China’s president Hu Jintao is visiting the United States and will be the focus of several state-level functions, including a full state dinner and a special luncheon hosted by the vice president, Joe Biden. In the face of US demands that China remove rate controls and allow its currency to appreciate, Pres. Hu has said the yuan should be thought of as the world’s currency standard, with other currencies priced against its value.

Is Pres. Hu so tone-deaf as to pave the way for a lavish state visit —where major issues of economics, security, human rights and more, will be discussed— with a call to sideline the United States’ dollar as the leading guide for international trade valuations? Or is this just an attempt to raise the stakes, put pressure on the US and bargain China’s way out of US pressure to let the yuan appreciate?

The US has been pressuring China to loosen its control of yuan valuations and allow the marketplace to drive the value of the yuan higher. The effect would be to reduce the US trade deficit with China, but China is resisting the move, because it could undermine Chinese exports and manufacturing, the main drivers of its economic boom. Hu may be raising the stakes of the debate deliberately, in order to persuade the US to accept something less.

Still, in the week preceding the visit, the yuan has appreciated, and is expected to continue, which may be, in part, a sign that China is responding to the pressure and/or interested in collaborating with its biggest trading partner. While some in the US have painted China as a liability to the US, owning too much debt and ready to “call it in”, others say the relationship is symbiotic, so much so that China cannot act in a way that would harm US buying power.

Even as GM is making major inroads in the Chinese auto market, Chinese firms are buying up American green energy businesses, ranging from manufacturing to wind farms and energy companies. In fact, while Pres. Obama’s Recovery Act will over its full life devote more funding to clean energy than all previous administrations combined —$80 billion—, China has become the global leader in funding, with $230 billion.

If Hu’s call for a global economy rooted in the value of the yuan is a diplomatic gambit, it is in keeping with China’s history of raising the stakes before asking allies and/or opponents to settle for less. The US has been known to do the same, and it can be expected the Obama administration was ready for such a maneuver, though perhaps as startled as anyone else by Hu’s aggressiveness on this point.

China has been hoping to bargain over another point, which is US praise for jailed Chinese democracy activist and 2010 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo. Pres. Obama has been “forward leaning” —in the words of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs— in his support of Liu, adding that “he should be free, that he certainly should be free to go Oslo and accept his prize”.

Liu was not allowed to travel to Oslo, remains in jail, and even his wife has been subject to house arrest and prohibited from traveling to receive the award. Mr. Liu was one of the framers of the Charter ’08 reform program, a kind of pro-democracy constitution whose release was timed to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games. China treats Liu and the Charter ’08 movement as guilty of sedition.

Pres. Obama and Sec. of State Clinton are both expected to press Hu and his diplomatic corps on the need to advance human rights in China, but both are also cited as indicating that they cannot let deep differences on those issues stall urgent negotiations on nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, or trade issues relating to China’s potential as a market for US goods.

On 4 June 1989, the Chinese military moved into Tiananmen Square to disperse a long-running student and citizen protest in favor of democratic reforms. The military were reportedly ordered to use deadly force and opened fire, killing an unknown number of unarmed civilians. The anonymous man in the above photo became known around the world as an icon of human rights, when he stopped a column of tanks by standing in their way, a moral and human challenge to the military crackdown.

In Hong Kong yesterday, thousands joined a candlelight vigil to honor those who died at Tiananmen Square. The annual commemorative ceremony is a reminder of the special political freedoms enjoyed by residents of the former British colony. Communications between Hong Kong and mainland China, however, were constricted, and surveillance of the whereabouts and activities of foreign visitors was reported to be intensified, as the government sought to keep information about the massacre from filtering through to the population.

China has fought hard to avoid entering the open media environment of the 21st century: the current president Hu Jintao notoriously launched a “smokeless war” against press and dissidents in the first Central Committee meeting after taking power. Regional protest movements have been suppressed in national media; the outbreak of SARS was suppressed, raising the ire of public health officials who accused the political elements of the government of endangering the population and the wider world.

The special freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong are not widely known inside China, or at least not publicly discussed. Journalists, government critics, bloggers and even internet cafe owners, have been or are presently jailed, for violating censorship laws. Google and other major western firms were forced to agree to blanket censorship regarding certain search terms like “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square”.

But earlier this year, when it was revealed that someone inside China had hacked into Google’s corporate email and internal communications, Google announced it would no longer filter its searches, challenging China’s government to deal with the problem of an open web. Again this year, websites have been blocked or shut down, traffic redirected, and service disrupted, as China’s government sought to suppress information about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators.

Google has recently announced it will no longer use Microsoft software, as it was discovered the Chinese hack of Google’s corporate communications was linked to a weakness in Microsoft’s web browser software. China’s government has also had access to Microsoft code, raising fears that access could make computers around the world vulnerable to illegal and possibly harmful surveillance and hacking.

The broader issue for China is how it can fully open its economic system when the central government so forcefully retains control over the flow of information inside China. Google has refused to allow the censored site to remain under Beijing’s control and is now redirecting search traffic to an uncensored site outside of China, but the conflict has only made the matter more urgent: how can China continue to advance if its government cannot allow Chinese people to know what their government does or has done?

The web is democratizing business and innovation the world over, but Tiananmen Square continues to be a measure of how unwilling the Chinese authorities have been to allow true informational freedom to the Chinese people. 2008 saw the Charter ’08 movement demanding the People’s Republic reform politically to allow more personal, organizational and media freedom in mainland China. The leaders have been prosecuted and jailed, and some are in hiding.

Google has announced it will stop censoring search results for users in China. This radically reverses the dynamic of its relationship with the Chinese government, which had demanded as a condition of being searchable in China that the internet giant systematically bar certain content from appearing in lists of search results. Google had agreed to enter the Chinese market filtering out search results related to the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of June 1989, even to the word “democracy”, but a cyber-spying attack that originated in China caused Google to rethink the validity of the initial agreement.

