CBS-rioPollution from patrice greanville on Vimeo.

Water contamination fears for 2016 Rio Olympics (CCTV)

Rio 2016 Olympics ‘Water too polluted for Games’ (BBC)

Water POLLUTION Poses HEALTH RISK for BRAZIL 2016 OLYMPICS (BBC)

=By= Ian Angus

This statement speaks volumes about the magnitude of the crisis we face: “In 2015, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owned as much as the remaining 99 percent combined.” The following article is from a talk that Mr. Angus gave in Australia on May 7, 2016, drawing on material from Chapter 11 of his new book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. It is republished here with his permission. – rw

I’m sure you’ve heard liberal environmentalists insist that we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth, sharing a common fate and a common responsibility for the ship’s safety. Former US vice-president Al Gore, for example, tells us: “We all live on the same planet. We all face the same dangers and opportunities, we share the same responsibility for charting our course into the future.”

In reality, a handful of Spaceship Earth’s passengers travel first-class, in plush air-conditioned cabins with every safety feature, including reserved seats in the very best lifeboats. The majority are herded into steerage, exposed to the elements, with no lifeboats at all. Armed guards keep them in their place.

Apartheid rules on Spaceship Earth.

The first months of 2016 were the hottest on record. According to conservative estimates by climate experts, if business as usual continues, within 50 years the global average temperature will be permanently hotter than at any time since modern humans evolved, 160,000 years ago.

That won’t just mean warmer weather, but more extreme weather, more storms, more floods, more droughts. Significant parts of the world will be literally uninhabitable, and ocean levels will begin swamping coastal cities.

But climate extremes aren’t the only records that are being broken.

Twenty-first century capitalism is also characterized not just by inequality—that’s always been a feature of class society—but by gross inequality, an unparalleled accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very few, coupled with mass poverty that is enforced by all the economic, political, and military resources the ultra-rich can muster.

Many studies, articles, and reports have documented the disproportionate wealth at the top. Rather than overwhelm you with a long list of appalling statistics I will just cite two.

• In 2015, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owned as much as the remaining 99 percent combined;
• and just 62 individuals owned more than the poorest three and a half billion people on earth.

Branko Milankovic, the former lead economist at the World Bank, is one of the world’s leading authorities on economic inequality. He says bluntly that we are now experiencing the highest level of relative and absolute global inequality at any point in human history.

So the 21st century is being defined by a combination of record-breaking inequality with record-breaking climate change. That combination is already having disastrous impacts on the majority of the world’s people. The line is not only between rich and poor, or comfort and poverty: it is a line between survival and death.

Climate change and extreme weather events are not devastating a random selection of human beings from all walks of life. There are no billionaires among the dead, no corporate executives living in shelters, no stockbrokers watching their children die of malnutrition. Overwhelmingly, the victims are poor and disadvantaged. Globally, 99 percent of weather disaster casualties are in developing countries, and 75 percent of them are women.

The pattern repeats at every scale. Globally, the South suffers far more than the North. Within the South, the very poorest countries, mostly in Africa south of the Sahara, are hit hardest. Within each country, the poorest people—women, children, and the elderly—are most likely to lose their homes and livelihoods from climate change, and most likely to die.

The same pattern occurs in the North. Despite the rich countries’ overall wealth, when hurricanes and heatwaves hit, the poorest neighborhoods are hit hardest, and within those neighborhoods the primary victims are the poorest people.

Chronic hunger, already a severe problem in much of the world, will be made worse by climate change. As Oxfam reports: “The world’s most food-insecure regions will be hit hardest of all.”

Unchecked climate change will lock the world’s poorest people in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats, and loss of livelihood. Children will be among the primary victims, and the effects will last for lifetimes: studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Niger show that being born in a drought year increases a child’s chances of being irreversibly stunted by 41 to 72 percent.

In 1980, the English historian and antiwar activist Edward Thompson proposed the word exterminism for “those characteristics of a society—expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity and its ideology—which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes.”

We see exterminism in action today, when untold thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa have drowned in desperate attempts to reach Europe, and those who reach the far shore are imprisoned and driven back, in violation of international law. The European Union has turned the Mediterranean into a mass grave, and its southern coastlands into concentration camps.

Governments that follow such policies say that they want to help people adapt so they can stay in their home countries, but their actions belie their words. A case in point is the Green Climate Fund, set up at the UN climate conference in Cancun in 2010. The rich countries promised to provide $100 billion a year, to assist Third World nations in adapting to climate change.

