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  • Why Did Israel Blow Up Gaza’s Power Station?

    Bad Faith and the Destruction of Palestine

    By Jonathan Cook

    September 29, 2006

     

    Nazareth.

    A mistake too often made by those examining Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories — or when analysing its treatment of Arabs in general, or interpreting its view of Iran — is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap.

    Such a reluctance to attribute bad faith was demonstrated this week by Israel’s foremost human rights group, B’Tselem, when it published a report into the bombing by the Israeli air force of Gaza’s power plant in late June. The horrifying consequences of this act of collective punishment — a war crime, as B’Tselem rightly notes — are clearly laid out in the report.

    The group warns that electricity is available to most of Gaza’s 1.4 million inhabitants for a few hours a day, and running water for a similar period. The sewerage system has all but collapsed, with the resulting risk of the spread of dangerous infectious disease.

    In their daily lives, Gazans can no longer rely on the basic features of modern existence. Their fridges are as good as useless, threatening outbreaks of food poisoning. The elderly and infirm living in apartments can no longer leave their homes because elevators don’t work, or are unpredictable. Hospitals and doctors’ clinics struggle to offer essential medical services. Small businesses, most of which rely on the power and water supplies, from food shops and laundry services to factories and workshops, are being forced to close.

    Rapidly approaching, says B’Tselem, is the moment when Gaza’s economy — already under an internationally backed siege to penalise the Palestinians for democratically electing a Hamas government — will simply expire under the strain.

    Unfortunately, however, B’Tselem loses the plot when it comes to explaining why Israel would choose to inflict such terrible punishment on the people of Gaza. Apparently, it was out of a thirst for revenge: the group’s report is even entitled "Act of Vengeance". Israel, it seems, wanted revenge for the capture a few days earlier of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from a border tank position used to fire artillery into Gaza.

    The problem with the "revenge" theory is that, however much a rebuke it is, it presupposes a degree of good faith on the part of the vengeance-seeker. You steal my toy in the playground, and I lash out and hit you. I have acted badly — even disproportionately to use a vogue word B’Tselem also adopts — but no one would deny that my emotions were honest. There was no subterfuge or deception in my anger. I incur blame only because I failed to control my impulses. There is even the implication that, though my action was unwarranted, my fury was justified.

    But why should we think Israel is acting in good faith, even if in bad temper, in destroying Gaza’s power station? Why should we assume it was a hot-headed over-reaction rather than a coldly calculated deed?

    In other words, why believe Israel is simply lashing out when it commits a war crime rather than committing it after careful advance planning? Is it not possible that such war crimes, rather than being spontaneous and random, are actually all pushing in the same direction?

    More especially, why should we give Israel the benefit of the doubt when its war crimes contribute, as the bombing of the power station in Gaza surely does, to easily deciphered objectives? Why not think of the bombing instead as one instalment in a long-running and slowly unfolding plan?

    The occupation of Gaza did not begin this year, after Hamas was elected, nor did it end with the disengagement a year ago. The occupation is four decades old and still going strong in both the West Bank and Gaza. In that time Israel has followed a consistent policy of subjugating the Palestinian population, imprisoning it inside ever-shrinking ghettos, sealing it off from contact with the outside world, and destroying its chances of ever developing an independent economy.

    Since the outbreak six years ago of the second intifada — the Palestinians’ uprising against the occupation — Israel has tightened its system of controls. It has sought to do so through two parallel, reinforcing approaches.

    First, it has imposed forms of collective punishment to weaken Palestinian resolve to resist the occupation, and encourage factionalism and civil war. Second, it has "domesticated" suffering inside the ghettos, ensuring each Palestinian finds himself isolated from his neighbours, his concerns reduced to the domestic level: how to receive a house permit, or get past the wall to school or university, or visit a relative illegally imprisoned in Israel, or stop yet more family land being stolen, or reach his olive groves.

    The goals of both sets of policies, however, are the same: the erosion of Palestinian society’s cohesiveness, the disruption of efforts at solidarity and resistance, and ultimately the slow drift of Palestinians away from vulnerable rural areas into the relative safety of urban centres — and eventually, as the pressure continues to mount, on into neighbouring Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt.

    Seen in this light, the bombing of the Gaza power station fits neatly into Israel’s long-standing plans for the Palestinians. Vengeance has nothing to do with it.

