Blair in Japan for climate talks

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has arrived in Japan for talks aimed at ending the "deadlock" over global greenhouse gas targets.

He said there was a "consensus" that a deal had to be reached - with a 50% cut in carbon emissions needed by 2050.

During his visit to Tokyo Mr Blair will meet climate change experts from China, Japan, Europe and the US.

Mr Blair, who stood down as prime minister last year, is also a peace envoy to the Middle East.

'New global deal'

In a broadcast on his personal website, he said: "At the big G8 summit of last year everybody agreed that climate change is a serious problem, everybody agreed we need a new global deal once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

"And everybody agreed that everybody should be part of it - including America and China.

"What this means is that there is a consensus now right across the world that we need a new global deal and at the heart of it there has got to be a substantial cut in emissions."

The meeting is being held by the Climate Group, an organisation which works with business leaders and politicians on climate change.

It will feature Sir Nicholas Stern, who conducted a review for the UK government on the economic costs of climate change.

Rwanda concerns

Since leaving Downing Street last June, Mr Blair has taken on the role of Middle East peace envoy for the "quartet" of the EU, Russia, the US and UN.

He also works as an advisor to investment bank JP Morgan and insurer Zurich.

Last week it was announced he would run a seminar on faith and globalisation at Yale University in the US.

In February Mr Blair said he would work to attract investment to Rwanda, as the central African country rebuilds its economy following the genocide of the mid-1990s.

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Gus: Blair has been a busy boy... He's doing his "Hail Mary"s at a ferocious pace... It shines of "mea culpa" on the way to redemption... Good luck and all the best for success... as long as no one gets killed. Onya, mate...

And tell your former mate George to shove it....

Top Blair aide: we must talk to al-Qaida

Western governments must talk to terror groups including al-Qaida and the Taliban if they hope to secure a long-term halt to their campaigns of violence, according to the man who for more than a decade was Tony Blair's most influential aide and adviser.

Jonathan Powell, who served as Blair's chief of staff from 1995 to 2007 and is widely regarded as having been instrumental in negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland, said his experience in the province convinced him that it was essential to keep a line of communication open even with one's most bitter enemies.

Powell said: "There's nothing to say to al-Qaida and they've got nothing to say to us at the moment, but at some stage you're going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution. And that means you need the ability to talk."

In his first major interview, ahead of the publication of his book on the behind the scenes drama leading to the Northern Ireland peace deal, Powell also delivered a remarkably candid assessment of the Blair years, revealing that:

· He did not think Labour had governed boldly enough because it feared losing power.

· Blair had a tendency to change his mind about things and could be "a bit of a flippertygibbet".

· Blair had failed in 10 years of government to sell Europe to the British.

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Iraq: Who won the war?

Not the 90,000 Iraqi civilians or the 4,200 US and UK troops killed since 2003. The big winners are the money men who have made billions. Raymond Whitaker and Stephen Foley report

Five years ago today, Britain stood on the brink of war. On 16 March 2003, United Nations weapons inspec-tors were advised to leave Iraq within 48 hours, and the "shock and awe" bombing campaign began less than 100 hours later, on 20 March. The moment the neocons around President George Bush had worked so long for, aided by the moral fervour of Tony Blair, was about to arrive.

"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," Kenneth Adelman, a leading neocon, had said a few weeks before, and so it proved. Within barely a month, Saddam's bronze statue in Baghdad's Firdaus Square was scrap metal. But every other prediction by the Bush administration's hawks proved wrong.

No weapons of mass destruction – Britain's key justification for war – have been found. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that a review of more than 600,000 captured Iraqi documents showed "no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida terrorist network".

In 2008, there are still more American troops in Iraq than during the invasion, with no exit yet in sight. Britain's Ministry of Defence has just admitted that it has been unable to withdraw as many British troops as it planned – there are 4,000 still based just outside Basra, instead of the projected 2,500. So far 3,987 American soldiers and 197 British troops have died in Iraq.

...

The main winners of the war are not the ones its instigators planned: Iran and al-Qa'ida. No one in Washington appeared to have calculated that to unseat Saddam, whom the US once supported as a bulwark against the Iranians, would empower the majority community in Iraq, the Shias, or that many of them would look to the world's only Shia nation, Iran. The US insists that Tehran retains nuclear ambitions, despite its own intelligence estimate that work on a weapon has stopped, but its occupation of Iraq has given Iran a hostage it could never have imagined having.

As for al-Qa'ida, it never had a foothold in Iraq until the chaos created by the invasion gave it the opportunity to establish one. And while the US is preoccupied in Iraq, the conflict it neglected, in Afghanistan, is getting worse. Al-Qa'ida has re-established itself in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, while its old host, the Taliban, regains ground on the other side of the Afghan border.

In early 2003, Mr Rumsfeld mused on what might be the cost of the war to come: $50bn (£25bn) or $60bn, he and White House planners thought. Five years on, the bill is already 10 times that, while here the Commons Defence Committee has just warned of a "surprising" 52 per cent increase in the cost of operations in Iraq to nearly £1.45bn in the current financial year, despite the reductions in troop levels. An unprecedented amount has been funnelled to the private sector. The big winners have been the money men.