That was six years ago. By March of this year, the Fund had actually received only 7% of the money required for just one year. Even if all the promised pledges are actually delivered, the total fund will still be 90% short of its first year requirement. As India’s representative on the Green Climate Fund Board said, “At this pace we will not be able to do anything much.”

That’s not to say the rich countries aren’t spending money to deal with climate change in the Third World—they’re just spending it in other ways. The European Union, which has pledged 1.8 billion euros in aid to Africa, has budgeted over six times that much for carrying out deportations. I don’t know what Australia’s budget is for excluding and imprisoning refugees, but it is clearly following Europe’s lead.

Christian Parenti calls this the politics of the armed lifeboat—“responding to climate change by arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing and killing.” It is a major element of the climate-change policies of wealthy countries today. It is certainly the best-financed part.

In 1844, Frederick Engels described how the streets of Manchester were carefully laid out so that rich didn’t have to come into contact with the poor or see the slums they lived in.

“The money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.”

Today, that physical separation is global. What Archbishop Tutu calls “adaptation apartheid” is business as usual.

While the military targets climate-change victims as enemies of the capitalist way of life, global elites are preparing for dark times by creating protected spaces for themselves, their families, and their servants in the hope of ensuring that they continue to get more than their share of the world’s wealth, no matter what happens to anyone else.

Long ago, Karl Marx wrote that

“Capitalist accumulation constantly produces . . . a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.”

As capital expands, Marx said, “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market,” creates an ever-growing global divide between rich and poor.

“Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows.”

When I was in university, my economics professors insisted that Marx was wrong, that capitalism was improving life for everyone. But what we see today goes beyond the horrors that Marx described. On one hand, ever-increasing wealth concentrated in the hands of the tiny billionaire class. On the other, an increasingly large proportion of the population has been made not just “relatively redundant” butabsolutely surplus to capitalism’s profit-making requirements. They aren’t needed as producers or consumers, and few of them ever will be. So they can be – and are – abandoned.

Hundreds of millions have already been pushed to the outer edges of the global economy and beyond, denied access to the minimum requirements of life, and left to survive the deteriorating global environment on their own. Excluded from the fossil economy, they have become its primary victims.

If this continues, the 21st Century will be a new dark age of luxury for a few and barbaric suffering for most. That’s why the masthead of Climate & Capitalism, the web journal I edit, carries a slogan adapted from Rosa Luxemburg’s famous call for resistance to the First World War: “Ecosocialism or barbarism: There is no third way.”

I’d like to finish by quoting an Australian activist some of you may have known, Del Weston. Her tragic death four years ago robbed Australia and the world of an outstanding ecological Marxist scholar. In the final paragraphs of her brilliant book,The Political Economy of Global Warming, Del wrote

“We can choose to fiddle while the globe burns, to be afraid to be called alarmists, to be secure in the knowledge that we in the West will not be so immediately and devastatingly affected by global warming. That however would leave us morally bankrupt and living in a sea of chaos on a stricken planet.”

But, she wrote, we still have a small window for action “to change the disastrous trajectory we are on.” We must she said, devote ourselves to

“Building new political, economic and cultural systems and societies that are metabolically restorative, equitable, resilient, just, diverse and democratic. It is a challenge that could bring the different peoples of the world together, to build something better together and make history for the benefit of all people. We cannot afford not to try, nor to fail.”

I could not agree more.

Republished with permission of Ian Angus, Editor of Climate and Capitalism

Ian Angus is the Editor of Climate & Capitalism. He has recently completed a three-week tour of Australia, organized by the Socialist Alliance and Green Left Weekly to introduce his new book, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. He gave the above talk, which draws on material in Chapter 11, at a well-attended May Day Celebration in Cairns, Queensland, on Saturday May 7.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

=By= Andrew Korybko

The Katun River in the Altai Mountains by Ondřej Žváček.

The Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership is about to take on an ecological angle with Moscow’s suggestion of piping Altai mountain river water to the drought-stricken deserts of Xinjiang. Aside from obviously being used to unburden the Chinese from dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the proposed fresh water pipeline will also have a premier strategic purpose as well. The research begins by examining the strategic vision at play with this initiative and then explaining how it relates to Color Revolutions. Finally, the insight that’s revealed from investigating the prior two topics will be linked to the forthcoming global struggle for reliable freshwater supplies in forecasting how the US will try to disrupt Russian-Chinese water cooperation in the coming decades.

