Dana Rohrabacher, Moron

I've said many times before that intelligence is absolutely not a requirement or even a desired trait to be in Congress. While there are some very smart people in Congress, there's little connection between intelligence and who gets leadership positions, nor is intelligence rewarded by voters, the media, donors, or one's colleagues.

See for instance California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who astounded everyone today by making the argument that cutting down the rainforest would help fight climate change:

“Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?” the congressman asked Mr. Stern, according to Politico.

“Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?” he continued.

Forestry experts were dumbfounded by Mr. Rohrabacher’s line of questioning, noting that the world’s forests currently absorb far more carbon dioxide than they emit — capturing roughly one-third of all man-made emissions and helping mitigate climate change.

“He’s seriously confused,” said Oliver Phillips, a professor of geography at the University of Leeds in Britain and an expert on terrestrial carbon storage. “He’s just got half of the equation. Natural things decay, of course, but they also grow.”

The idea that cutting down forests would result in a net reduction of emissions is “crazy,” Dr Phillips added. “The need is to reduce deforestation.”

Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, found another hole in Mr. Rohrabacher’s logic. Roughly 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the natural world come not from above-ground biomass, but from the soil, she said. “You don’t even want to give this guy another wacky idea, but he forgot about soil,” Dr. Law said.

Moron. Complete freaking moron. 

Climate Change Humor

An oldie but goodie from The Onion on the cancellation of 3 billion seasons of the series known as Fall.. I'm glad someone is making climate change jokes, a subject too depressing for me to find much to laugh about.

Visit the Boreal Forest Now Because It's Not Going to Be There in 30 Years

Another extremely depressing bit of environmental news. Goodbye Canadian boreal forest.

Sweltering

While it might seem cold in much of the nation this winter, and quite frankly it is, that wasn't the case for the world last year. 2010 matched 2005 as the hottest year on record (quite likely as the hottest year in human history given recent climate change).

Derek Arndt, who heads the climate monitoring branch at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said the new data should be viewed in the context of the record retreat of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of the melt season and a near-record retreat of Arctic sea ice.

"Together across the board, it was an unusual year, and a year that in many ways was a culmination of what we've been seeing for the past several years," Arndt said. 

But of course, climate change isn't just about global warming. It's also about global wettening. Think of common images of the dinosaurs and their habitate in warm, wet climates for a look at the future.

Last year was also the wettest on record in terms of global average precipitation, according to the Global Historical Climatology Network, which collects data from meterological organizations around the world.

But the rate of precipitation, like the temperature, varied widely depending on the region: The 2010 Pacific hurricane season had only seven named storms and three hurricanes, the fewest since researchers started using satellite tracking in the 1960s.


Meanwhile, an unusual jet stream brought a two-month heat wave to Russia last summer and helped spur severe flooding in Pakistan at the end of July.

But it's not like we are going to do anything about it:

"Hopefully, this new data will finally convince congressional climate-science deniers that global warming is real and that action is urgent," said Daniel J. Weiss, who directs climate strategy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "To reject this latest evidence is like ignoring strange spots on a chest X-ray and continuing to smoke." 

The cancer analogy is entirely appropriate. But we are as addicted to fossil fuels as any smoker is to nicotine.  Good luck breaking that habit.

The British--Also Prown to Climate Lies

It is not only we Americans prone to climate denialism. The head in the sand groups have lobbied hard in Britain and their propaganda has proven effective. This moronic Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph is a great example. Blaming the global warming crowd for making Britain unprepared to deal with snow, Booker writes:

The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.) This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.

So I guess scientific discussions of climate change are equivalent to doctrinaire Marxism for the climate change denial crowd.

To be more precise, the denialists are using every cold snap and every snow storm as propaganda tools for their anti-scientific agenda. Meanwhile, actual reality suggests that climate change will lead to more snow, at least in areas that remain below freezing. But climate science is complex and easily manipulated or ignored by denialist conservatives.

And here's actual and deeply depressing evidence about the effects of climate change on the forests of the Rocky Mountains:

Warmer climate leads to beetle infestations in these whitebark pine forests, not only killing the dominant tree species in high altitude forests but potentially endangering grizzly bears.

Required Climate Change Reading

For everyone who wonders why it is so cold and snowy during a period of global warming and for all the skeptics out there, Judah Cohen's Times editorial should be required reading.

Essentially, climate is really freaking complicated.

Bjorn Lomborg, Still Hackalicious After All These Years

Bjorn Lomborg's climate change skepticism grows even more tiresome.

