Global carbon-dioxide emissions increase by 1.0 Gt in 2011 to record high

Global carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011, according to preliminary estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA). This represents an increase of 1.0 Gt on 2010, or 3.2%. Coal accounted for 45% of total energy-related CO₂ emissions in 2011, followed by oil (35%) and natural gas (20%).

The 450 Scenario of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2011, which sets out an energy pathway consistent with a 50% chance of limiting the increase in the average global temperature to 2°C, requires CO₂ emissions to peak at 32.6 Gt no later than 2017, i.e. just 1.0 Gt above 2011 levels. The 450 Scenario sees a decoupling of CO₂emissions from global GDP, but much still needs to be done to reach that goal as the rate of growth in CO₂ emissions in 2011 exceeded that of global GDP. “The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close,” said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol.

In 2011, a 6.1% increase in CO₂ emissions in countries outside the OECD was only partly offset by a 0.6% reduction in emissions inside the OECD. China made the largest contribution to the global increase, with its emissions rising by 720 million tonnes (Mt), or 9.3%, primarily due to higher coal consumption. “What China has done over such a short period of time to improve energy efficiency and deploy clean energy is already paying major dividends to the global environment”, said Dr. Birol. China’s carbon intensity — the amount of CO₂ emitted per unit of GDP — fell by 15% between 2005 and 2011. Had these gains not been made, China’s CO₂ emissions in 2011 would have been higher by 1.5 Gt.

Read More:

http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/news/2012/may/name,27216,en.html

Stephen Lendman - IS AMERICA GOING TO WAR? Anti-Iranian Propaganda in High Gear

Listen to Stephen weekly on Thursday's at 11am (Eastern) and Saturday and Sunday at 1pm (Eastern)

When America goes to war or plans one, the media march in lockstep. 

Articles, commentaries, editorials, and broadcasts feature Washington handout-style journalism. 

Managed news misinformation substitutes for truth and full disclosure. Readers and viewers are deceived and betrayed.

For years, Iran and Syria have been targeted for regime change. Independent governments aren't tolerated. Puppet ones are planned to replace them. Scoundrel media play leading roles.

On May 24, The New York Times headlined "Iran Nuclear Talks End with No Deal."

P5+1 talks failed as expected. Washington bears full responsibility. Deal-making isn't at issue. It's portraying Iran as uncooperative for added justification to wage war.

"The six wanted a freeze on Iranian production of uranium enriched to 20 percent purity, which is considered a short step from bomb grade."

In fact, it's a giant one to 90% required for weapons making. It's especially so without intent to produce them.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31069

Tina Dupuy - Why Mobility in America Is in the Dumpster

We’re a species that has gotten around; we’ve wandered, pioneered and migrated to every corner of the world. The spear tip of technology is how we can get somewhere else: the wheel, the sailboat, the rocket. In short: we’re movers.

We are now as mobile as we’ve ever been as a culture. Our phones are not tethered to any particular location. Our keepsakes, like photos and letters, are all saved on devices smaller than your average drugstore paperback. The bitter visual of a breakup – the splitting up of a couple’s CD collection – no longer exists since you both have copies of the same MP3s. Your computer fits comfortably in your lap – everything else is in your pocket. We now have the ability to go anywhere and bring with us more things utilizing less space than at any other time in human history.

We have the ability – the freedom – to roam more now than ever before. And yet our upward mobility is standing still.

Jason DeParle in The New York Times wrote in January this year, “Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.” And as Occupy Wall Street successfully pointed out the top one percent “earn” nearly a quarter of the nation’s income. While they have enjoyed an increase in wealth and a decrease in taxes, the rest of the country has seen a flattening of their prospects. The U.S. ranks near the bottom in income inequality and therefore upward mobility.

Time noted, “The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project has found that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S., you had only about a 17 percent chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.”

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155505/why_mobility_in_america_is_in_the_dumpster

Fiona Harvey - Bonn climate talks end in discord and disappointment

The latest round of international climate change talks finished on Friday in discord and disappointment, with some participants concerned that important progress made last year was being unpicked.