Strategic Vision

Xinjiang is the global intersection point for most of China’s Eurasian Silk Road projects, and it’s thus of the highest importance that the frontier region remains stable and prosperous in order to function as the ultimate juncture of the 21st century’s transcontinental infrastructure projects. While foreign-supported terrorism and the proselytization of violent ideologies are certainly a challenge in the area, what most directly affects the population’s sympathies towards the central government are more immediate concerns such as their standard of living. The countless material products that are expected to pass through the region and tangentially enrich it can only do so much in improving one’s livelihood if there are potentially pressing problems with water availability to the local citizens.

At this moment in time, the Chinese government has been doing a phenomenal job ensuring that the people of Xinjiang are taken care of by providing for all of their needs, but Beijing is also keen enough to plan ahead several decades in advance in order to preempt as many forthcoming challenges as possible. Considering the recent drought and unpredictable global climactic changes, China has legitimate fears that the current environmental difficulties could be exacerbated in the future. Needing to keep Xinjiang as stable and prosperous as possible in order to facilitate its grander goals of pan-Eurasian integration through the New Silk Road, China and Russia came up with the idea of using Kazakhstan to geographically facilitate the transfer of mountain river water from Altai Krai to Xinjiang’s deserts.

The Color Revolution Connection

If successfully completed, then the ambitious project would guarantee Xinjiang a stable supply of freshwater and counteract the physical-political effects of any future droughts, thus depriving the US of one of the potential avenues through which it could one day try to stir up anti-government unrest. For example, the authorities would not have to worry about their citizens being manipulated into protesting against a shortfall in domestic water availability (sewage and in-house running water complications), a dearth of drinking water, and/or the disastrous agricultural and livestock impact of drought because each of these scenarios would be rendered increasingly unlikely after Xinjiang reliably connects its water infrastructure to Altai’s.

From another angle, however, the establishment of the Altai-Xinjiang water pipeline would increase the chance that the US would try to stage a Color Revolution scenario in Altai in order to interfere with the vital source of western China’s water supplies. Even prior to the project’s completion, the US and its army of NGOs will expectedly stage disturbances aimed at highlighting the “environmental consequences” of the initiative, potentially even encouraging its local “activists” to enter into clashes with the police. Should the pipeline get up and running, then the authorities need to be on the lookout for potential signs of growing identity separateness between the local Altai population and Moscow.

While it’s always a positive development when indigenous cultures embrace their uniqueness and are proud of their heritage, there’s a distinct line between peaceful celebration and hostile antagonism. If the locals organize around some distinct facet of their identity — perhaps a revival of the Shamanistic religion of “Burkhanism” or a violent interpretation of  Tibetan Buddhism — then they could more easily be herded into nationalist groups that might thenceforth be directed to stage aggressive anti-government protests. The fusion of identity separateness and a US-promoted awareness of the Altai’s newfound geostrategic importance to multipolar affairs could be enough to encourage increasingly radicalized individuals to agitate for substantially enhanced autonomy or outright independence, being misled by Washington and its NGO minions into thinking that they could indefinitely sustain their ‘sovereignty’ solely through profitable water exports to China.

Water Wars¹

The proposal to connect Russia’s freshwater resources with the growing Chinese consumer base is emblematic of Moscow’s rising role as the world’s premier water superpower. No other country has as much freshwater reserves as Russia does, which thus increases is global profile and will soon allow it to reap enormous strategic advantages as the rest of the world literally thirsts for this resource. Russia’s other advantage — though regularly spun by the West as a disadvantage — is that the Siberian and Far East regions where the freshwater originates are largely underpopulated and accordingly more than capable of diverting their own supplies abroad without any consequences at home. In the future, Russia might not only come to be China’s main energy partner, but also its vital lifeline to clean freshwater reserves as well, thereby making itself forever irreplaceable as Beijing’s most important grand strategic ally.

Because of the pivotal role that Russia is expected to play in providing clean drinking water to some of China’s over one billion citizens, the US will undoubtedly conspire to find a way to interfere with the reliable shipment of this life-sustaining resource and thus gain leverage over both of these Great Powers. In a sense, this is merely an adapted application of what it’s already trying to do vis-a-vis global energy flows, albeit much more directly connected to life-or-death ends. Using the techniques of Hybrid War that it’s been perfecting over the past decade and especially in the most recent years, it’s foreseeable that the US will try to instigate identity tension inside the freshwater-originating regions or transit areas.