Climate Change Dries Up Fertile Crescent

This isn't good:

Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the Fertile Crescent — including much of neighboring Iraq — appears to be turning barren, climate scientists say. Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off. Sandstorms have become far more common, and vast tent cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and cities of Syria and Iraq.

“I had 400 acres of wheat, and now it’s all desert,” said Ahmed Abdullah, 48, a farmer who is living in a ragged burlap and plastic tent here with his wife and 12 children alongside many other migrants. “We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero — no money, no job, no hope.”

Of course, climate change isn't all of it. High modernist governmental plans have contributed as well. But climate change makes human mistakes (not that we can really separate climate change from human mistakes) all the worse.


But hey, in nations as stable as Syria and Iraq, what bad could possibly come from millions of displaced peoples!

Climate Change and the Kimchi Crisis

Yesterday, I linked to my new article on climate change and the poor.

Today, we see one of the manifestations of how climate change will affect the poor--higher food prices. The Napa cabbage shortage in Korea, which is the main ingredient for kimchi, is probably short-term. And it's being portrayed as somewhat humorous given Koreans' devotion to this difficult food (which in full disclosure I absolutely love). But this is the beginning of a long-term trend. A terrible year of extreme climate decimated the cabbage crop in Korea--extreme spring cold, crazy hot summer, devastating fall rains. This is the template for food shortages. And the cost:

An unusually long stretch of bad weather nearly halved the latest cabbage crop, causing prices to soar. At markets in Seoul, shoppers were up before dawn fighting to buy heads of napa cabbage that once cost about $4 but now go for as much as $14.

In the short-term, Koreans can import cabbage from China. But in the long-term, these sorts of climate-change related agricultural failures will create real challenges for the world. 

On an unrelated note, for a such an industrialized and modern country, I'm amazed at how many Koreans still make their own kimchi:

South Koreans consume an estimated 1.45 million tons of kimchi a year, said Lee Jeong-sik, an official at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. About 450,000 tons of it is made at factories, and the rest at homes or by restaurants.

Though the mouth-scorching dish can be readily bought in stores, many people make it on their own at home — a laborious process that requires it to be stored and fermented during the winter months. Many homes have special kimchi refrigerators that regulate temperatures to maintain the preferred level of fermentation.

Few peoples in the world have such devotion to a particular food as Koreans do for kimchi, but this is pretty remarkable. What's the equivalent in the U.S.--could we survive a shortage of Cheetos?

Climate Change and the Working Class

I have a piece at Global Comment on how the environmental movement has done a terrible job making climate change about people instead of polar bears and why this matters. Here's an excerpt:

I am volunteering for an environmental justice organization in a large northern city. This group works on environmental health issues with the city’s poor, mostly African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, and has started focusing on how climate change will affect working-class people. Rising temperatures will lead to any number of problems for the economically disadvantaged, including air pollution, higher rates of asthma, greater populations of cockroaches and other unwanted insects, rising food prices, a greater percentage of income spent on energy, and increased mortality rates for people who do not have access to air conditioning.

Climate change has proven difficult to explain to people; scientists’ unwillingness to declare anything a certainty combines with climate change’s complexity to leave people confused. My organization went to its constituents and tried to explain climate change to them. The organizers messaged this campaign in an interesting way: openly attacking the environmental movement’s framing of the issue. They created buttons that featured a crossed-out polar bear. They repeatedly told the attendees that climate change was about people, not bears. And yet, when the question and answer session began, the overwhelming response was, “Why should I care about bears?”


Why should poor people care about bears? That’s a great question. I can’t think of a good reason. Now, I don’t really approve of the anti-bear message. The idea of polar bears going extinct because they lack polar ice makes me want to vomit. However, this scenario demonstrates the horrible job the environmental movement has done in framing climate change.

By focusing on bears instead of people, the environmental movement sends mixed messages. It might reinforce the responsibility humans have to protect other animals and ecosystems, but it also suggests that climate change won’t affect people like bears. Moreover, it creates an image that the poor don’t count in environmentalism, reinforcing the inability of environmentalists to connect with working-class people over the last thirty years.

The Disingenuous Lindsay Graham

So Lindsay Graham says he is pulling out of negoitations over a climate bill because President Obama has decided to push for immigration reform. Supposedly this dooms a climate bill.