It is presumed the Chinese government will eventually shut down Google altogether in mainland China, should the search giant not revert to filtering certain key words from searches generated by users inside China. But as of Tuesday, full blockage had not gone into effect. The San Jose Mercury News, however, is reporting that “One day after Google stopped complying with China’s censorship rules, state-sponsored media ratcheted up verbal attacks on the search giant, and several of Google’s key business relationships in the country appeared to be in serious jeopardy.”

According to Wired:

The recent hack attack on Google, Adobe and other companies occurred through exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability that affects many versions of Internet Explorer, according to Microsoft and a security researcher with a leading anti-virus firm.

Microsoft learned about the vulnerability only Wednesday evening, said the researcher, who asked not to be identified because he’s not authorized to speak with the press.

Over 30 firms were hacked, in what appears to be a state-corporate espionage operation, though it is still unclear what sort of information was compromised, or if any documents were deleted, altered or accessed. At least 34 companies were attacked, and reports suggest the hack was designed to access the companies’ secret proprietary source code, possibly to allow further future hacks, censorship operations or blanket espionage linked to specific software.

Wired has also reported that:

Anti-virus firm McAfee has published a blog post confirming that a previously undisclosed vulnerability in IE was used to hack into several of the targeted companies. The attacks have been dubbed “Operation Aurora,” believed to be the name the hackers gave their attack. A McAfee spokesman told Threat Level that the company’s researchers had been working with a number of companies that were targeted in the attack since last week, prior to Google’s announcement.

There has been a “bumper crop” of malware, in recent months, meaning a build-up of malicious software that would allow hackers to remotely access private, proprietary information, if anti-virus software is not yet attuned to the specific technical functionality of the attack.

Google’s announcement that it will no long participate in China’s “voluntary” censorship/filtering program is, clearly, a direct accusation against the Chinese government, and a sign the software and search company does not believe it can reasonably defend its interests, or the interests of informational freedom, by agreeing to a pact which it says Beijing has refused to honor.

Google is now redirecting search users inside mainland China to an uncensored site based in Hong Kong. According to the New York Times:

Just over two months after threatening to leave China because of censorship and intrusions from hackers, Google on Monday closed its Internet search service there and began directing users in that country to its uncensored search engine in Hong Kong.

While the decision to route mainland Chinese users to Hong Kong is an attempt by Google to skirt censorship requirements without running afoul of Chinese laws, it appears to have angered officials in China, setting the stage for a possible escalation of the conflict, which may include blocking the Hong Kong search service in mainland China.

Google says China’s government was involved in the attack, and has violated the terms of the agreement Google made, which allowed certain search terms to be blocked inside mainland China, in exchange for a largely open operating policy. Somewhat surprisingly, China’s government has said through the state-run Xinhua news agency that Google’s move is a violation of its agreement with Beijing, which the government alleges included a ban on accusing the government of illegal hacking.

Clearly, the media environment is too constrained and authoritarian to allow for Google to operate freely as an open information media enterprise. Google’s challenge to Beijing, it is thought, will most likely result in Google’s search engine pages being banned outright in mainland China, and a more intense censorship clampdown on other search engines and social networking websites.

China may be fast moving toward global superpower status, with rates of industrialization and wealth-creation nearly unprecedented in human history. But the ancient imperial state still faces pervasive problems of regional and ethnic disharmony and multiple separatist movements intent on breaking up the map of the modern political state. To hold together, Beijing will have to democratize public and private institutions at a rapid pace and in a credible way.

Hong Kong, once a British protectorate, has been granted special political freedoms —as part of the conditions for its return to Chinese rule, and not without significant amounts of public protest from locals demanding them—, including electoral representation and the right to demonstrate. It is a divergent political model within the still largely totalitarian system planned and managed from Beijing, and it may serve as a credible model for how to democratize Chinese institutions of government and enterprise.

In order to meet the social and political demands of coming decades, China will have to grapple with the very real problem of what impact the information revolution will have on Chinese society, which has allowed for a privileged class of central control to impose a strict authoritarian order for thousands of years. Chinese society is already democratizing in terms of information, in that the government has had to admit mistakes in attempts to reorganize and filter information of vital public interest.

The scandal surrounding attempts to cover up the outbreak of SARS in China angered governments and international bodies, and spurred a wave of dissent in China that gave more power to journalists in the state media who sought to put informational value ahead of Beijing politics. Pres. Hu’s “smokeless war” against the press and dissidents has been a questionable enterprise throughout, with limited practical success in promoting Beijing’s projection of power and apparently sparking a surge in dissent.

Authoritarian urges inherent in Beijing’s use of power, both within China and beyond, have generated a notable backlash. In March 2008, an effort to ‘Sino-ize’ the Tibetan economy and consolidate Beijing’s hold on the region led to an outbreak of violence, with ethnic clashes, street demonstrations and security forces attacking civilians in the streets. The demonstrations spread to other regions of China and to neighboring Nepal. As we reported on 31 March 2008:

Demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet turned violent in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, yesterday, as police wielded bamboo clubs and beat demonstrators, including Buddhist monks and nuns. The UN has said Nepal’s harsh clampdown on Tibetan demonstrators violates international human rights law, including the right to peaceful assembly, as embodied in treaties signed by Nepal.

Demonstrations that began in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, more nearly 3 weeks ago have now spread to neighboring provinces in China, and into Nepal and India. The Kathmandu clashes came as large crowds accusing China of human rights abuses in Tibet tried to approach the Chinese embassy grounds.

A similar outbreak of ethnic violence broke out in the western province of Xinjiang, when efforts to centralize political control of the region and marginalize the local ethnic majority led to violent street battles. The government accused Uighur separatists of stoking the violence, while Uighur muslims from the region accused ethnic Han immigrants of undermining the economic opportunity available to the locals.

For the occasion of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, dissidents organized a high-profile petition for political reform, calling the document itself Charter ’08. The document, far from being an outright repudiation of China’s political establishment, calls for an incremental liberalization of the political process, and diversification of the one-party system. It opens with an explanation of the historical moment and the socio-political imperatives the regime will have to face, one way or another:

This year is the 100th year of China’s Constitution, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A “modernization” bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a “modernization” under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.