Ethnic Mongol regions of Russia (wikipedia)

Looking at the map, a fair share of Russia’s major Siberian and Far Eastern rivers either start or pass through autonomous republics (Sakha/Yakutia, Buryatia, Tuva, Khassia, Altai) or areas with a distinct identity separateness such as Altai Krai. Conclusively, it’s reasonable to suggest that the US might try to capitalize off of the indigenous population’s Turkic Buddhist-Shamanist identity in fomenting identity tension, with this scenario spiking in probability if Washington ever succeeds in swaying the Mongolian government over to the New Cold War side of unipolarity.

Concluding Thoughts

The idea of linking Siberia’s freshwater supplies with China’s deserts, and presumably later on even to its major population centers, is an ambitious proposal that carries with it profound global significance. The world’s dwindling freshwater reserves are being pushed beyond their limit in providing nourishment to an ever-increasing population, to say nothing of their use in agriculture, hydroelectricity, and animal husbandry. In the coming decades, the countries that control freshwater resources either in whole or in part (whether through their source, transit, or mouth) will be in a superb position to influence all of those around them.

Even though China is unquestionably the freshwater king of East, Southeast, and South Asia through the sources that it controls in Tibet (which explains the US and India’s unceasing struggle to destabilize and dislodge the region from Beijing), its unchecked industrialization of the past couple of decades has led to unprecedented pollution that has made some of these supplies dangerous and unfit to use. Moreover, not all of the country is served by the Tibetan rivers, with the geostrategic trans-continental juncture point of Xinjiang being absolutely arid and deprived of any significant water resources. This part of China is also the scene of foreign-supported terrorist aggression, and it’s in the best interests of Beijing to do everything that it can to secure the locals’ contentment with the central government in order to avoid losing “hearts and minds” amidst this partially ideological conflict.

What Russia’s planning to do isn’t just to provide Xinjiang with Altai freshwater supplies, but possibly even to expand this cooperation further in connecting northeastern and eastern China to similarly reliable and clean resources. This would greatly relieve the Chinese authorities of future contingency planning in the face of an ever-unpredictable climate and could also free up its own domestic resources for further export and strategic utilization as regards the downstream countries. By remedying China’s freshwater shortage amidst its never-ending population growth, Russia would fulfill an irreplaceable role in Beijing’s grand strategic calculus and thereby maximize its importance to its critical multipolar partner.

However, it’s due to this very same vision of pragmatic win-win cooperation between the two Eurasian Great Powers that the US has a vested interest in sabotaging their prospective freshwater trading network, which is why it might seek to capitalize off of identity separateness in Russia’s Turkic Buddhist-Shamanistic regions in one day stoking a series of meticulously preplanned Hybrid Wars designed to offset this eventuality. Though there presently aren’t any overt signs that the US has made any progress in actualizing this objective, it must still be astutely monitored by the Russian authorities in order to ensure that NGOs and other disruptive proxy actors don’t succeed in fanning the flames of conflict and disturbing the peace in this historically stable corner of the world.

1.  In depth analysis  of the water conflict situation:
   Water wars. Part I
   Water wars. Part II

About the author

Andrew Korybko is a political analyst who writes extensively on Russian international relations. He is a specialist on Middle Eastern politics, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. He is a frequent commentator on TV and radio. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he is currently completing graduate studies in international relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO).

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

FRONTLINE
NEWS—

Reports, News Flashes, and Commentary from Various Conflict Zones Around the Globe
HUMANITY IN TORMENT

=By= Greenpeace .org

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday Greenpeace Netherlands releases secret documents of the EU-US TTIP negotiations. On www.ttip-leaks.org the documents will be made available for everyone to read, because democracy needs transparency.

“These documents make clear the scale and scope of the trade citizens of the United States and the European Union are being asked to make in pursuit of corporate profits. It is time for the negotiations to stop, and the debate to begin.

Should we be able to act when we have reasonable grounds to believe our health and wellbeing is at risk, or must we wait until the damage is done?

Were our governments serious in Paris when they said they would do what was necessary to protect the planet, and keep climate change under 1.5 degrees?

Environmental protection should not be seen as a barrier to trade, but as a safeguard for our health, and the health of future generations.

We call on citizens, civil society, politicians and businesses to engage in this debate openly and without fear. We call on the negotiators to release the latest, complete text to facilitate that discussion, and we ask that the negotiations be stopped until these questions, and many more have been answered. Until we can fully engage in a debate about the standards we and our planet need and want” – Sylvia Borren, Executive Director Greenpeace Netherlands.