    Another recent, more predictable, example was an email exchange published on the Media Lens forum website involving the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. Bowen was questioned about why the BBC had failed to report on an important peace initiative begun this summer jointly by a small group of Israeli rabbis and Hamas politicians. A public meeting where the two sides would have unveiled their initiative was foiled when Israel’s Shin Bet secret service, presumably with the approval of the Israeli government, blocked the Hamas MPs from entering Jerusalem.

    Bowen, though implicitly critical of Israel’s behaviour, believes the initiative was of only marginal significance. He doubts that the Shin Bet or the government were overly worried by the meeting — in his words, it was seen as no more than a "minor irritant" — because the Israeli peace camp has shown a great reluctance to get involved with the Palestinians since the outbreak of the intifada in 2000. The Israeli government would not want Hamas looking "more respectable", he admits, but adds that that is because "they believe that it is a terrorist organisation out to kill Jews and to destroy their country".

    In short, the Israeli government cracked down on the initiative because they believed Hamas was not a genuine partner for peace. Again, at least apparently in Bowen’s view, Israel was acting in good faith: when it warns that it cannot talk with Hamas because it is a terrorist organisation, it means what it says.

    But what if, for a second, we abandon the assumption of good faith?

    Hamas comprises a militant wing, a political wing and a network of welfare charities. Israel chooses to characterise all these activities as terrorist in nature, refusing to discriminate between the group’s different wings. It denies that Hamas could have multiple identities in the same way the Irish Republican Army, which included a political wing called Sinn Fein, clearly did.

    Some of Israel’s recent actions might fit with such a simplistic view of Hamas. Israel tried to prevent Hamas from standing in the Palestinian elections, only backing down after the Americans insisted on the group’s participation. Israel now appears to be destroying the Palestinians’ governing institutions, claiming that once in Hamas’ hands they will be used to promote terror.

    The Israeli government, it could be argued, acts in these ways because it is genuinely persuaded that even the political wing of Hamas is cover for terrorist activity.

    But most other measures suggest that in reality Israel has a different agenda. Since the Palestinian elections six months ago, Israel’s policies towards Hamas have succeeded in achieving one end: the weakening of the group’s moderates, especially the newly elected politicians, and the strengthening of the militants. In the debate inside Hamas about whether to move towards politics, diplomacy and dialogue, or concentrate on military resistance, we can have guess which side is currently winning.

    The moderates not the militants have been damaged by the isolation of the elected Hamas government, imposed by the international community at Israel’s instigation. The moderates not the militants have been weakened by Israel rounding up and imprisoning the group’s MPs. The moderates not the militants have been harmed by the failure, encouraged by Israel, of Fatah and Hamas politicians to create a national unity government. And the approach of the moderates not the militants has been discredited by Israel’s success in blocking the summer peace initiative between Hamas MPs and the rabbis.

    In other words, Israeli policies are encouraging the extremist and militant elements inside Hamas rather the political and moderate ones. So why not assume that is their aim?

    Why not assume that rather than wanting a dialogue, a real peace process and an eventual agreement with the Palestinians that might lead to Palestinian statehood, Israel wants an excuse to carry on with its four-decade occupation — even if it has to reinvent it through sleights of hand like the disengagement and convergence plans?

    Why not assume that Israel blocked the meeting between the rabbis and the Hamas MPs because it fears that such a dialogue might suggest to Israeli voters and the world that there are strong voices in Hamas prepared to consider an agreement with Israel, and that given a chance their strength and influence might grow?

    Why not assume that the Israeli government wanted to disrupt the contacts between Hamas and the rabbis for exactly the same reasons that it has repeatedly used violence to break up joint demonstrations in Palestinian villages like Bilin staged by Israeli and Palestinian peace actvists opposed to the wall that is annexing Palestinian farm land to Israel?

    And why, unlike Bowen, not take seriously opinion polls like the one published this week that show 67 per cent of Israelis support negotiations with a Palestinian national unity government (that is, one including Hamas), and that 56 per cent favour talks with a Palestinian government whoever is leading it? Could it be that faced with these kinds of statistics Israel’s leaders are terrified that, if Hamas were given the chance to engage in a peace process, Israeli voters might start putting more pressure on their own government to make meaningful concessions?

    In other words, why not consider for a moment that Israel’s stated view of Hamas may be a self-serving charade, that the Israeli government has invested its energies in discrediting Hamas, and before it secular Palestinian leaders, because it has no interest in peace and never has done? Its goal is the maintenance of the occupation on the best terms it can find for itself.