The government’s response has been to suppress the very idea of a need for liberalization and to prosecute those responsible for the petition. Liu Xiaobo, a moderate dissident and respected literary figure, was detained this summer on charges linked to the Charter ’08 movement and has now been sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power”, a charge the very name of which is a virtual admission of China’s need to democratize. The trial was just two hours long and has been decried across the world as an unfair prosecution without adequate defense or due process for the accused.

Instead of recognizing the constructive role that responsible political reformists can play in crafting a viable future for China —in line with the international system to which China has signed up but whose values it consistently rejects—, those in power in Beijing are treating the very idea of broader political freedoms for the Chinese people as a threat to national security. As the LA Times has reported:

In the last two years, the Chinese government has cracked down on Internet sites, lawyers, consumer advocates and human rights activists, particularly after the collapse of poorly constructed schools in the Sichuan earthquake and the tainted milk scandal in 2008. Liu is a brave democracy advocate and no stranger to jail; he was sent to prison for 21 months after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and to a labor camp in 1996 after demanding clemency for others still imprisoned.

This attack on universal values and persecution of the very dissident voices that could most ably and responsibly shepherd China through a period of needed democratic progress is dangerous in the extreme. Beijing’s hard-line tactics have radicalized and even popularized separatist movements across a number of regions, and efforts to disallow protests and even individual complaints about corruption has sown the seeds of deeper dissent across the country, at a time when tens of millions have lost work due to the global economic crisis.

China has also sought, along with its persecution of dissidents and its use of military force to impose political control over satellite regions, to create a hermetically controlled Chinese-language internet, where information can only be posted if approved by state censors. Instead of seizing the Olympics as an opportunity to plan, test and exhibit meaningful democratic liberalization, the government in Beijing has sought to block websites critical of its policies and control the flow of information across all communications networks in China.

But efforts to impose a blanket censorship-enabling spyware technology on all computers in the country were complicated this summer, when complaints about the substantial security risks and negative impact on business and foreign investment forced the government to back down. In July, we reported:

Amid a storm of protest from Chinese citizens, businesses, rights activists and foreign governments, China has suddenly halted its planned installation of a new enhancement to the ‘Great Firewall’ called ‘Green Dam’. In a statement the UK’s Guardian calls “terse”, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported “China will delay the mandatory installation of the ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers.”

The technology may still take effect, under the guise of an effort to block pornography in order to protect young people, but there is intense resistance from the international community, and from media and business interests in China. There are concerns that aside from a gross violation of fundamental rights to open information, the software could actually destroy intellectual property, impede the functioning of computer hardware altogether, and even subject users to added security risks.

According to the OpenNet Initiative:

The version of the Green Dam software that we tested, when operating under its default settings, is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed. Not only does it block access to a wide range of web sites based on keywords and image processing, including porn, gaming, gay content, religious sites and political themes, it actively monitors individual computer behavior, such that a wide range of programs including word processing and email can be suddenly terminated if content algorithm detects inappropriate speech. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. The operation of the software is highly unpredictable and disrupts computer activity far beyond the blocking of websites.

Features that allow for intimate monitoring of keystrokes and usage logs could permit attacks either from within government monitoring or from non-government criminal enterprises, to access personal information, create extensive archives of data regarding individual lives and networks of people, and subject individuals to identity theft, harassment, and other kinds of computer-enabled endangerment. Such intrusive harvesting of personal data could even put children at far greater risk of exploitation via the Internet.

One of the most fundamental dangers inherent in this type of digital data-based persecution of dissent at all levels is that it first of all assists in the coverup of abusive or corrupt activity and secondly does nothing to reform areas of the political system itself that are causing anger and the spread of hostility to government policies. While the Green Dam spyware project may allow Beijing to conceal or disrupt the communication of dissent, it will do nothing to prevent the dissent-inducing abuses or systemic inadequacies from occurring.

The only practical way to ensure that government services meet the needs of real people, and thus fashion a more harmonious system, is for a freer flow of information among people and between the people and their government. Failing that, even the best-intentioned government programs will run into trouble and be a source of unrest or opposition. Persecution of dissent is an ancient tool of underdeveloped power structures; China has the wealth and technology to democratize peacefully, and can do so by liberalizing the process for selecting and evaluating party leaders, policy-makers and administrative bureaucrats.

The Hong Kong model is complicated, and has many critics, but for a nation as vast and diverse as China, facing all of the crises, political, economic and environmental, it now faces, the Hong Kong model provides a worthy example for how to usher in more permissive political processes, without giving up the integrity of the existing system or the territorial integrity of the nation.

There will need to be practical solutions that help keep long-simmering tensions in check, if China is to avoid further flare-ups of ethnic violence or the aggressive ramping up of separatist activity. Change is emerging organically, across China, and the current government will eventually have to choose between working with or against the driving forces of change. Addressing economic concerns —like quality of life, education, transport and energy— will be key to being able to shepherd the nation through the coming period of political transformation. The following are a few areas that may help ensure stability throughout:

1. Re-evaluate prosecutions like that of Liu Xiaobo, which cripple the political dynamism of the Chinese system and help ensure a sclerotic policy apparatus, unaware of the best competing ideas going forward;
2. Free political prisoners like Liu Xiaobo and other responsible dissenters, who use no methods of sabotage or violence, only words and ideas, to convey their message of liberalization;
3. Reward local officials who find creative ways to integrate citizens into the process of making and administering policy;
4. Encourage freer expression of critical views, in part to show tolerance of dissent, in part to allow for the discovery of sound ideas for making a better way for the nation;
5. Encourage local political organizing, even where dissenting views are more popular than Beijing policy: a system of competing views need not override established policy, but can allow for competing views to filter in and serve the public good;
6. Liberalize selection process for Communist party officials, as a first step toward general elections;
7. Recognize cultural and political autonomy of regional states, like Tibet and Xinjiang: a Spanish approach may work better than the militaristic all-or-nothing conquest-based approach favored until now;
8. Reform the justice system, so that low-level corruption cases and judgments benefitting ordinary citizens can gain prominence and foster a new respect for judicial process: this helps guarantee order, but also prevents corruption and abuse;
9. Take a leading role in championing fundamental political and civil rights in other nations: doing so does not violate anyone’s sovereignty, but failing to do so shows a reduced hold on domestic support for the exercise of it;
10. Prepare for an issue-based divergence of factions within the Communist party, and a credible legal process by which those factions can establish competing parties loyal to a central constitution.