Does anyone really believe that a climate bill was going to pass anyway? Each and every Republican has no intention on allowing any part of Obama's agenda to pass. Maybe, just maybe, Lindsay Graham was committed to climate change legislation (not committed enough to overcome disdain for brown people of course). But first, he was the only Republican who might theoretically ever vote for a climate bill. Second, in order to do this, he would have watered it down into nothing. Third, Joe Lieberman or Blanche Lincoln would have blown it up anyway. So Graham can complain all he wants to but until Republicans show even a basic willingness to negotiate with Democrats in good faith, he's not worth listening to.

Moreover, immigration reform is precisely what Obama should start pushing for. While the issue scares many conservative Democrats from white states, the issue makes perfect political and moral sense. With states like Arizona openly embracing white supremacy, Obama needs to show that America stands for fairness and at least a semblance of justice. With Latinos the fastest growing demographic in this country, he has the opportunity to lock in much of that vote for a generation, turning states like Arizona and Nevada to the Democrats, as possibly even Texas in another decade.

Besides, whatever lame climate legislation that might have received Lindsay Graham's vote would have been a drop in the bucket in actually stopping this insidious process. I'd rather Democrats fight for something that's actually going to matter.

Climate Change Leading to Record-Setting Fatal Heat in Brazil

I, like many, am tired of idiot pundits, politicians, and quitters claiming that climate change (or, as they anachronistically call it, "global warming") is bunk just because there's a lot of snowfall. But for those who insist that a lot of snow in D.C. and Baltimore is proof that "Al Gore was wrong," there's this:

The worst heatwave to hit Rio de Janeiro in 50 years turned the city into a pre-Carnival furnace Wednesday, and killed 32 elderly people further south, officials said.

According to the Inmet national weather service, recorded temperatures in Rio were well above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees) -- and felt more like above 50 degrees.

"The heatwave in Rio is seen as historic. February right now is the hottest month for the past 50 years," meteorologist Giovanni Dolif told the O Globo daily. [...]

The heatwave made Rio the hottest place on the planet on Tuesday, save for Ada, a town in eastern Ghana, according to data from the World Meteorological Organization.

Rio's recorded temperature that day was 46.3 degrees Celsius -- less than even the Sahara desert, which came in at a milder 33 degrees.

Dolif said being in Rio was worse than being in a dry desert because seaside humidity gave the temperature a suffocating boost, making it feel much higher.

That's right: Rio - hotter than the Sahara! For those who are wondering, 46.3 degrees Celsius is 115 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was just the thermometer temperature - it doesn't take into account the humidity and heat index, which is more practical in terms of knowing how it actually feels outside.

So for all those idiots shocked that there have been some heavy snowfalls in winter: climate change isn't bunk just because you're stupid and near-sighted. In parts of the world that are actually in the midst of summer, they're seeing record-setting, hellish heats, in just one more example of how climate change is real and happening.

Climate Change as Imperialism

So it seems Osama Bin Laden released a statement blaming the U.S. for climate change and talking about fighting climate change as an anti-colonial action.

Obviously, we can't take Bin Laden seriously on something like this. Certainly Juan Cole doesn't and lists 10 reasons why Al Qaeda has been bad for the climate, including causing the war which has created enormous emissions.

But let's at least pretend Bin Laden has a leg to stand on. Can we see climate change as another episode of western imperialism against the developing world?

Absolutely.

And it's actually a fairly simple case. Western nations pump out tremendous amounts of carbon emissions. They exploit nations such as Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and others to get their fossil fuels. Then sea levels rise and destroy Tonga and Vanuatu, while also erasing much of Bangladesh. Increased drought and desertification make places like Mali and Niger increasingly difficult places to live. Refugees are forced into ever more crowded nations and poverty increases.

The more interesting question whether a global movement can develop that uses climate change as a central organizing issue. It's certainly hard to say. The period of anti-colonial nationalism has largely passed, with old colonial leaders and their descendants making bank off global capitalism. The erasure of western rule or direct domination has made it more difficult for leaders to deflect attention away from their own problems onto the United States or Great Britain. Since the leaders of China, India, and most other developing world nations are trying to increase carbon emissions as fast as possible, an anti-climate change movement will focus on national problems first before going international.

This makes any real organized anti-colonialist movement based around western caused climate change very unlikely.

QDR and Climate Change

Rob has a series of excellent posts up about the Quadrennial Defense Review and why progressives should care. I highly recommend them. I'd like to build on his work for a brief discussion of climate change and the QDR. For the first time, the QDR includes a section on climate change and defense policy.

