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Deforestation unlocking carbon reserves (LAT-WP) A vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US. By Andrew Higgins Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, in Taruna Jaya in Indonesia, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick — and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle. The lopsided struggle is part of a battle against one of the biggest, and most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. Unlike the noxious gases pumped into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in the United States and smoke-belching factories in China, danger here in the heart of Borneo rises from the ground itself. Peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed trees, grass and scrub, contains gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide, which used to stay locked in the ground. It is now drying and disintegrating, as once-soggy swamps are shorn of trees and drained by canals, and when it burns, carbon dioxide gushes into the atmosphere. Amid often acrimonious debate over how to curb global warming ahead of a critical UN conference next month in Copenhagen, “peat is the big elephant in the room,” said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia’s National Council on Climate Change. Dealing with it, he said, requires that the world answer a vexing question: How to make protection of the environment as economically rewarding as its often lucrative destruction? Carbon trading was meant to do just that by allowing developing countries that cut their emissions to sell carbon credits. But this and other incentives for conservation developed since a UN conference in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 have done nothing to protect Indonesia’s abused peatlands. Less than a quarter of a century ago, 75 percent of Kalimantan — which comprises three Indonesian regions on the island of Borneo — was covered in thick forests. Gnawed away since by loggers, oil palm plantations and grandiose state projects, the forests have since shrunk by about half. Each year, Indonesia loses forest area roughly the size of Connecticut. Fires, meanwhile, have grown more frequent and serious. Since centuries, Kalimantan locals have burned forestland to create plots for farming. But what used to be small, controlled fires have become fearsome conflagrations as dry and degraded peat goes up in smoke. Estimating carbon emissions from deforested peatland is a highly complicated and inexact science. Even when not burning, dried peat leaks a slow but steady stream of carbon dioxide and other gases. Once it catches fire, the stream becomes a torrent. In 2006, according to Wetlands International, a Dutch research and lobbying group, Indonesia’s peatlands released roughly 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — equal to the combined emissions that year of Germany, Britain and Canada, and more than US emissions from road and air travel. When particularly bad fires raged across Kalimantan in 1997, according to a study led by a British scientist, the amount was four times as high — more than the total emissions by the United States in that period. How dirt became so dangerous — and why reversing the damage is so difficult — is on grim display here in Central Kalimantan, inhabited by about 2 million people and a rapidly dwindling population of orangutans. Economic logic here is firmly on the side of those wrecking the environment. For example, Hadrianyani, the firefighter in Taruna Jaya, also has another job: He clears peatland of trees and scrub for cultivation — a task done most easily by burning. That work earns him about $8 a day — twice what he gets for putting out fires. Across Kalimantan, logging and palm oil companies deploy formidable economic, and real, firepower against environmental activists trying to protect the fragile peat. On a recent afternoon in Lamunti, a desolate Central Kalimantan settlement crisscrossed with fetid canals, the rival camps faced off. On one side of a wooden barrier at the entrance to PT Globalindo Agung Lestari, an oil palm estate, stood a dozen or so out-of-town environmental activists with a bullhorn. On the other side stood company security guards, local police officers and Indonesian soldiers with automatic weapons. Villagers, though angry at the plantation, stayed away: They didn’t want to lose their jobs tending oil palm. The pay is about $3 a day and the work backbreaking, but “when you don’t have anything, you have to support the company,” said Budi, 21, who, like many Indonesians, uses one name. Interviewed away from the company’s compound, villagers accused its managers of stealing their land. The village chief, Syahrani, said he was trying to get compensation but didn’t hold out much hope. Globalindo’s bosses “have all the power. They control everything,” he said. Of the 600 working-age people in his village, 75 percent work at Globalindo. Acting estate manager Karel Yoseph Rauy declined to comment on allegations that his company had pilfered land. The uneven match of reality and good intentions has put Central Kalimantan’s government in a bind. “The carbon here is huge. It should be safeguarded like Fort Knox,” said Humda Pontas, the Maine-educated head of the economics department at the regional planning board. But palm plantations, though a serious threat to carbon-rich peatland, “are the only real investment opportunity. They employ people” and pay taxes. The rest, he said, “is just theory.” The deforestation of Kalimantan began with loggers. Then, in 1995, Indonesia’s authoritarian ruler, Suharto, launched a plan to turn nearly 2.5 million acres of peatland — about twice the size of Delaware — into a rice farm. Thousands of workers were shipped in to dig canals and drain swamps. Suwido Limin, a local scientist, protested that the plan would never work. The government dismissed him as a communist. Suharto’s “mega rice” project turned out to be a disastrous flop. “It was supposed to produce rice. It