Long-term stability is often cited by China’s authorities as the reason behind extremely hard-line actions. But as we are now seeing in Iran, and as we have seen in eastern Europe and the Philippines, hard-line oppression often sows unrest and brings about far more radical kinds of political change. China is too closely linked to the information technology revolution to not be affected by it, and its censoring-technology approach to manufacturing consensus is not viable; it will collapse under the weight of the challenge.

Planning for the period of liberalization that will follow is the only responsible way for the government in Beijing to move forward with long-term Chinese development and political planning. It is the only policy response that will build confidence among foreign investors and major enterprises, including banks, that wish to locate offices or factories in the country, and it will prove to be the only practical way to prevent sectarian conflict and the disintegration of political ties with the satellite states where unrest is already brewing.

China has outraged political and diplomatic leaders around the world by aggressively blocking agreement on hard targets for binding emissions cuts, refusing even to agree to any accord that would include mention of other nations’ specific cuts. One observer told the BBC that he observed China, India and Saudi Arabia as the key powers working to prevent binding targets from being adopted, but China was the most immovable opponent to a binding agreement.

The reasons are not hard to guess: China has invested unprecedented amounts of money (given the time-frame) in carbon-based fuels. Its efforts to expand the national capacity for coal-fired electric power plants and its holdings in oil-rich highly unstable African countries rivals Allied efforts to secure carbon-based fuel supplies during the two World Wars.

But carbon-intensive energy systems are not just harming the environment, they are degrading vital natural resources and generating massive additional economic costs, already being felt across whole economies, but projected to increase drastically as impacts from global climate destabilization worsen and mount.

The result is that China has signed over its potent economic growth to a kind of resource-relative Ponzi scheme. The numbers don’t add up, if China projects its behavior out over the long term. Extreme reliance on fossil fuels will eventually cripple its growth-driving sectors and limit its capacity to build future prosperity. Beijing’s current approach to the carbon-induced climate crisis appears to be rooted in a persistent unwillingness to face facts about the increasingly unsustainable nature of its carbon-fueled economy.

China can no more write off its historic investment in fossil fuels than Wall Street could just stop using unwieldy, unsustainable financial “exotics” and derivatives. The logic of a bubble economy, which buries its long-term costs under a glaze of rapid growth, easy profit and false abundance, is that the accounting method cannot become more honest, only less so. This is why China, despite devoting enormous amounts of productive capacity and new investment to developing the industrial infrastructure for supplying the green energy economy, will not tolerate a global agreement with binding targets for emissions cuts, and a transparent verification process.

That, and corruption. China’s banking system is notoriously opaque, firmly rooted in the hard ground of centralized power, and the spectacular expansion of private wealth through entrepreneurship has been closely intertwined with personal and family relationships linked to positions of high power in the Communist party. Corruption prosecutions are notoriously selective and often come only after significant signs of spreading public unrest.

But much more far-reaching than the question of China’s banking transparency or political corruption is the question of how China will provide resources for its booming economy and growing consumer class. Even as environmental degradation ravages the world’s most populous nation, with deserts rapidly expanding across the northwest and river systems under threat from contamination and other environmental factors, across the south and east, China has signed up for an 18th-century model of how to power economic growth, using unsustainable farming methods and privileging coal over most other fuel sources.

As the Copenhagen Accord is put into action, in the next round of international negotiations, in Mexico in 2010, attention needs to be focused on how to motivate both China and India to redirect behemoth industrial-scale funding for fossil fuels to a comprehensive, affordable approach to greening the entire infrastructure for energy production and distribution of industrial resources. Achieving that goal, whether through international funding incentives or a multilateral trade agreement, will help motivate the necessary awakening that will allow Beijing to admit to its fuel-economy catch-22 and make the hard choices needed to emerge from it.

As ongoing global climate destabilization builds momentum, and fundamental climate-linked environmental processes come apart, we are hearing time and again that melting ice, whether in glaciers or in the Arctic Ocean, is “the canary in the coal mine”. The metaphor is very tempting, indeed, as coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel in use and a major contributing factor to global warming and climate destabilization, but the problem with the metaphor lies in the meaning of the canary being nothing more than an alarm signal. Glaciers are very much more important to human civilization than that.

In fact, melting ice is not just a sign of the underlying problem, and something precious to life that can be corrupted and wiped out by ongoing climate change, it is also one of the fundamental engines of climate-linked disaster, as projected in most scientific models looking at the negative impact of warming. As glacial ice melts, it increases the flood-intensity of river systems downstream, during certain periods, but flooding pushes excess water through, leaving more arid conditions behind. Flooding also erodes riverbeds and surrounding terrain, reducing water absorption capacity.

As melt and erosion build into a cycle of degradation, the result is less fresh water available for farming, less stable riverside communities, and reduced protection against forest depletion. Each of these factors enhances the spiral of environmental degradation that depletes the resources which make vital ecosystem services possible. Without those ecosystem services, like forest-cover which absorbs carbon, stabilizes topsoil, takes up water and shifts precipitation patterns inland and upland, the fertility base and stable landscape civilization depends on are not sustainable.

But glacial melt is also part of the process that links rising temperatures to higher sea levels. When sea ice melts, it contributes to the warming process —as ice is more reflective and therefore less heat absorbing than deep-blue ocean water— but it does not contribute to the rise in sea levels, as the floating ice already displaces water to the same volume. But when glacial ice melts, it releases new water into the global ocean, adding volume and pushing sea levels higher.

Rising sea levels are one of the most severe environmental threats to result from global warming. The most obvious result is the erosion of coastal land. Some small island nations are threatened with total disappearance if global sea levels rise just a couple of meters. Whole populations will have to be relocated, raising serious questions of political sovereignty, democratic rights, and the nature of the link between citizenship and geography. Bilateral treaties are already being negotiated to prepare for such evacuations.

