the G8 leaders on global warming represents a significant victory for President Bush. There are no targets or timetables, no ominous declarations of immediate global catastrophe, and no calls to reduce world energy consumption. Instead, the statement recognizes that the threat is long-term and stresses the need for adaptation to deal with the challenges. Moreover, there is recognition that the world actually needs to increase power consumption to help the 2 billion people who have little or no access to energy. In effect, the G8 has adopted the American position on global warming as the consensus position (even the language about science comes straight from Administration documents). This statement relegates global warming to its proper place in world affairs - one to keep an eye on, and work to mitigate with appropriate, low-cost strategies, but not an immediate priority. It also means that the Kyoto treaty, mentioned almost as an afterthought, is effectively dead, yesterday's solution to yesterday's conception of tomorrow's problem. The Europeans are still bound by it, however, and unless they have the courage to admit that it is the wrong course, they will continue to struggle with it until it collapses as a result of its own contradictions.

Tony Blair's role in securing the President's victory should also be acknowledged. Although his instincts are those of the left, he can see the right path, in his own Gladstonian way, when someone is courageous enough to put the case forcefully, as the President has done. Without his efforts, I'm not sure this victory would have been as complete as it has been.

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HIMALAYAS MELTING? THE LATEST GREENIE LIE

Read the garbage below and then take note that the IPCC says that the temperature in the Himalayas region has actually been FALLING. The glacial cover CANNOT therefore be getting smaller because of warming. It is probably getting smaller because of reduced precipitation (snowfall). So that actually leads to LESS flooding

Deluge, drought, disease: if the experts are right, then the misfortune facing Asia will be like a biblical catastrophe. It will begin with overflowing rivers, which will wash away homes and fields in China, India and South-East Asia. After a few decades will come drought, as the same rivers dwindle to a trickle. And then will come the second deluge — immense walls of water, like mountain tsunamis, which will break through thin walls of frozen earth, washing away bridges, dams and Himalayan communities. Countless people will drown or die from the inevitable epidemics and food shortages. Many more will lose their livelihoods and be condemned to poverty in some of the most densely populated areas of the world. And, most alarming of all, it may be too late to do anything about it.

Those are the potential consequences of one of Asia’s most serious environmental problems — the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, the vast moving mountains of ice that grind imperceptibly along the valleys of the Tibetan Plateau. According to an increasing number of environmentalists and climate scientists who have studied the glaciers, there is no doubt that they are melting as a result of global warming, with incalculable consequences for countries as far apart as Pakistan and Cambodia.

In China alone, more than 700 people died and almost three million were displaced last month when rivers in the south and east of the country burst their banks. Climate scientists say that it is difficult to make a clear connection between the melting of the glaciers and these recent floods, [You bet it is] which were also the result of heavy rain. But rising temperatures in the Himalayas are only going to make such disasters bigger and more frequent....

But the average temperature in the Himalayas has risen by 1C since the 1970s, and the glaciers are in retreat. The Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has retreated more than three miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953. According to a report published in March by the WWF, a quarter of the world’s glaciers could disappear by 2050.

(Excerpt from "The Times" of July 12th)




GERMAN GREENS WILTING

Twelve months ago Germany's Greens were at the peak of their power. With 13 percent support in polls-their highest ratings ever-they had become the party of choice for a broad, educated elite. Observers saw their handwriting all over the policies of the government they had formed with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in 1998: new mandates for renewable energy and recycling, an agreement to phase out nuclear power, a modern citizenship law that did away with ancient blood-based rules, even gay-partnership rights. Their leader, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, was easily the most popular politician in Germany.

Just a year later, the Greens are floundering. In May elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, voters kicked them out of the last of five state governments where they once shared power. Fischer is under investigation in a scandal involving human trafficking from Eastern Europe-critics say he approved a controversial 2000 directive abolishing background checks on foreign visitors, and refused to make changes despite having been informed of massive abuse. Support for both the party and its leader has taken a nose dive, and Schroeder's decision to call early elections for Sept. 18 has caught them at the worst possible moment. A weakened Social Democratic Party (SPD) could conceivably join up with the conservatives in a "grand coalition." But virtually no one can envision a scenario in which the Greens-who have no other allies than the hemorrhaging SPD-stay in government.