That the new QDR even discusses climate change is a big step. The 2006 version, written during the Rumsfeld years, couldn't care less. That edition was all about fighting the never ending war on terror and acquiring new toys. Thankfully, the Gates Department of Defense has moved to more serious policy analysis.

And what of the QDR's first foray into thinking about climate change? It's quite mixed. DoD rightfully recognizes the threat rising sea levels provide to their own facilities. The entire Navy infrastructure faces a serious threat. The United States has such a long coastline that rising sea levels will likely force the nation to spend trillions of dollars either relocating facilities or keeping the ocean out.

The QDR does a less effective job thinking about how climate change will affect U.S. military involvement around the world. The military seems inordinately concerned with climate change and the Arctic. The thawing north will open up unexploited resources to the nations with Arctic boundaries. Corporations and governments are salivating. Plus, open Arctic waters means the U.S. and Russian navies will frequently be in close quarters.

While I can see the potential for conflict in an ice-free Arctic, the DoD doesn't seem to grasp the far more profound ways that climate change will likely affect U.S. military operations. Maybe I am too optimistic in thinking the Russians and Americans will come to a mutually profitable way to split Arctic resources, along with the Canadians and Scandinavian nations. But I think the significantly bigger issue is the massive geopolitical stability climate change could create around the world. The QDR only notes that the military needs to help other militaries prepare for natural disasters and notes that climate change could exacerbate already existing instabilities.

That's all true, but one short paragraph in the QDR barely touches the surface of what the U.S. military may face. Take Bangladesh. This low-laying, overpopulated and impoverished nation sits on the Indian Ocean, laced by major rivers filled with melted snow from the Himalayas. Under the best of circumstances, floods are a fact of life here. But rising sea levels combined with the likelihood of extreme typhoons has led many people to project 50 million climate change refugees from this one nation alone. Where are they going to go? India probably, since it's unlikely Myanmar will be welcoming. If Bangladesh destabilizes, how will the subcontinent and Southeast Asia more broadly respond? How will 50 million Muslims affect already shaky Hindu-Muslim relations within India? What will Pakistan do? This seems like precisely the kind of thing for which DoD should plan.

Talking about climate change and resource scarcity in the abstract is fine, but how will the military deal with real problems. For example, what happens if the Middle East enters a prolonged drought, Turkey impounds most of the water in the Tigris and Euphrates, and Iraq and Syria go thirsty? What will happen to this already unstable region? The QDR might not be the place to explain the details of these situations, but it seems fairly clear from the document that the military is still considering climate change as an abstract problem of the future.

Finally, the QDR commits the military to saving energy. This is fine and all, but slightly better fuel efficiency is hardly going to eliminate the military's contribution to climate change. Plus, in the face of a country almost completely unwilling to take the radical steps necessary to stablilize the climate, these minor actions won't make any difference in the long run.  The military also talks a lot about energy security. That's certainly a worthy goal, particularly if that energy comes from renewable sources, but the U.S. is unlikely to achieve energy independence any time in our lifetimes.

In the end then, the QDR's approach to climate change is a good first step, but little more. Its focus on energy policy over thinking through the real international security problems climate change will cause reveals a continued lack of imagination on climate change. Still, the military, and particularly the Navy, has made important strides in the last four years; hopefully, the next QDR will build upon these early ideas and show that climate change is central to U.S. foreign policy rather than the afterthought it appears to be today.

Stupidity: Now That's Filibuster Proof!

Centrist Democratic senators are fleeing to join their Republican colleagues in climate-change denying and cutting environmental agencies off at the knees. Since Tuesday, at least 3 Democrats have gone this route--Landrieu, Lincoln, and now, Ben Nelson. Maybe this explains why:

Climate Change Legislation....

...Dead on arrival.

Barring blowing up the filibuster (which must happen), there's no way the Senate is going to get 60 votes here. Between Republicans and coal state producing Democrats, we can forget about it. I imagine a decent climate change package could get about 52 votes in the current Senate.

Something might get passed, and as we see with health care, something is better than nothing. But for a crisis situation where every day makes the problem permanently harder to fix, this underwhelming response will fall far short of making a difference.

Labor and Climate Change

New AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is making a lot of noise about labor being 100% behind climate change legislation and creating green jobs. That's great, but it's a bit hard to enforce on the local level. Global Labor Strategies has a piece about some locals joining with industry to oppose climate change legislation. These locals are hardly the only examples of this. The United Auto Workers has done a terrible job supporting emissions legislation and the United Mine Workers consistently goes to the mat to support mountaintop removal and the American coal economy. In this case, it's just a few locals in Alaska who would benefit from the building of pipelines and such.