    On much the same grounds, we should treat equally sceptically another recent Israeli policy: the refusal by the Israeli Interior Ministry to renew the tourist visas of Palestinians with foreign passports, thereby forcing them to leave their homes and families inside the occupied territories. Many of these Palestinians, who were originally stripped by Israel of their residency rights in violation of international law, often when they left to work or study abroad, have been living on renewable three-month visas for years, even decades.

    Amazingly, this compounding of the original violation of these Palestinian families’ rights has received almost no media coverage and so far provoked not a peep of outrage from the big international human rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

    I can hazard a guess why. Unusually Israel has made no serious attempt to justify this measure. Furthermore, unlike the two examples cited above, it is difficult to put forward even a superficially plausible reason why Israel needs to pursue this policy, except for the obvious motive: that Israel believes it has found another bureaucratic wheeze to deny a few more thousand Palestinians their birthright. It is another small measure designed to ethnically cleanse these Palestinians from what might have been their state, were Israel interested in peace.

    Unlike the other two examples, it is impossible to assume any good faith on Israel’s part in this story: the measure has no security value, not even of the improbable variety, nor can it be sold as an over-reaction, vengeance, to a provocation by the group affected.

    Palestinians with foreign passports are among the richest, best educated and possibly among the most willing to engage in dialogue with Israel. Many have large business investments in the occupied territories they wish to protect from further military confrontation, and most speak fluently the language of the international community — English. In other words, they might have been a bridgehead to a peace process were Israel genuinely interested in one.

    But as we have seen, Israel isn’t. If only our media and human rights organisations could bring themselves to admit as much. But because they can’t, the transparently bad faith underpinning Israel’s administrative attempt at ethnic cleansing may be allowed to pass without any censure at all.

    Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming " Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

  • Record Profits for Exxon, Deprivation for Africa

    Oil Trip: Nigeria, Chad, Liberia

    By Emira Woods

    September 29, 2006

    http://www.counterpunch.org/woods09292006.html


    I t is almost impossible to imagine, as we sit in a well-lit, fully functioning gas station on Main Street, USA, that a community blessed with oil riches under its soil could look as impoverished as Yenagoa in the Nigerian state of Bayelsa.

    Yenagoa is the site of one of Nigeria’s first oil wells, built in pre-independence 1956 . Yet as in many communities in Nigeria’s oil rich Delta region, most people of Yenagoa live in mud huts. Some reside only a few feet away from the oil wells. But they lack electricity and indoor toilets. They have no hospitals, no running water, and no schools. And there is unemployment too. Oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil bring in foreign workers for even the most menial jobs.

    I recently took a trip to Yenagoa as part of a tour of three African countries-Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia-that may well fuel future U.S. energy needs. Historically, the United States has gotten two-thirds of its oil from other countries. Most U.S. oil imports come from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada. Increasingly, as the United States, China, and other nations expand their thirst for oil, and instability deepens in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a more attractive source for crude. The U.S. National Intelligence Council estimates that Africa could supply 25% of U.S. oil by 2015.

    The three countries I visited could well play a role in meeting that goal. Each is at different stages of oil production. In Nigeria, oil exploration dates back to 1956. In Chad, extraction started just three years ago. In Liberia, where I spent much of my childhood, the potential of oil off its expansive coastline holds hope for the future.

    In each of these countries, a complex web of geo-political actors, from oil company executives and government officials to military agents, makes decisions that impact the lives in the communities that produce the oil that flows straight to consumers in the United States.

    Nigerian Injustice

    The residents of Yenagoa lack jobs and basic social services. What they do have in abundance is environmental damage from decades of oil spills, compounded by the constant burning of gas flares necessary to extract the crude. Farmland is rendered useless while rivers and waterways, once well-populated with marine life, are now barren. One local chief explained that he received from Shell oil 150 Naira ($1.15) for each acre of land used by the company. I was astonished when he went on to say, "150 Naira, once every four years." With oil prices at historic highs, how could the compensation to communities long suffering the health impacts of oil spills and gas flares be such a pittance?

    Military and security personnel blanket the area around Yenagoa to protect oil interests. The communities are under siege.