In the developed world, such cases seem rare, and highly exotic, and seaboard erosion tends to be equated with beachgoing and little more. But it is very much more serious than that. Nearly half the world’s population lives on land that is close enough to sea level to be under threat with just a couple of meters’ worth of sea-level rise. River systems and watersheds could see tidal flows interrupted and coastal cities could become uninhabitable, without unprecedented water-retention spending and technological development.

But more severe still is the effect such tidal shifts would have on low-lying nations like Bangladesh. With over 162,000,000 people, Bangladesh is the 7th most populous nation in the world, one of the most densely populated, and intensely poor. Enjoying some of the world’s most fertile land, a high percentage of Bangladesh’s arable land lies below sea level, meaning a sea-level rise of just two meters could erase more than 20% of the nation’s land area, most of its best cropland, and displace tens of millions of people.

Already, south Asian countries are dealing with the prospects of catastrophic and unprecedented mass migrations due to climate change. Serious erosion of Bangladesh’s arable land could cause migrations of up to 80 million people, destabilizing border regions and saturating neighboring countries with unmanageable new concentrations of people. Already, the entire Nile River basin is facing such severe chronic water scarcity that migration patterns, food aid requirements and political stability are linked to the water management policies of countries along the river’s length.

Glacial melt is not a canary in the coal mine; it is both a sign of and a driver of human habitat destruction. Without stable climate patterns and resilient ecosystem services, agriculture is not possible and human civilization as we know it cannot be sustained. Where we are seeing accelerated or even severe glacial melt, we are already facing the long-term fallout from climate destabilization linked to carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect. Concerted restorative action is needed to slow or reverse that melting.

The United States is pledging to “take the lead” on a global fund of $100 billion over ten years, designed to help developing nations transition to a zero-combustion energy economy and fend off the already mounting ravages of climate destabilization. The offer was announced yesterday by Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and was intended in part to put added pressure on China to agree to a binding climate deal with emissions reduction verification processes built in.

As reported by Congressional Quarterly:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States would help to raise $100 billion annually through 2020 for a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change — but only if all countries submit to outside verification of their carbon emissions.

Clinton’s offer is intended to end a stalemate with China at the Copenhagen talks. China has refused to allow outside inspectors to monitor its emissions reductions. Its response to Clinton’s speech was muted, and it was unclear whether the offer of a massive fund would jump-start talks.

Prior to Clinton’s announcement the US had committed only to $1.2 billion for a global climate change mitigation fund, and up to $10 billion through 2012. The $100 billion pledge is a major new motivation for wavering nations to seize the opportunity and join a binding climate pact. The offer also firmly establishes the United States’ having fully committed to a binding global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

Clinton explained that the fund is not a cash giveaway and is designed to be part of a comprehensive public-private partnership to green the global economy and create a vibrant new energy infrastructure, including investment capital. “We expect this funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance,” she remarked, adding that “This will include a significant focus on forestry and adaptation, particularly, again I repeat, for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.”

Another important point about the fund is that the US has no intention of giving money to China to spur its emissions-reduction, green-energy or mitigation efforts, China already holding an unrivaled amount of American wealth and US government bonds. In fact, China would likely be urged, if not immediately then in the future, to contribute to a global climate change mitigation fund.

A week ago, Chinese officials had raised the issue of industrialized nations —a club to which it does not yet claim to belong— contributing funding for poor nations to deal with the effects of climate change, as their industry is responsible for creating the costs to those poor and developing nations.

But the US envoy to the Copenhagen climate conference, Todd Stern, said in light of the debate that developing nations could not be given “a free pass”, because “Virtually all of the growth in emissions going forward … will be coming from developing countries”, with as much as 50% of that expansion in harmful emissions likely to come from China alone. Getting China to sign up not only to a treaty, but to a transparent, independent process of verification, is crucial to the legitimacy and efficacy of any emissions-related global policy.

It is unclear whether the $100 billion fund would be of great benefit to India, the world’s largest democracy and a rapidly developing nation with widespread poverty and significant vulnerability to emissions-linked glacial melt, sea-level rise, desertification and rain-band shifts. But India’s interest in securing a deal that includes such funding, for itself and/or its neighbors, like Bangladesh, will also help intensify pressure on China to agree to the principles of a binding emissions-cutting pact.

The World Bank is working with the Chinese government to fund major industrial development in specific areas across Africa, as part of an effort to spur development and create jobs. The effort is needed in order to breathe new life into African cities that are experiencing population explosions, with little new investment to match the demand for resources and jobs. But three key factors raise questions about whether the China plan for African industry will be good for Africa.

Those factors are human rights, environmental protection and the legitimacy of governments associated with the ramping up of Chinese investment. China has been heavily criticized for taking advantage of politically precarious situations to win favorable investment conditions, leading to Chinese money and technology helping to prop up sometimes brutal regimes. It has also been criticized for alleged plans to use Africa as a colonial dumping ground for its own industrial waste.

And the question of human rights is crucial: China has long resisted nearly any effort by the international community to lobby on behalf of downtrodden minorities or dissidents in any country, a policy generally considered to mirror Beijing’s concern that its own internal power would be destabilized if intense international scrutiny of its rights standards were permitted and/or published. China’s censorship and persecution of dissidents is thought to be a threat to already fragile democracies in Africa.

But the Chinese investment goes beyond the admittedly fearsome complexities of those three main points. The depletion of Africa’s resources is already a serious problem for nearly every nation on the continent, and China is very explicitly seeking to expand its own direct exploitation of those already scarce resources. China is facing a severe crisis in food production, with grazing ranges and arable land being reduced dramatically by desertification and industrialization.

As a result, China is seeking to lease or buy land in countries in several African countries, including Zambia and Mozambique, as well as Russia, the Philippines, Australia, Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Brazil. In the Democratic Republic of Congo —a desperately poor country whose abundance of natural resources has made it the site of a catastrophic regional proxy war in which 5 million lives have been lost— China has secured a lease for 50% more land than the entire nation devotes to growing corn, its staple food, for 66 million of its own people.