At the talks, countries were supposed to set out a workplan on negotiations that should result in a new global climate treaty, to be drafted by the end of 2015 and to come into force in 2020. But participants told the Guardian they were downbeat, disappointed and frustrated that the decision to work on a new treaty – reached after marathon late-running talks last December in Durban – was being questioned.

China and India, both rapidly growing economies with an increasing share of global emissions, have tried to delay talks on such a treaty. Instead of a workplan for the next three years to achieve the objective of a new pact, governments have only managed to draw up a partial agenda. "It's incredibly frustrating to have achieved so little," said one developed country participant. "We're stepping backwards, not forwards."

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/25/bonn-climate-talks-end-disappointment/print

Jack A. Smith - American Politics: THE ELECTIONS WON'T BRING PROGRESSIVE CHANGE, SO WHAT CAN?

Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center

1. If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism."

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31042

Greg Palast - Killings, cancer, corruption and Azerbaijan: Eurovision in the Islamic Republic of BP

Palast's book Vultures' Picnic will be released in Britain June 26. Catch with Special Guest Warren Ellis, info here.

Will “Beyond Petroleum” oil giant BP pick the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest today in Baku, Azerbaijan? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I was arrested by the military police of Azerbaijan during my investigation of BP for Channel 4′s Dispatches in 2010, one of the cops who surrounded our crew in the desert told us, with great pride:

“BP drives this country.”

Indeed it does.

In 1992, the newly independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan elected a kindly Muslim Professor, Abulfaz Elchibey, as President.

But the voters had made an error: Elchibey refused to give BP an exclusive contract to drill the nation’s massive Caspian Sea fields as the company wished. In 1993, with assistance and, reportedly, guns provided by MI6, Elchibey was overthrown by the nation’s former Soviet KGB boss, Heydar Aliyev.

Read More:

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/05/eurovision-bp-azerbaijan-killings-cancer-corruption/

Lynn Parramore - The Best and the Greediest? Ivy League Students Are Still Heading to Wall Street

The Ivy League classes of 2012 arrived on campuses in fall of 2008, just as the world economy was plunging into a Wall Street-driven freefall. Many were glad they weren’t out facing a nasty job market. But they worried about the future. They networked earlier. They fretted over internships. 

Their senior year started with the launch of the Occupy movement, which raised a collective fist at the financiers whose casino games wrecked the economy. A few students from elite colleges even joined the protest. Back in November, some Harvard students interrupted a Goldman Sachs recruiting event hosted by the Office of Career Services.

But now the show is over, and it’s time to don the caps and gowns. Will students be any less likely to flock to Wall Street this year?

A look at last year’s numbers: In 2011, finance was still the most popular career for Harvard graduates, luring up 17 percent of those who went from college to a full-time job. Finance accounted for 14 percent of the 2010 graduating class at Yale. Princeton, which wins the Lloyd Blankfein Booby Prize for the most Wall Street-crazed campus, sent 35.9 percent of those who had jobs at graduation into finance. That’s more than a third of the entire student body.  

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155535/the_best_and_the_greediest_ivy_league_students_are_still_heading_to_wall_street

Marc McDonald - How Right-Wingers Took Over Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most useful sites on the Web. It's a fantastic reference source that provides an incredible wealth of data on an endless variety of topics.

A big strength of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any article. If, for example, an expert on quantum mechanics happens to notice a small factual error in the Wikipedia article on that topic, he or she can easily fix it on the spot. By harnessing the power of the knowledge of millions of people, Wikipedia has grown into the world's biggest reference resource.

However, Wikipedia's strength is also its biggest flaw. The very fact that anyone can edit an article means that errors, spin and bias can easily creep into the Wikipedia database.

If you're looking to read up on millions of disparate topics, from aardvarks to Frank Zappa, Wikipedia can offer you an enormous amount of helpful info that is reasonably free of bias.

But there's one big exception: articles on current political figures and topics.

Here, Wikipedia falls woefully short in its goal of providing a "neutral point of view."

Read More:

http://www.beggarscanbechoosers.com/2012/05/how-right-wingers-took-over-wikipedia.html

Your rights or GMOs?