    In Odi, a community adjacent to a well built in1958, villagers are demanding basic services like clean running water, electricity, and schools. The response from security agents has been severe. Our delegation watched in horror as one young man after another came forward to show fresh wounds from 5 days earlier. They told us that uniformed military men had grabbed 15 youths as they walked home from an adjacent village in the middle of the afternoon. The young men were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned, as a warning to others in the village. For almost a week, the youths languished in a prison miles away. Their family members were forced to walk for a day and a half to see them or bring them food in that decrepit prison. Their crime? Clamoring for basic rights.

    As oil companies celebrate record profits and the price of oil hovers close to $65 per barrel, African communities ostensibly blessed with the curse of oil languish in squalor. In fact, with no useable farmland or waterways, many in Nigeria say that they are worse off than their grandparents were before the discovery of oil.

    Hope in Chad?

    Recognizing the plight of their neighbors in Nigeria, communities in Chad’s oil producing areas worked hard, even before the onset of oil production in 2003, to minimize environmental damage and maximize the benefits to communities from which the oil flows.

    The 650-mile Chad-Cameroon pipeline (Africa’s biggest investment project) links landlocked Chad to world export markets through Cameroon’s port city of Douala. It was funded through loans and other support from the World Bank. Heroic measures initiated by activist, civil society, human rights, and religious community leaders led to a forward-looking revenue management law to manage the flow of oil revenues in a transparent way, ensuring resources for future generations.

    However, the Chadian government has subverted its own revenue management law. It has diverted spending away from the original priorities of agriculture, health, and education and toward "security." As a result, money that only now is beginning to flow from oil production is spent on weapons and other military equipment, instead of poverty reduction and the interests of future generations.

    The oil wells in Chad are newer, so its oil-producing areas haven’t yet experienced the damage caused by decades of oil spills. However, gas flaring, with its related health and environmental damage, is an integral part of the production cycle. When the wind blows, the smell of the burning gas blankets villages miles away.

    In a community near Doba, with gas flares as a backdrop, villagers told us about increased death and dying in the past few years from respiratory ailments and contaminated water supplies.

    Meanwhile, in Chad’s fertile agricultural zone, mangoes, cotton, gum Arabic, and cattle are abundant. Yet there is not one factory transforming the raw produce into goods for domestic or international markets.

    In spite of these challenges, Chadians maintain that their vigilance will minimize negative social and environmental impacts of oil and secure poverty reduction. Chad could easily feed itself and its neighbors if productive capacity were built in the agricultural sector. Oil revenue directed at building an education system, providing healthcare, as well as basic electricity, running water, and roads, could go a long way toward improving the condition of people’s lives.

    Throughout the country, in spite of a recent coup attempt and the elections in April that the majority of people boycotted, Chadians remain hopeful. From the capital city to the Southern oil fields, everyone seemed confident that future generations will experience a better life.

    Liberian Alternatives

    Liberia, the third country I visited, has recently emerged from 25 years of war. People there are hopeful too, despite the 85% unemployment rate and the complete lack of functioning schools or healthcare.

    Liberians hope that concessions now being granted for off-shore oil exploration will lead down the road to a new source of revenue. Liberia’s National Oil Company negotiated two contracts with the Nigeria-based Oranto Petroleum Limited and British-based Broadway Consolidated PLC. With exploration already underway, few in Liberia think that leaving the resource untouched is a viable option.

    The key question is, whether and how Liberia can escape the oil curse that so clearly has hurt Nigeria, Angola, and other countries in Africa’s richly endowed Gulf of Guinea region.

    One possibility is for countries like Liberia to consider alternative models for oil development. What, for example, can Liberia learn from Venezuela’s example of 61% national control of oil revenue and management? Or from Norway’s use of oil revenue to diversify the economy while advancing social services?

    Like many Africans, I fear that oil companies look to Africa for its resource wealth without seeing the people. Resource-rich communities are dehumanized and the color line is ever present as the greatest profits flow steadily to wealthy white men who already control enormous wealth and power.

    The price of oil has nearly tripled since President George W. Bush took office in 2001, yet the majority of the people who live in the countries from which the fuel flows still experience grinding poverty. Viewed side by side, the $10 billion quarterly profits of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, or Shell and the $1.15 per acre compensation paid (every four years) to some farmers in oil producing zones show just how unfair the global oil industry has become.