Which documents are we releasing?

The documents that Greenpeace Netherlands has released comprise about half of the draft text as of April 2016, prior to the start of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US (New York, 25-29 April 2016). As far as we know the final document will consist of 25 to 30 chapters and many extensive annexes. The EU Commission published an overview stating that they have now 17 consolidated texts. This means the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands encompass 3/4 of the existing consolidated texts.[1]

Consolidated texts are those where the EU and US positions on issues are shown side by side. This step in the negotiation process allows us to see the areas where the EU and US are close to agreement, and where compromises and concessions would still need to be made. Of the documents released by Greenpeace Netherlands, in total 248 pages, 13 chapters offer for the first time the position of the US.

How have the documents been handled?

The documents we received had clearly been treated to make it possible to identify individual copies. Prior to release they have been retyped and identifying features removed. We have not altered content of the documents and have preserved the layout. For this reason we are not offering access to the original documents.

How do you know the documents are genuine?

After receiving the documents both Greenpeace Netherlands and Rechercheverbund NDR, WDR und Süddeutsche Zeitung, a renowned German investigative research partnership have analysed them and compared them to existing documents. The Rechercheverbund, which consists of different German media outlets, has covered, amongst other big stories, the Snowden leaks and the recent Volkswagen emissions scandals.

What are the first conclusions from the documents?

From an environmental and consumer protection point of view four aspects are of serious concern.

1, Long standing environmental protections appear to be dropped

None of the chapters we have seen reference the General Exceptions rule. This nearly 70-year-old rule enshrined in the GATT agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), allows nations to regulate trade “to protect human, animal and plant life or health” or for “the conservation of exhaustible natural resources” [2]. The omission of this regulation suggests both sides are creating a regime that places profit ahead of human, animal and plant life and health.

2, Climate protection will be harder under TTIP

The Paris Climate Agreement makes one point clear: We must keep temperature increase under 1.5 degrees to avoid a climate crisis with effects on billions of people worldwide. Trade should not be excluded from climate action. But nothing indicating climate protection can be found in the obtained texts. Even worse, the scope for mitigation measures is limited by provisions of the chapters on Regulatory Cooperation or Market Access for Industrial Goods. [3] As an example these proposals would rule out regulating the import of CO2 intensive fuels such as oil from Tar Sands.

3. The end of the precautionary principle

The precautionary principle, enshrined in the EU Treaty[4], is not mentioned in the chapter on Regulatory Cooperation, nor in any other of the obtained 12 chapters. On the other hand the US demand for a ‘risk based’ approach that aims to manage hazardous substances rather than avoid them, finds its way into various chapters. This approach undermines the ability of regulators to take preventive measures, for example regarding controversial substances like hormone disrupting chemicals.

4. Opening the door for corporate takeover

While the proposals threaten environmental and consumer protection, big business gets what it wants. Opportunities to participate in decision making are granted to corporations to intervene at the earliest stages of the decision making process.

While civil society has had little access to the negotiations, there are many instances where the papers show that industry has been granted a privileged voice in important decisions. [5] The leaked documents indicate that the EU has not been open about the high degree of industry influence. The EU’s recent public report [6] has only one minor mention of industry input, whereas the leaked documents repeatedly talk about the need for further consultations with industry and explicitly mention how industry input has been collected.

END

Notes

[1] The documents we are releasing are

[chapter 1.1.] National Treatment and Market Access for Goods

This chapter addresses trade in goods between EU and US.

[chapter 1.2.] Agriculture

This chapter deals with trade in agricultural products and illustrates EU-US disagreements on matters such as genetically modified organisms.

[chapter 1.3.] Cross-Border Trade in Services

This chapter addresses trade in the service industry sector.

[chapter 1.4] Electronic Communications

This chapter addresses Internet and telecommunications issues.

[chapter 1.5.] Government Procurement

This chapter deals with purchases by government entities within the EU and US.

[chapter 1.6.] Annex Government Procurement

The annex of the previous chapter, with additional information about a US-proposed chapter on anti-corruption.

[chapter 1.7.] Customs and Trade and Facilitation

This chapter addresses differences among various customs regulations.

[chapter 1.8.] EU – US revised tariff offers

These are the respective positions regarding tariffs.

[chapter 2.1.] Regulatory Cooperation

In this controversial chapter EU and US aim for joint regulations on products and services, for example for food and cosmetics safety.