What’s more, human-induced climate destabilization is having a more direct impact on Africa than on any other continent, in part due to already unfavorable climate patterns, and so geography, but also due to the inability of governments to adequately fund both sustainable practices and the regulatory regimes necessary to maintain stable conditions for climate-sustainable practices. China is fast catching up to and will likely soon eclipse the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

This means Chinese industrial expansion, whether in China or in Africa, poses a direct threat to the environmental, economic and political stability of African societies, and therefore a significant conflict of interest for the African populations whose governments would be negotiating with the World Bank to secure fresh Chinese investment. There are significant reasons for concern about what strings come attached to that investment, like a demand for neglect of environmental concerns or an incentive to slow democratic progress.

In much of Africa, infrastructure is failing or non-existent, with only one in four having regular access to electricity, while one in four also lack access to safe drinking water. This crisis-level situation, across whole regions, helps explain the appeal of China’s investment strategy. But African nations will have to study very closely what the impact of any specific project will be on their local environment, living conditions, political freedoms, and economic dynamism. Standards should be adopted that require both Chinese entities operating or investing in Africa and the local authorities, to meet certain criteria that advance the interests of the population on each of these fronts.

The global food supply is facing major security challenges, as warming global average temperatures and the destabilization of climate patterns and natural services undermine dependable agricultural cycles and threaten resources. The food supply is the most direct and visible connection between the breakdown of global climate systems and human health and wellbeing, but not the only link. The possible collapse of a major part of the human food supply means the collapse of agriculture, i.e. the breakdown of the human habitat.

Habitat is something we tend to associate with non-human animal life. Most species are evolved to function in highly specialized habitats, and complications common in neighboring natural environments can pose a direct threat to the fragile natural systems on whose balance a sustainable habitat depends. Human beings, however, like mountain lions, ants and a number of bird species, have shown near universal adaptability in terms of diverse range of climates. But the human habitat is more than temperature and precipitation: it’s sustainable agriculture.

The breakdown of global climate systems means a much less certain probability of being able to intelligently select good arable land, and little likelihood of being able to expect it will remain so. When agriculture breaks down, human civilization itself is under threat. Chronic food scarcity logically provokes mass migration, armed conflict, the scrambling of political borders and political systems, something very different from what we expect of the organized structures of human society.

But long before we need to talk about the total collapse of global human civilization, we can talk very really and very much in the present, about the direct and immediate threat to food supplies on which hundreds of millions depend for sustenance. As the Himalayan glaciers retreat, they first create untimely excessive flooding, then prolonged drought, draining entire river systems and threatening all of southeast Asia with chronic drought.

Rising sea levels then reclaim low-lying land from humanity, putting as much as 20% of Bangladesh’s land-area at risk over the next few decades. The resulting loss of cropland could deprive up to 2 billion people of a sustainable, affordable supply of life-sustaining nutrients. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina must be taken into account: deny human beings the basic needs to sustain life —like food, water, shelter and basic communal security— and the normal order of society quickly breaks down.

The collapse of specific river systems and the cropland they feed, coupled with the disappearance of some of the most fertile land in Asia under the waves, will cause a mass migration of unprecedented proportions. Demographers and economists speculate the effect could make political borders throughout the region virtually meaningless for an indefinite period of time, as hundreds of millions seek shelter and sustenance.

For most of the last decade, the world stores of surplus grain have been depleted, as demand far outstrips supply, and major grain producers like China have gone from being vital net exporters to significant net importers of grain. The situation has been gravely exacerbated by the global financial crisis and the paralyzation of credit across the world.

Writing for Nigeria’s Daily Champion newspaper, Chima Obbuji reports:

Amid global concern over food insecurity situation, which continues to impose serious threat for humanity, the world leaders have designed a summit to stem the tide of the insecurity. With food prices remaining stubbornly high in developing countries, the number of people suffering from hunger has been growing relentlessly in recent years.

The global economic crisis is aggravating the situation by affecting jobs and deepening poverty. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that the number of hungry people could increase by more than 100 million in 2009 and will surpass the one billion mark.

With chronic shortages of safe drinking water on the rise, and more than one-third of the world’s population lacking dependable access to safe drinking water, there are concerns the crisis in food security could begin to spiral. If water supplies continue to be depleted, and warming trends continue to rob the world of arable land and reliable annual harvests, the food crisis could become a global economic catastrophe.

The FAO estimates that 923 million people around the world suffered persistent hunger due to extreme poverty during 2007, while a further two billion slip in and out of chronic hunger due to less severe, but persistent poverty. In total, more than half the world’s population could experience some period of food shortage this year. Even in the United States, the most agriculturally productive nation in history, often called “breadbasket to the world”, one in eight are going hungry.

World grain stocks are now at their lowest level in thirty years. The human population now consumes more food than farmers can produce. Sea-borne food like fish are now produced primarily by way of industrial aquaculture, with oceanic fisheries across the world in collapse. Europe has had to mandate a freeze on fishing for certain species in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in hopes the natural fish stocks can replenish themselves.

The rate of increase in farming productivity by way of hybridization and other growing techniques or chemical treatments has slowed, so the hugely successful “green revolution” of the 1960s, which deployed new strains of rice, wheat and maize, to stave of famine and save hundreds of millions of lives across India, is unlikely to be repeated. Genetic modification may pose dangers to both human health, to the long-term sustainability of specific crop varieties, and to ecosystems verging on the land where GM seeds are planted.

Environmental factors that erode the supply of productive arable land and deplete natural resources like fresh water, fertile soil and specific species of animal life —like bees that pollinate crops—, are making the global food supply less sustainable. That mounting insecurity in the food supply is fast becoming the most immediate and comprehensive challenge facing nations around the world, and so will be instrumental in deciding the approach to climate danger response that will emerge from Copenhagen.