    The next time you pull up to the pump, stop a moment and remember that the thick black crude is extracted from the earth’s crust at great social, political, and environmental cost. Then do whatever it is in your power to demand dignity and proper compensation for those whose land or sea may be cursed with the blessing of this natural resource.

    Emira Woods is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

  • Barefoot lawyers find true cost of advice

    By Adele Horin

    October 7 2006

    http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/10/06/1159641528381.html

    YOU would think a bunch of community legal centres that dispense advice to the down-and-outs might lie beneath the Federal Government’s radar. It has a war on terrorism to wage, a war on drugs, on the unions and on the Labor Party to execute.

    But no, the redoubtable Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, found time from his musings on torture to kick the boot into these barefoot lawyers who earn half the going salary of their private sector counterparts. Their alleged crime is to dare to dissent from the Government on aspects of family law and anti-terrorism laws and its Achilles heel, industrial relations.

    Their punishment, he indicated, is likely to mean future funding contracts will prohibit the centres from engaging in advocacy, community education, or law reform.

    The Government withdrew its usual funding of the centres’ annual conference because the tenor of it caused displeasure. "Centres must focus on serving clients, not running private political agendas," Ruddock has said.

    There are 180 legal centres, dispensing advice on an array of topics from credit and debt to environmental law, and thanks to a lot of volunteers, they cost the Government only $22 million a year.

    But the power of a few pamphlets, an annual conference that featured the ACTU’s Sharan Burrow, and a single centre’s "industrial relations" data base made Ruddock see red – indeed reds under the bed. Fortuitously for the Government, the Office of the Employment Advocate has also decided it will no longer fund the legal centres to give advice to clients – mainly non-unionists – on industrial relations issues. It can handle all matters, from workers and bosses, in-house from now on.

    Bit by bit the Government is snuffling out the last flares of opposition, wherever it spots them, however feeble. Having won four elections, control of the Senate, the devoted support of the Murdoch press and talkback radio, the Government is still not content. It has planted hard-right warriors Keith Windschuttle, Janet Albrechtsen, and Ron Brunton on the ABC board to change its culture. It has undermined the independence of academics with its broad-brush sedition and anti-terrorism laws that have caused researchers to abandon studies on terrorism lest they be spied upon or detained.

    And now the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, is planning to take over school curriculum. She does not like what children are being taught, claiming "ideologues" have "hijacked" the syllabus. It is not just the wrong history that is being taught, as the Prime Minister regularly asserts; it goes well beyond that.

    The Government, it seems, will not stop until all Australians are singing from the same song sheet. Unswerving approval of the IR changes, welfare-to-work, "staying the course in Iraq", detention without trial, and a white armband view of Australian history is not called ideological; it’s called correct.

    The Howard Government is in fact ideologically combative to a startling degree, forcing dissenters to toe the line through fear, funding partnerships and confidentiality clauses in contracts.

    A blanket of silence has fallen across Australia since the Government came into office in 1996, flexing its muscles against dissenters.

    It quickly de-funded several groups representing poor and disempowered Australians – the Australian Federation of Pensioners and Superannuants, National Shelter, the Association of Civilian Widows and other women’s groups, and the Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition. In its stead it gave money to groups that have never caused a ripple, a rotating and occasional "youth round table", for instance, which to its credit once called for the restoration of a permanent body that might have some teeth.

    By 2002 a survey of peak groups in social welfare, aged, disability, and migrant issues, found half had lost significant funding and 20 per cent had lost all funding. Their role as advocates was a major reason for the clamp-down.

    A 2004 report by The Australia Institute showed non-government organisations had become more fearful of "biting the hand that feeds" them. Ninety per cent of the 290 surveyed believed their funding could be at risk if they criticised the Government. As the UNSW academic, Joan Staples, reminds us in a recent paper, the attitude to feisty non-government organisations was once different.

    A House of Representatives committee brought down a report in 1991 that said an important role of the these groups was "to disagree with government policy where this is necessary in order to represent the interests of their constituents". Howard, instead, sees them as single-issue groups and elites, with no role as advocates, or in policy formation. The Business Council of Australia, and such, are exceptions.

    He has shut the big charities up with multimillion-dollar Job Network contracts, and praises those that fill the gaps created by the withdrawal of government services. As long as they feed the hungry and house the poor but refrain from comment or advocacy, they are in the fold.

    Academics, likewise, are increasingly tied up doing contracted research for government departments, sworn to secrecy, even as their findings languish for months or years on a minister’s desk.