[chapter 2.2.] Technical Barriers to Trade

This chapter addresses differences between EU-US regulations and the ways in which they affect trade.

[chapter 2.3.] Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

This chapter deals with the protection of plant and animal health.

[chapter 3.1.] Competition

This chapter deals with competition between parties.

[chapter 3.2.] Small and Medium-sized Enterprise

This chapter addresses enterprises smaller than multi-national corporations.

[chapter 3.3.] State-owned Enterprise

This chapter addresses nationalised enterprises.

[chapter 4.] Dispute Settlement

This chapter deals with resolving disagreements between the EU and the US.

[chapter 5.] Tactical State of Play

Not intended for public viewing, this document describes EU-US disagreements and shows how much private industry influences the TTIP negotiations.

[2] Most of the WTO’s agreements were the outcome of the 1986-94 Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. Some, including GATT 1994, were revisions of texts that previously existed.

[3] Nothing in the relevant Articles 10 (Import and Export Restrictions) and 12 (Import and Export Licensing) of the Chapter on National Treatment and Market Access for Goods shows that necessary trade related measures to protect the climate would be allowed as a trade restriction under GATT Article XX (see footnote 1).

[4] “The precautionary principle is detailed in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (EU). It aims at ensuring a higher level of environmental protection through preventative decision-taking in the case of risk. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV%3Al32042

[5] e.g. “While the US showed an interest, it hastened to point out that it would need to consult with its industry regarding some of the products” – Chapter ‘Tactical State of Play’, paragraph 1.1, Agriculture.

[6] ‘The Twelfth Round of Negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)’ http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/march/tradoc_154391.pdf

Contacts:

Dutch media please contact Greenpeace Netherlands, +31 (0)6 21 29 68 95, persvoorlichting@greenpeace.nl

Brussels media please contact Greenpeace EU press desk, +32 (0)2 274 1911, pressdesk.eu@greenpeace.org

International media please contact Greenpeace International press desk (24 hours), +31 (0)20 718 2470, pressdesk.int@greenpeace.org

Source: Greenpeace Press Release

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

=By= Tim Radford

Shennongjia Forestry District, Hubei, China. Evilbish. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] forest could be its own economic community as trees establish their own free trade area. They don’t just build their own tissues with atmospheric carbon, they also share it with the neighbours, according to new research.

Tree roots can graft to each other, but Swiss researchers have established that trees are sharing resources even when no such grafts take place.

Tamir Klein, a botanist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and colleagues report in Science journal that up to 40% of the fine root carbon in temperate forest trees may have been derived from the neighbouring trees.

The discovery that trees that compete for sunlight and growing space can also co-operate is, once again, an instance of the remarkable and sometimes puzzling complexity and interdependence of living things.

Simple science

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd the scientists established their discovery with some simple but difficult-to-achieve science, based on elemental isotope comparisons − and a very large crane.

They used the crane to get to the canopies of spruce trees, 120 years old and 40 metres tall. Then they used a network of fine tubes to flood the crowns of these trees with their own labelled carbon dioxide. Their supplies of the greenhouse gas were conspicuously short of the proportion of the rare and heavy isotope carbon-13 that is normally detected in air.

“Evidently, the forest is more than
the sum of its trees”

This sudden flooding of the canopy made no difference to the experimental trees. They did what trees do and used photosynthesis to take the carbon from the air, and used the carbon to make sugars which then became cellulose, lignin, proteins and lipids in the plant tissues, not just in the leaves and stems but all the way down to the roots and the fungi around the roots.

And then the researchers used an atomic mass spectrometer to track the carbon through the entire tree. They found that their carbon not only spread through their prime specimens, but neighbouring trees – sometimes of different species – that had not been given the labelled carbon dioxide also turned out to have acquired an unexpected quantity of the experimental gas.

Carbon exchange

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he only way the carbon could have been exchanged between spruce, beech, pine or larch, was by a network of tiny filaments belonging to the mycorrhizal fungi that traffic nutrients in the forest floor.

And although the discovery is not directly part of climate science, it offers yet more unexpected insights into the role of forests in managing atmospheric carbon for the rest of the living world.

Climate science presents a global-sized puzzle, and the latest find in every sense gets to the roots of one aspect of the great carbon puzzle: where does the stuff go, and how does it get where it does?

As one of the report’s co-authors, Professor Christian Körner, a plant scientist in the Basle team, observes: “Evidently, the forest is more than the sum of its trees.”

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?