From WhiteHouse.gov: “In an address recorded in Seoul, South Korea, the President discusses his trip to Asia. He talks about his push to stop nuclear proliferation in North Korea, Iran, and around the world. He talks about promoting America’s principles for an open society in China while making progress on joint efforts to combat climate change. And talks in-depth about the primary objective of his trip: engaging in new markets that hold tremendous potential to spur job creation here at home.”

Three major components of Pres. Obama’s trip to east Asia are securing the international financial system in the interests of a sustained economic recovery —dealing with trade deficits and creating jobs at home (5% more exports to Asia will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs)—, nuclear non-proliferation with specific attention to the proliferation risks and potential security threats regarding North Korea and Iran’s respective nuclear programs, and coordinated action to reduce global carbon emissions and combat climate destabilization.

I think this is an interesting question. Can we expect China’s cooperation? It’s clear that China has shifted its energy policy somewhat, to take account for the potential long-term strategic economic benefit of being a major source for green energy technology, know-how and to use green energy to fill out the nation’s energy supply and possibly permit exportation of energy or fuels.

Whether that means China is on board for steep emissions cuts is another question. I think China will hedge against any effort by major industrial democracies to slow their own emissions cuts. Beijing clearly wants permission to emit more than it does now, at least for a time, and to reduce its emissions from a peak level well above current levels. Western powers may have to agree to something along those lines to win real substantive and reliable cooperation from China on emissions cuts, over time.

The question is: how long do we have, and are we politically willing or able to go for the still more severe emissions cuts we will need, to offset such a scenario?

• Follow this discussion on The Hot Spring Network

Pres. Obama has reportedly secured Chinese president Hu Jintao’s pledge of cooperation on global economic recovery, efforts to curb emissions and combat climate destabilization, and nuclear non-proliferation, both in Iran and North Korea. The pledge of cooperation came despite Obama’s demand that China honor the “universal” human rights of its people, alongside differences over how strongly to pressure Iran to guarantee its nuclear pursuits are legal and peaceful in nature.

Sustained, serious cooperation on efforts to reform and improve international banking standards and limit abuses may be key to guarding against Chinese prosperity eroding American prosperity, and helping to prevent a return to risky, predatory behavior at major US banks. China’s banking system has long been assailed in the west for lacking transparency and condoning behavior banned by international economic treaties. Hu’s pledge of recovery cooperation implies progress on removing such inefficiencies an abuses from the Chinese banking system.

Pres. Obama gave a town-hall format talk to a closed-door gathering in which he spoke against censorship and said the freer the flow of information in a society the stronger that society will be. His remarks were censored by Chinese authorities and the comments on censorship were barred from any media distribution within China. One website that posted the remarks was forced to take them down after just 27 minutes.

The episode highlights the serious divide between Chinese and American policies toward the meaning of people’s government. This means specific details of how to tackle Iran’s nuclear programme, or North Korea’s, will be harder to agree on. Beijing has long tended to be sympathetic to the authoritarian urges of the Iranian regime, though it is suspicious of theocratic politics in general, and North Korea is China’s historic ally. China sees attempts to dictate to Tehran what it is permitted to do militarily or economically as a potential threat to its own sovereignty vis a vis international law.

On climate destabilization and emissions reduction, China is a complicated partner: the Chinese government has demanded special freedom to aggressively ramp up carbon emissions, possibly until per-capita levels rival those in the industrialized democracies. But climate scientists say such a scenario would push the world over the brink into irreversible climate change, possibly with catastrophic consequences for billions of people around the world.

China’s pledge of cooperation is being treated with skepticism by those in western industry who believe it is more a ruse to permit China to negotiated strict limitations on industrial rivals, while ignoring emissions capping requirements altogether. For that reason, Pres. Obama’s visit to China is considered to be a vital step toward securing Beijing’s collaboration on a system of transparent international verification of to achieve emissions targets, reductions and related innovations.

On economic recovery, banking reform is key, but the vast trade imbalance between the US and China, which owns trillions of dollars worth of US dollar currency and government bonds, is another crucial negotiating hotzone. China cannot afford to see the US fail to pay in full on time the debt obligations it has with Beijing, but neither can China afford to see the US dollar decline in value or the influx of US consumer cash for goods and services decline.

Both nations are engaged in a complex catch-22, where no part of the puzzle can be let slip, but no part of the puzzle is entirely secure. Cooperation on economic recovery means both nations will seek to serve and protect that synergistic relationship, while cooperating to find ways to protect against its potential pitfalls. For now, Hu is making pledges that China has traditionally been unwilling to honor; the hope is that Pres. Obama has been able to convey the novel problems of these times, and that Pres. Hu has been able to see China’s future in a new, more interdependent, international light.

Pres. Barack Obama today delivered his first address to the UN General Assembly, promoting cooperation to green the global economy and combat climate change. He pledged the US would lead by example, and called on other nations to find common ground and work to secure the global environment against irreversible degradation.

In a day filled with major initiatives and encounters with heads of state, the US president’s message seemed to resonate most significantly in an announcement made by China’s president Hu Jintao, also this morning, that China will enact sweeping efforts to significantly reduce the carbon intensity of its economy, in order to fight climate destabilization.

Reaching such an agreement has been a major focus of Pres. Obama’s policy toward negotiations with China, in preparation for the Copenhagen climate conference this December, where world leaders hope to establish a global emissions-reduction regime that will prevent the worst projected effects of global climate destabilization from taking effect.

But the White House has been cautious in its response to Pres. Hu’s announcement. An official statement recognized the importance of the plan, and said the announcement was welcome, but that the virtues of China’s carbon emissions stance will have to be judged based on concrete numbers. China will be pressured to come in line with aggressive plans such as the US’ pledge to reduce emissions up to 80% by 2050.

Obama’s climate address focused on the need of developing nations to participate just as responsibly and pro-actively in reducing global emissions:

Those rapidly growing developing nations that will produce nearly all the growth in global carbon emissions in the decades ahead must do their part as well… They will need to commit to strong measures at home and agree to stand behind those commitments just as the developed nations must stand behind their own. We cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution act together. There is no other way.