Part of the problem is the decentralized nature of unionism in the United States. There are dozens of unions, many of which are today very small. The AFL-CIO is a federation, not a dictatorship. Unions have come and gone over the last decades, including the defection of the CIO itself in the 1930s and more recently SEIU's Change to Win coalition. So if a union is angry with the federation, they can just leave. Moreover, if the UAW wants to lobby to kill climate change legislation, there's little the AFL-CIO can do to stop them.

It's hard to blame workers for this. They desperately hold on to their jobs, knowing that GM will probably ship them to Mexico anyway, but maybe extreme loyalty to the company will engender loyalty from the company to them. That's not going to happen, but put yourself in the workers' position. West Virginia coal miners don't have a lot of other economic options. Despite the fact that mountaintop removal has vastly reduced employment in coal over the past twenty years and that the coal companies would replace every single worker with technology if they could, in a lot of West Virginia and Kentucky, a job in coal is the best job you can get. By far.

The answer to this dilemma is a more centralized labor federation with more power in the governing body. That's probably not going to happen, as the different unions can't agree on much of anything except to support Democrats in elections. But perhaps Trumka can rally the unions on these issues and convince workers that unionized green jobs are their bright future.

Drought, Climate Change, and Societal Problems

The problems Kenya faces right now are probably indicative of common situations the world will have to face as the century winds on.

Kenya is in the middle of a terrible drought. This happens from time to time, though certainly climate change can make droughts worse. There are lots of people and cattle in Kenya as well, putting too much pressure on the limited resources of the country. When drought hits, people start killing each other over control to resources. In the last week, more than 30 Kenyans have died in tribal raids to steal cattle in order to replenish depleted herds.

We can't blame any one drought or hurricane or natural disaster on climate change, even though they are likely to become more common. But we can directly link climate change to melting glaciers, a situation which is making Kenya's water supplies even more threatened. Right now, with the drought combined with dwlindling glacial melt, there isn't enough water to run the nation's power plants. People are getting increasingly desperate and turning to violence as a result.

It's going to be a real worldwide challenge to deal with these conflicts in coming decades, both within and between nations.

The Ways In Which Climate Change Is Already Affecting Cultures As Well As the Environment

This article on the Kamayurá people in the Amazon offers just one more reminder of the tragic effects climate change is having not just on flora and fauna, but on people and cultures, too:

Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

[...] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

This is absolutely right. In our concern over climate change, there seems (at least to me) to be a disconnect between the damage the environment is and will sustain (often illustrated in images of rising waters, receding glaciers, or increasingly arid locations) and the real effects these changes are already having on people. In part, at least in the U.S. and Europe, this is a matter of luxury - the populations are relatively well-off enough that issues like declining food availability and the threat of cultural extinction seem far-off or even non-existant (does anybody stop to consider the death of American cultures, or even sub-cultures?). Yet there are other parts of the world that are already dealing with these possibilities, not just in terms of declining food availability or changing landscapes, but of real threats to the survival of their cultures and beliefs. Nor, as the article points out, is it limited to Brazil - cultures in the U.S. are already facing danger:

"Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

All this serves as just a stark reminder that climate change isn't just a threat that could radically transform the world for the worst if we don't do something about it now. It's already begun to take its toll on many peoples, and to ignore that fact is to ignore the fact that climate change isn't a future threat: it's a clear and present danger.

[Also, as an aside, I'm more than a little bothered that the second word (and first non-article descriptor) in the article is "naked." Could we appeal to exoticizing stereotypes, please? Were they naked? Probably. But factuality isn't the issue. What exactly does their state of clothing have to do with the rest of the article? Nothing. It's just appealing to basic, stereotypical images that portray indigenous people as exotic beings who don't wear clothes, without providing anything of substance to the main point of environmental change in the report.]

Around Latin America

-Brazil is going to resume construction on its third nuclear power plant this September. Construction had originally halted on Angra 3 in 1986 after environmental groups and media reports led to the shutdown. In explaining the return to construction 23 years later, state-run Electronuclear president said "Our nuclear program will not be as spectacular as those of China or India, but we will have a moderate and constant growth from Angra 3 on." The timing of the decision is strange - Brazil has been facing growing power concerns, but it has found ways to address those (see the next story), and the option for wind energy remains undeveloped in Brazil. However, the "from Angra 3 on" suggests Electronuclear plans to continue developing nuclear power plants beyond Angra 3, and while it may be nothing, I find the reference to China and India interesting. There's nothing to say this is the case, but I wonder if the decision to return to Angra 3 after 23 years is in part based on fears of falling too far behind other emerging world powers in Brazil's own quest to become a global leader.


