Wednesday, January 20, 2010
china confidential
UN Climate Scientists Admit They Were Wrong
South Korean Human Rights Group Says North Has 200,000 Political Prisoners; Families Incarcerated
Confucius Replaces Avatar in Chinese Theaters
US Intel Chief Confirms Christmas Bomber Should Have Been Treated as a Terrorist, Not a 'Suspect'
RWE to Build World's Biggest Wood Pellet Plant in US, Plans to Export Output to Europe for Co-Firing
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Crap and trade.
U.N. climate scientists admit they were wrong about a key prediction concerning manmade global warming. Click here for the story.
The so-called settled science of global warming is melting faster than the glaciers.
South Korea's government-funded human rights watchdog has issued its first report on widespread abuses in North Korea. The report reflects a significant shift in South Korea's approach to Pyongyang.
The National Human Rights Commission report issued Wednesday says the number of North Korean political prison camps has declined, but the number of people being detained in them is still high.
Kim Hyung-wan, a policy director with the commission, says the camps began operating in the late 1950s, and there were 13 of them in 1970. After 1980, Kim adds, the number dropped to six camps, which currently are believed to hold 200,000 prisoners.
Human rights organizations say the North routinely incarcerates entire families for minor political infractions by one member, such as damaging a photo of leader Kim Jong Il, or humming a South Korean pop song.
The camps also punish those caught trying to leave North Korea, or who have been forcibly returned from China.
Kim says around 2000, the punishments differed based on the motivation for defecting. However, he says over the past three years, the punishment for attempting to defect has grown harsher.
This is the first time the South Korean commission has reported on abuses North Koreans face in their own country. Kay Seok, a researcher in Seoul for Human Rights Watch, says such a report has been long awaited.
"It is certainly one step in the right direction, and a welcome change," Kay says.
Report Reflects Policy Change
The report reflects South Korea's willingness to confront the North publicly on human rights issues since the inauguration of conservative President Lee Myung-bak two years ago.
The government-funded commission remained silent on North Korean human rights under two prior South Korean administrations, which had a policy of engaging Pyongyang and avoided openly criticizing it.
Seok points out during those years, the commission said what went on in North Korea was beyond its mandate.
"Which actually conflicts with the fact that the South Korean government has been accepting and resettling North Korean refugees all along … under the South Korean constitution, which defines the entire Korean peninsula as the South's territory. So their logic was not very convincing," Kay says.
Wednesday's report comes on the second day of North-South talks, and amid new tensions. A few days ago, Pyongyang responded to reports of a South Korean contingency plan for instability in the North with threats of what Pyongyang described as a "holy war."
And on Wednesday, the South's defense minister said the South would be ready to preemptively strike North Korea if it were certain that Pyongyang was about to launch a nuclear attack.
Although it has grossed more money in China than any foreign film in history, Avatar is being pushed aside in Chinese theaters to make room for Confucius, in keeping with China's protectionist policies. Click here for the story.
Vindication for critics of the Obama administration's soft approach to terrorism.
The nation's top intelligence chief concedes the Nigerian Islamist who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been treated as a terrorism detainee and not as a civilian crime suspect. Click here for the story.
The alien enemy combatant has been given a public defender and is eligible for a plea bargain in line with the administration's apparent determination to downgrade the war on Islamist terror to the level of a law enforcement challenge. Every effort has been made to basically ban the W word on the grounds that referring to the conflict, or struggle, as a war plays into the hands of Al Qaeda--the only Islamist group the administration has ruled out engaging--by inflaming Muslim sensibilities.
Today's development is the latest flip, or flop, on the part of the administration, which has had to admit to a "systemic failure," as the President has put it, in preventing the botched bombing before it could get off the ground--literally--after first insisting that the system worked just fine.
In related news, Munich Airport was closed and all incoming and outgoing flights were canceled after a passenger's personal computer was found to contain explosive material.
The passenger escaped after the material was discovered.
A giant German utility is going to produce huge amounts of "carbon neutral" wood pellets in one of America's southern states for the express purpose of shipping the pellets to Europe in order to co-fire with coal to produce electricity with reduced carbon emissions. Click here for the story.
RWE's Georgia plant will cost a whopping $170 million and use up about 1.5 million metric tons of wood per year to produce 750,000 metric tons of pellets.
The project is one of several planned by RWE, which is compelled by the EU to cut annual carbon emissions by 20% by 2020--meaning, a reduction of eight million metric tons a year from a total of 40 million metric tons a year.
RWE is moving aggressively to control what an important company executive calls the wood "value chain" in North America, which is one of the planet's most important sources of sustainable--and economically accessible--wood supplies. Given the illegal logging that plagues Asia, Africa, and South America, and threatens the Siberian forest--the world's largest--with extinction over the next 20 years, North American wood will become an increasingly sought-after commodity.
At least 60% of the world's logs, used for dimensional lumber, now go to China. Siberia is a major supplier; but an estimated one-third of its logs are illegally produced and smuggled into China by Russian organized crime.
Elsewhere in the United States, plans to convert a coal-fired power plant to one that will use wood biomass and natural gas are moving ahead, as reported here.
The scale of the projects is staggering. Few people appreciate the enormous quantities of fuel that are required to generate electricity for cities, towns, industry. As of now, more than half the electricity produced in the U.S. comes from burning coal; and, while co-firing coal with wood pellets and chips has been shown to be viable, the application is limited by technical issues and available resources. Simply put, there aren't enough sustainable supplies of legally harvested wood on the planet to substitute for coal; and there are no real substitutes for fossil fuels in general.
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