Last chance to Drop the Money Bomb on Monsanto and Turn the Connecticut Massacre into the California Miracle!

Exactly 20 years ago today, Vice President Dan Quayle announced a new policy by the first Bush administration that declared genetically engineered foods to be “substantially equivalent” to foods that farmers had traditionally planted and bred for thousands of years.

With this single policy, the U.S. government radically altered the food supply, introducing novel genes into our food that have been genetically altered in laboratories and never before consumed by humans. While the technology of genetic engineering was brand new, corporate executives at Monsanto colluded with elected officials to make sure that their new “products” were place onto the market as quickly as possible.

The Bush/Quayle 1992 policy, crafted by former Monsanto attorney Michael Taylor, who had been hired by the Bush FDA to fill a new position of deputy commissioner of policy, was designed to fast track approvals of GMOs and guarantee the new seed technology avoid rigorous safety testing and labeling, or as stated, “burdensome regulation”.

Two decades later, Americans are still denied the basic right to know what’s in their food because of this infamous policy, despite the fact that polls regularly show that 90% of Americans believe in labeling GMOs.

But this fall, all that can change! With your help, you can make GMO labeling history by chipping in to make sure that the California Right to Know 2012 ballot initiative succeeds in November!

Chip in today to join the effort to end this 20-year pseudo-scientific policy and regain your basic right to Label GMOs!

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/596?t=7&akid=559.419237.x4Gk_i

As we reported yesterday, the biotech industry and Big Food retailers are already pledging millions of dollars to attempt to defeat us this fall. Earlier this month in a secret meeting, industry lobbyists promised to raise between $40 to $50 million to kill the GMO labeling initiative in California and deny us our right to know what’s in our food.

But we’re not going to allow that to happen!

The movement to label GMOs in the U.S. has grown exponentially in the past year and now California is on the front lines for this important battle for our basic rights. In order to match Monsanto and the biotech industry’s millions of dollars, we need to run an effective campaign to counter the lies and propaganda that will soon hit the California airwaves.

This will take all of us chipping in what we can and working together for victory in November!

We can do this – with your help. With just two days left, we need about $50,000. We’re counting on small donations of $5, $10, $20 to get us there. Your donation could be the one that puts us over the top!

Please chip in today to tell Monsanto: We have a right to know if our food contains GMOs! Every dollar counts!

http://fdn.actionkit.com/go/596?t=10&akid=559.419237.x4Gk_i

To make this a memorable experience, we’re giving the first 100 people that donate more than $100 a free limited-edition Label GMOs t-shirt with the quote from President Obama’s famous promise to label GMOs on the back.

"Here’s what I’ll do as President. I’ll immediately implement Country of Origin Labeling because Americans should know where their food comes from. And we’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified because Americans should know what they’re buying."

Thank you for contributing what you can today - Together we can win!

Now's the time. Let’s drop the money bomb on Monsanto and take back our food supply!

Thanks for participating in food democracy,

David Murphy

President, Food Democracy Action!

P.S. All money raised for this campaign will go through Food Democracy Action!, a 501(c)4 allied organization of Food Democracy Now!, focused on grassroots lobbying and legislative action. Donations are not tax-deductible. Thank you for your support!

China hits back at critical U.S. human rights report

China hit back on Friday at the U.S. State Department's annual survey of human rights, saying that only the Chinese people could pass judgment on what the Foreign Ministry said were the country's obvious achievements in the area.

Asked about criticism of China in the report, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei condemned it for being prejudiced.

"The United States State Department's annual report on human rights maligns other countries, and the content concerning China ignores the facts and is filled will prejudice, confusing black and white," he told a daily news briefing.

Since the launch of landmark economic reforms more than three decades ago, Hong said: "China's human rights endeavors have made achievements that are plain for all the world to see. The Chinese people themselves have the most right to speak about China's human rights situation".

"In human rights, there is no such thing as the best; there is only doing even better," he added.

Human rights have long been a source of friction between China and the United States, especially since 1989 when the United States and other Western countries imposed sanctions on China after a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.

Read More:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/25/us-china-usa-rights-idUSBRE84O0DM20120525