-I commented last time that Brazil and Paraguay had reached an agreement on the power supplied by the Itaipu dam. Apparently, that deal is based on the agreement that Brazil will be paying triple what it had been paying to Paraguay for Paraguay's excess energy, as well as helping Paraguay develop infrastructure for the smaller country's own needs. As for who wins in this, I agree with Boz: both Lula and Lugo come away winners, especially Lugo.


-For those who get worked up in a froth over the sheer fact that illegal immigration can happen, there is this tragic reminder that many times, illegal immigration happens to reunite families. Not that the "family values" party would ever stop to consider the irreconcilability of fierce anti-immigration and so-called family values (which, to be fair, they clearly only spout for Machiavellian purposes without ever practicing what they preach).


-Apparently, it has gotten increasingly difficult to find a movie theater in Guyana over the past couple of decades (though I doubt the inability to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster " has in some way resulted in the decay today of the current moral fibre" of Guyana, as the author ponders).


-Greg found some mystifying data suggesting that Bolivians and Hondurans feared military coups the most in 2008, with 36% and 29% respectively believing their countries were heading towards coups. Strangely, Chile came in with 11%, as did Costa Rica, which doesn't even have a military.


-Greg also does an excellent, concise job in pointing out the ridiculous-ness of the charges from the left and the right against Obama in dealing with the Honduras crisis. To quote Greg:

It has become almost a political game to determine who is influencing Barack Obama with regard to Honduras. It can be tough to keep track.

• He is being influenced by Clintonites to support Zelaya.


• He is being influenced by Clintonites to oppose Zelaya.


• He is being influenced by The Empire to oppose Zelaya.


• He is plotting with the UN to support Zelaya.


• He was duped by Bush administration officials while in Russia to oppose Zelaya.

Heh. Indeed.


-An interesting new study says that climate change allowed the Incas to build Machu Picchu, as a receding treeline created more space for farming, cultivation, sculpting steppes, and building the roads that allowed them to reach Machu Picchu. I don't know if the science is accurate or not, but it's an interesting suggestion. (And I'd be worried about wingnuts in the U.S. pointing to this as evidence that the current environmental crisis we're facing is good, but that would require them to both look outside of the U.S. and acknowledge the genius of pre-Contact non-European civilizations, and that doesn't seem too likely).


-There's been a lot of hubbub and misunderstanding over Zelaya's stance on re-election (once again: he wasn't seeking it for himself, and it wasn't for this election; he was overthrown because he wanted a vote to determine whether the Honduran population could decide in the next election if they wanted to allow re-election or not). However, Alvaro Uribe continues to show far more anti-democratic tendencies than Zelaya. Uribe has postponed until September his decision on whether or not to run for re-re-election. No word yet on whether the military is planning on overthrowing him, too, or if the Republicans will be able to defend the coup in Colombia.


-Daniel Ortega could be taking the Uribe-path, too, as he is considering removing term limits in Nicaragua, conveniently enough so that he could possibly be re-elected. Sounds like it's time for another coup*.


-Speaking of Nicaragua, the total ban on abortion has had about all the effects one would expect, "endangering the lives of girls and women, denying them life-saving treatment, preventing health professionals from practicing effective medicine and contributing to an increase in maternal deaths across the country."


-While relatively under the radar, things are getting tense in the northern part of South America. FARC guerrillas were discovered having Swedish weapons, including surface-to-air missile launchers, weapons which Sweden said it sold to Venezuela. Sweden and Colombia are demanding an explanation, while Venezuela is saying that the allegations are lies meant to harm Venezuela and to justify Colombia's recent agreement to allow more U.S. troops in Colombia. And tonight Venezuela has cut diplomatic ties with Colombia over the allegations. While relations between Colombia and Venezuela are often full of bluster and posturing, this seems like it could become fairly serious.


-Finally, I've mentioned before the environmentally appalling conditions and devastating consequences of salmon farming in Chile. In spite of a claim that the Chilean government would try to reducethe use of antibiotics in salmon production, things continue to be depressingly grim, as a report has been issued that says that Chile uses more than 350 times the antibiotics in its fish that rival Norway uses in its salmon production. I fortunately don't eat salmon, but if I did, reports like this would convince me pretty quickly to abandon that habit.




*Sarcasm