The party may thus be the most direct victim of Schroeder's political woes. The question is whether it's experiencing a temporary setback, or is in terminal decline. "The Zeitgeist has turned," says Thomas Petersen, an analyst at the Allensbach polling institute. With 12 percent unemployment-and seemingly endless economic stagnation-spreading anxiety deep into the middle class, the national debate has shifted from things like global warming to the hard issues of jobs, money and welfare. Last week Schroeder's SPD unveiled an "election manifesto" that promises a new "rich-people tax" to help pay for its social programs. The conservatives will follow with their own platform this week, expected to focus on labor-market deregulation and the cutting of payroll taxes. Classic Green issues like the environment, pacifism and feminism now seem like indulgences to many. "Green worries are luxury worries," says Petersen. "When there are no jobs, the ozone hole no longer matters."

Ouch. As if overnight, the Greens have turned from the darlings of the German establishment to emblems of what ails the country. goodbye eco-freaks, the Financial Times Deutschland headlined last week, predicting the advent of a long conservative era. With their neglect of hard-hitting economic issues, the Greens have turned themselves into "the feel-good party of the urban academic milieu," sneered even Berlin's Tageszeitung, a historically leftist paper. Critics see Fischer's visa scandal as the embodiment of what's wrong with the Greens: do-good policies-in this case, opening Germany's borders in the name of "multiculturalism"-paired with an arrogant disregard for the cost to the country. A similarly high-minded policy to subsidize wind power has drawn protests from citizens angry about thousands of giant wind turbines that now sully once pristine landscapes. Even Schroeder has lashed out at his erstwhile political allies, suggesting in a recent interview in the weekly Die Zeit that sharing power might have been a mistake.

To be fair, Schroeder's own party, not the Greens, bears greater responsibility for the chancellor's demise. His left wing has rebelled against even modest economic reforms-hence the SPD's new soak-the-rich platform. In fact, on the issue of urgently needed economic reforms, the Greens have been more pro-market than Schroeder, calling for an end to rust-belt industry subsidies and less red tape for entrepreneurs. Rightly or wrongly, the Greens even credit their environmental policies with creating jobs. "Look where the new jobs are in Germany," says Anna Luhrmann, a Green M.P. in Berlin, noting the 70,000 positions created in the renewable-energy sector. Wind- and solar-power companies have been among the fastest growing in the country, and a high-tech recycling industry has begun expanding abroad.

Yet a boom in wind and garbage may matter little in the face of a broad cultural shift. If Cologne University sociologist and Greens expert Markus Klein is right, Germany is in the grip of a "values rollback," away from the post-materialist values of the comfortable 1970s and '80s-including concern for the environment and minority rights-to a more conservative emphasis on achievement, responsibility, family, career and, to a small extent, even religion. Young Germans who grew up in the economically insecure 1990s, he says, worry about jobs and education, not the second-tier issues with which the Greens are identified. Already, says Klein, Green voters are concentrated in the 40-to-49 age bracket, while young voters are increasingly flocking to conservative and liberal-democratic parties. "The Greens are a one-generation project," says Klein. "Their core voters will just die out."

That probably underestimates the Greens' resilience, and the persistence of the issues they address. As last week's G8 meeting in Scotland showed, "soft" issues such as climate change and developing-world aid are hardly ephemeral. "If even George W. Bush talks about the need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, then I'm not going to worry about the future of the Greens," says Luhrmann. And as intransigent as their reputation might be, the Greens have shown a remarkable capacity for change. Once in office, peacenik Fischer passionately supported sending German troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan. And the once anarchist Greens have had no qualms about abolishing an array of privacy rights-like confidentiality in banking-only loosely connected with the fight against terror. An "ecolibertarian" wing of the Greens even wants to ally with Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats.

Such hard-nosed realism is not likely to save the party come September: the latest polls show the Greens garnering only 7 percent of the vote. But four years in opposition may give them enough time to figure out how to adapt to Germany's new reality

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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