    It is only in the letters pages of some newspapers and on the internet that forthright dissenters can be found. The liberal MP Petro Georgiou has emerged as an unlikely hero because his viewpoint on asylum seekers and multiculturalism is so rarely expressed by any public figure, Kim Beazley included.

    Until now the legal centres, which include the Welfare Rights Network, have tried to reflect the views of their clients, bringing problems with welfare reform, family law, and industrial relations to the Government’s and public’s attention.

    They are out of tune with the times, and discord won’t be tolerated.

  • Retain Solar Energy Rebates

    The Seven network is lobbying the federal government to retain solar energy rebates. The intention is to present the petition on air to the environment minister. Sign the petition

  • Howard’s browning of the greenhouse emissions debate

    Some questions about the Prime Minister, posed by political correspondent Dennis Shanahan in The Australian (21 October 2006, p.3): Has Mr Howard just discovered the environment as an issue? Is he a newcomer to nuclear power because it’s clean and green? Is he linking drought, water shortages and climate change for pure political expediency? Does he refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change because he’s a fuddy-duddy who doesn’t believe in climate change? Or are we watching Howard’s latter-day greening?

    The gentleman’s not for turning: The answer to all of the above, writes Shanahan, is no. What we are watching is not the greening of Howard but the browning of the greenhouse emissions debate.

    It’s about solutions: Howard is now running a debate in Australia and internationally that accepts that the greenhouse effect or climate change is under way, but is looking at solutions with an economic and industry base.

    Debate is changing: The nature of the world reaction to greenhouse is changing and is about to change even more dramatically with the release of Britain’s Stern review on the economics of climate change in a week or so.

    Macfarlane on song: For Australia’s Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane, who has been quietly supporting nuclear power in Australia for years and sees it as part of the answer to greenhouse emissions, the debate has turned.

    Ideology not enough: “People in the street accept that greenhouse emissions and climate change are a problem, but they also expect practical solutions to the problem,” Macfarlane said. “People don’t accept ideological answers any more. That’s why they are prepared to discuss the possibility of nuclear power in Australia.”

    Aust "leading the way"? Macfarlane argued that there was a browning of the emissions debate and industry, and economists were trying to find answers. “The rest of the world is now coming to us because we are leading the way in private and public partnerships in lowering greenhouse gas emissions.”

    Questionmarks growing about Kyoto: Howard and Macfarlane have steadfastly ruled out the prospect of carbon taxes in Australia to establish a European-style emissions trading system, which is supported in principle by the state Labor governments. But again the argument over the benefits of a Kyoto-backed emissions trading system has shifted with the the patchy start to the EU emissions trading scheme which has provided large profits for power generators but has had no net effect on greenhouse emissions.

    EU falling behind targets: Last week a market analysis of the first phase of the EU’s system found that the EU was highly unlikely to meet its Kyoto Protocol emissions targets. According to global consultancy Cap Gemini the 15 EU countries in the scheme are “300 million metric tonnes of CO2 away from meeting their Kyoto Protocol objective, with the notable exception of the UK”.

    Not a great record: CO2 and greenhouse gases emissions, moreover, were increasing. In 2005, energy accounted for about 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, while electricity accounted for 38 per cent of CO2 emissions, the report said. “The combined EU-15 emissions were only 0.9 per cent below 1990 levels."

    The Australian, 21/10/2006, p. 3

    Source: Erisk Net  

  • Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs biggest water wasters

    Eastern Suburbs residents were Sydney’s biggest water wasters, with Woollahra households using an average 328,000 litres in 2005/2006 – above the average of 237,000 litres and even more than the city’s pre-water restriction average of 300,000 litres in 2002/03, reported The Daily Telegraph (21/10/2006, p.1).

    Woollhara’s shame revealed: Sydney Water figures also showed Woollahra residents received 242 water restriction fines between July 2005 and June this year, the largest number issued. Hunters Hill was the second worst water waster in 2005/06, with an average of 302,000 litres used per household, followed by Mosman with 299,000 litres.

    South Coast town most economical: The best performers were Kiama households, which used only 170,000 litres. Sydney City was rated fifth, using 195,000 litres. Sydney’s water storage levels were currently at 41 per cent, up from 39.1 per cent when level three mandatory water restrictions began in June 2005.

    The Daily Telegraph, 21/10/2006, p. 1

    Source: Erisk Net