just produced haze,” said Limin, who runs a peat research center and has joined with American bank J.P. Morgan to develop a project to fight peatland fires — and earn money from carbon credits. A year after Suharto fell from power in 1998, Jakarta pulled the plug on his rice folly. Since then, Indonesian and foreign experts have struggled to figure out how to repair the damage. An Indonesian-Dutch plan to rehabilitate the area put the price tag at about $700m. The hope is that a big chunk of this might come from carbon trading if delegates at next month’s Copenhagen conference agree to expand the system of conservation incentives to cover peatlands. The Indonesian-Dutch plan calculates that emissions reductions in the former mega-rice zone could fetch $50 million to $100 million a year on the global carbon market. Agustin Teras Narang, governor of Central Kalimantan, likes the idea of earning big money from his region’s vast peatland vault of carbon dioxide. But, with no sign of peat turning into a profit center anytime soon, the governor’s big concern is getting Jakarta to let him turn more of Central Kalimantan’s forests over to production — primarily rubber and oil palm plantations. When fires raced across his territory in September, Narang had seven firetrucks to cover an area bigger than Virginia and Maryland combined. Schools shut down, the airport closed, and hospitals struggled to cope with thousands of patients suffering from respiratory problems. The fires also delivered a devastating blow to Limin, the peat researcher. Flames reduced his research camp to charcoal. Charred sardine cans, an incinerated bicycle and shattered glass now litter an apocalyptic landscape of smoldering peat and uprooted trees. Before the fires started, Limin was working on a big experimental project to reduce fire risk and thus carbon emissions. Financing was to come largely from J.P. Morgan’s ClimateCare unit, headed by British engineer Mike Mason, a prominent Oxford-based climate entrepreneur. Mason took the firefighting project to a UN climate committee in Germany that reviews emission-reductions ventures and decides whether they might qualify to earn carbon credits. In June, the committee rejected the proposal, arguing that peat fires are a natural phenomenon and, therefore, not eligible. (Most experts disagree and say the fires are not natural.) Limin put his ambitious firefighting plans on hold. When flames advanced on his forest encampment in September, he had just a couple of dozen men to battle them. After days of struggle, they retreated. Shortly after his camp was gobbled up, Limin stood near a table on which a police-band radio crackled with reports from the forest of yet more flames. He groaned. Saving peat and the planet, Limin said, requires that people get paid: “Who will work without pay? Nobody.” |
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A bogus, pompous, ludicrous and overpriced job (The Times) The manner of the birth of the new European presidency tells you everything that is wrong with it. Instantly it has provoked confusion, a satirical focus on personalities and rancour between nations large and small. Everyone is talking about who the president and foreign minister of this abstract entity will be, no one about how it will actually work. Perhaps that is because, in their hearts, people know that it can’t. The EU is not a country and, far from “gaining weight globally by speaking with one voice”, acting as if it were could imperil many of its achievements to date. I was a communist specialist at the Foreign Office when EU political co-operation first got under way in the 1970s. It proved a winner. Previously, the instinctive reaction of the French, the Germans and the British to an East-West problem had been how they could use it to score points off one another. Afterwards — notably in the Helsinki process, in which I took part — the Nine (as we then were) experimented successfully with the novel approach of facing the adversary together. As principal private secretary to David Owen and Lord Carrington I later saw how intimate senior European foreign ministers had become, lunching and dining and above all breakfasting at international gatherings ad hoc and à la carte, or at discreet, unpublicised meetings. Meanwhile, a web of contacts was forming between specialists and commissioners for foreign affairs in Brussels, anonymous folk for the most part, working to keep the Nine pointing in the same direction. In this way the ha... |
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Mirror, mirror into space, can you cool off this place? (LAT-WP) By Henry Chu If there were some kind of panic button to stop global warming, what would it look like? How about billions of tiny mirrors, launched into orbit to deflect solar rays away from Earth? Or big, fluffy clouds, artificially whitened so they reflect more sunlight back into space? Or maybe mechanical trees, ugly but effective at sucking carbon dioxide from the air along busy highways? Outlandish as some of these proposals may seem, scientists and engineers are paying increasing attention to such ideas amid mounting evidence that human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc in some parts of the world. The proposals belong to a field known as geo-engineering, or manipulation of the environment on a grand scale. As a solution to global warming, it remains a highly controversial concept, dismissed as a dangerous distraction by critics or embraced as a quick, if temporary, fix by enthusiasts such as the authors of the best-selling book “Freakonomics”. Regardless, decision-makers are beginning to take notice. The US House Committee on Science and Technology held its first hearing on the topic this month. “It’s too soon to think about actually doing any of these things, but it’s the right time for some serious research and for some funding from the government,” said John Shepherd, a professor of Earth science at the University of Southampton in southern England, who testified at the hearing. Shepherd is a member of the prestigious Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists that released a highly publicised report in September identifying various geo-engineering solutions and assessing their feasibility. The ideas usually fall into either of two categories. In one, the goal is to decrease the amount of sunshine hitting and warming Earth — one eye-popping proposal calls for unfurling a space-based gigantic shade made of a super-thin mesh of aluminum threads. A more reasonable and promising alternative, according t... |