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.

As we need a fire chief, especially one with a bit of pull and lots of extinguishers, I wish Aussie Tony the best of luck in chasing reluctant morons. The Europeans are okay, they know where their climate change toast is buttered... They know there is an urgency in attending to the problem... But the US, now in economic doldrums, is not prepared to go the full hard yard thus showing other countries like India and China the wrong way to go... Unfortunately, the downturn in the US economy does not mean a reduction of emission as I joke about from time to time ("Bush did more than Al Gore on US emission", etc)... And as the US Fed and the US Administration fiddle with business, the likelihood of increase in emission is more likely...

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Melting glaciers start countdown to climate chaos 

From 1850 to 1970, the team estimates net losses averaged about 30cm a year; between 1970 to 2000 they rose to 60-90cm a year; and since 2000 the average has been more than one metre a year. Last year the total net loss was the biggest ever, 1.3m, and only one glacier became larger. Worldwide, the vast majority of the planet's 160,000 glaciers are receding, 'at least' as much as this, says Haeberli, probably more - a claim supported by evidence from around the world.

In North America, Dr Bruce Molina of the US Geological Survey says that in Alaska '99-plus per cent of glaciers are retreating or stagnating'.

In the European Alps, a report last year by UNEP said glaciers declined, from a peak in the 1850s, by 35 per cent by 1970 and by 50 per cent by 2000, and lost 5-10 per cent in the mega-hot year of 2003 alone.

Biofuel: the burning question

The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world's environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?

By Cahal Milmo
Tuesday, 15 April 2008

From today, all petrol and diesel sold on forecourts must contain at least 2.5 per cent biofuel. The Government insists its flagship environmental policy will make Britain's 33 million vehicles greener. But a formidable coalition of campaigners is warning that, far from helping to reverse climate change, the UK's biofuel revolution will speed up global warming and the loss of vital habitat worldwide.

Amid growing evidence that massive investment in biofuels by developed countries is helping to cause a food crisis for the world's poor, the ecological cost of the push to produce billions of litres of petrol and diesel from plant sources will be highlighted today with protests across the country and growing political pressure to impose guarantees that the new technology reduces carbon emissions.

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Gus: Some people, as usual, have found cunning ways to sell us something bad beyond an idea that sounds good. Without engaging into bulldozing more bush-land to grow biofuel, one could, I suppose, say that excess production of world sugar, ballooning and subsidised since the 1950s for example could be managed better and help making some biofuel while reducing the need for everyone to become overweight and diabetic in support of the industry.

But no, we overdo things, recklessly, and start tearing apart the precarious natural balance — or what's left of it — by throwing at will some heart-warming subsidies to destroy more lands and sponsor recklessness through greed. In fact, I suspect that governments knew of the problem in advance but they have embraced the bio-fuel accelerated implementation because, in the process of constructing this "new" industry, they also know that oil is running out... And they want to see more car on the roads for a few more years to come after running out. Anyway, we might have to start driving cars the size of the "Gardiniera" Fiat of the 60s, one of the smallest car ever built in the world so it could run through the back-streets of Firenze without touching the walls on either sides...

Sure we can manufacture carbon-neutral methane from pig-shit but overtaking the earth with pigs is not an option. But that's we're on the verge of doing. Whether we use wheatiblozulationtrithaol, corn-oil or sticks, it amounts to the same result of destruction. In one of my blogs, I reminisced about the used of firewood being used by trucks, in Europe, and also commented it would take a forest the size of Tasmania to provide the energy needs of Australia, every year.

We need to reduce consumption rapidly. I pull my hat to President Bush, who fiddling accidentally by neglect or mismanagement has collapsed the US economy to bring it into recession with huge amounts of debts, thus having to reduce their emission by lack of spending power, although he's trying hard to throw more illusive bucks to stay on top. China has now become the country with the greatest CO2 emission, although it could have started to overtake the US about 2006...

'I run a small business now. I love it'

He has a string of jobs and earns £3m a year but what has the ex-PM actually achieved since leaving Downing Street a year ago?

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"The other change I have got to know better since leaving No 10 is that the whole centre of gravity in the world is shifting east, that for countries like us, and Europe and America, this is a change so profound that I don't think we yet quite understand its consequences or its implications for us.

"When you think the industrialisation of China and India is going to be four times that of the USA, happening at five times the pace too, you can understand the magnitude of what we are talking about. We are about to enter into a new epoch in terms of power relations."

He rattles off a list of institutions that will have to change - the UN security council, the G8, the IMF and World Bank.

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Gus: Didn't we tell him this would happen, about five years ago, when he was rattling on in Iraq like a mongrel in search of a tree? And he "can type a one or two line message in less than half an hour." Brother! Does he take proportionate time to formulate sumpthin' too?... Is he like Gus, doing too many things and achieving little? At least I can type much faster. And I can rave a lot about nothing, like he seems to be doing, although I earn nothing and he is paid 3 million pounds for it...

There must be a trick. See toon at top...

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

jetsetter Aussie Tony explains how he's going to save the planet.

see toon at top