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CIA pays hundreds of millions for Pakistani intelligence (LAT-WP) By Greg Miller The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s intelligence service since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency’s annual budget, current and former US officials say. The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA programme that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said. The payments have triggered intense debate within the US government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine US efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. But US officials have continued the funding because the ISI’s assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence. The White House National Security Council has “this debate every year,” said a former high-ranking US intelligence official involved in the discussions. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Despite deep misgivings about the ISI, the official said, “there was no other game in town.” The payments to Pakistan are authorized under a covert program initially approved by President George W Bush and continued under President Barack Obama. The CIA declined to comment on the agency’s financial ties to the ISI. US officials often tout US-Pakistani intelligence cooperation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship have never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the US has given Pakistan more than $15bn over the last eight years in military and civilian aid. Congress recently approved an extra $1bn a year to help Pakistan stabilize its tribal belt at a time when Obama is considering whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a range of purposes, includi... |
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Nevada’s hidden ocean of radiation (LAT-WP) By Ralph Vartabedian A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada. Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and in some cases directly into aquifers. When testing ended in 1992, the US Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation. During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage. They successfully pressured federal officials for a fresh environmental assessment of the 1,375-square-mile test site, a step toward a potential demand for monetary compensation, replacement of the lost water or a massive cleanup. “It is one of the largest resource losses in the country,” said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. “Nobody thought to say, ‘You are destroying a natural resource.’” In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years — enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep. At today’s prices, that water would be worth as much as $48bn if it had not been fouled, Buqo said. Although the contaminated water is migrating southwest from the high ground of the test site, the Energy Department has no cleanup plans, saying it would be impossible to remove the radioactivity. Instead, its emphasis is on monitoring. Federal scientists say the tainted water is moving so slowly -- 3 inches to 18 feet a year—that it will not reach the nearest community, Beatty, about 22 miles... |
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Pakistani scientist confirms Chinese proliferation role (LAT-WP) By R Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post. The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan. US officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese — who denied it — but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that “the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons,” plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday. According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan’s bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: US officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran; in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan’s clandestine network. China’s refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation. Although US officials say China is now much more attuned to proliferation dangers, it has demonstrated less enthusiasm than the United States for imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear efforts, a position Obama wants to discuss. Although Chinese officials have for a quarter-century denied helping any nation attain a nuclear capability, current and former US officials say Khan’s accounts confirm the US intelligence community’s long-held conclusion that China provided such assistance. “Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister ... had gifted us 50kg of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons,” Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb program that he prepared after his January 2004 detention for unauthorized nuclear commerce. “The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium,” he said in a separate account sent to his wife several months earlier. China’s Foreign Ministry last week declined to address Khan’s specific assertions, but it said that as a member of the global Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, “China strictly adheres to the international duty of prevention of proliferation it shoulders and strongly opposes ... proliferation of nuclear weapons in any forms.” Asked why the US government has never publicly confronted China over the uranium transfer, State D... |
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