Barbara Stocking, of Oxfam, was critical of the lack of specifics in today’s announcements:

It sounded like Hu was being positive about moving forward together but he didn’t put any [major] new things on the table which is a shame at this stage in the negotiations… Fundamentally what we need is for the leaders to come out now to set the tone for the whole deal.

She called Pres. Obama’s address “a major missed opportunity”, saying:

The president unfortunately did not deliver what other nations were hoping to hear, namely, a commitment to work with the Senate leadership on a game plan for getting through the Senate, on a timetable commensurate with the urgency of the climate challenge, a bill that caps America’s greenhouse gas emissions…

Obama has been guarded about both the international and domestic politics of emissions reduction targets, cautious not to appear at home to be going too far without guarantees from abroad and careful not to tip his hand too far before major developing nations, like China, India and Brazil, commit to hard targets and firm timetables for emissions reduction.

In the US, climate-related legislation has been controversial, with conservative Republicans casting the entire issue as a “socialist hoax” designed to cripple the American economy. The public broadly supports green legislation and seeks serious emissions reductions, but the Congress has been unable to agree on a method of legislating binding caps on overall emissions national or regional emissions.

Nevertheless, China’s announcement is a vital step forward, and opens the floor to further debate on the specific ways in which the nation’s most influential economies can cooperate to effect comprehensive global emissions reductions, taking into account the need of poor nations to develop quickly and at low cost. Subsidies for green technology may be on the table as the G20 discusses ways of reaching a binding protocol at Copenhagen.

Today’s twin messages of responsibility and action by the US and China on the issue of carbon emissions is being treated as a sign of hope and of true progress made during this year of intensive, ongoing negotiations on the subject. Pres. Obama noted that the US government has been slow in responding to the climate crisis, but that in the last 8 months, more action has been taken in connection with climate change than all previous efforts combined.

One analyst, as cited in the Guardian newspaper, said last week’s announcement of a new fuel-efficiency standard for all vehicles sold in the US is “the single biggest step the American government has ever taken to cut greenhouse-gas emissions”. And in a sign of commitment to the greening of the global economy, he said today that at the G20, he will work with other world leaders “to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so that we can better address our climate challenge”.

The UN General Assembly, which brings together every head of government in the world, to offer their country’s position on issues, their country’s demands regarding trade and conflict negotiations, their country’s hopes for a more harmonious world, this year truly grapples with issues of global consensus. Economic recovery, for many parts of the world, will require an unprecedented expansion of women’s rights and sustained attention to responsible environmental stewardship.

Climate change, or global climate destabilization, has come to the fore as the most severe and pervasive security threat of the 21st century. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month will work in part as a prelude to the Copenhagen climate conference to be held in December. The goal is to achieve worldwide consensus on a comprehensive, binding strategy to reduce carbon emissions and to protect against the unwinding of climate patterns that have remained consistent throughout all of recorded human history.

Women’s rights is now being viewed by more nations and by more major international organizations as key to the economic and political stability of fragile nations. The Obama administration, under the leadership of Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has made women’s rights a priority and has laid out goals for helping to promote women’s rights through economic development, modernization of educational systems, and democratization of the political processes in nations around the world.

A consistent theme of Sec. Clinton’s travels around Africa this summer was the need to end the out of control violence against women that plagues many African nations, and bring women into the fold of the political process and economic structures. She visited the eastern Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where one of the world’s most desperate and protracted civil wars continues to put women in jeopardy of random attacks on a daily basis and where mass rape has been used as a weapon of war.

Her message was clear: the United States does not intend to continue directing aid to regimes that do not combat the extreme conditions of violence and repression in which millions of women find themselves, but aid will be directed toward those policies that are designed to empower and protect women. There will be efforts to persuade China, which strongly backs some of the worst offending nations, like Sudan, to demand better treatment for women.

Pres. Obama has called for a global initiative to move toward the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons, which he admits may not occur during his lifetime. He and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev have already begun the process to establish a new comprehensive strategic arms reduction treaty (StART). Iran, under intense pressure from the international community to cease uranium enrichment, has also proposed a framework for eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide.

The nuclear question looms large, and will consume a lot of words in open and back-room negotiations. The UN Security Council can be expected to receive new pressure from western powers to threaten sanctions against Iran if it does not halt uranium enrichment. And the recent announcement of the Obama administration’s plans to scrap Bush-era plans for stationing missiles in Poland is thought to be in part a call on Russia to support sanctions against Iran.

In a recent CNN interview, with Fareed Zakaria, Pres. Medvedev sounded tougher on the Iran question than at any time previous: he said Russia would only ever provide Iran with “defensive” weapons equipment and would neither help Iran develop long-range ICBM nor come to Iran’s defense if it were attacked. He called on the international community to come together to secure peace and prevent conflict in the middle east.

Medvedev also confirmed that he had met in secret with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He said the meeting was kept secret at the Israelis request and that he had “honored the wishes of our partners”. He revealed that in that meeting Netanyahu, who has been under intense pressure from the west to tone down bellicose rhetoric, said Israel had no plans to attack Iran or destroy any of its research facilities, adding that he trusted Israel and hoped new partnerships could be created to prevent further conflict in the region.

Pres. Obama has invited PM Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to meet with him to discuss the path to lasting peace, during the UN General Assembly in New York. The two have accepted, setting the stage for what might be breakthrough negotiations on concessions from both sides that could lead to a two-state solution.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

In a break from the Bush administration, Mr. Obama pressed early in his administration for new, U.S.-brokered talks between the two sides. In another departure, Mr. Obama has ratcheted up pressure on Israel, publicly calling for a total freeze in Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.

That issue has blocked progress in restarting talks so far. Palestinian negotiators have demanded a total freeze before agreeing to any substantive negotiations. Mr. Netanyahu has refused.

The US and NATO nations may refrain from openly pressing Russia on its interventions in the volatile Caucasus region, but the problem of Georgia and the former Soviet Republics along its borders must be dealt with. Abkhazia has declared independence with Russian diplomatic backing, and Georgia has sought to blockade Abkhazia as a protest against that declaration of independence. There are fears the blockade could lead to another bloody Russian intervention against a state that seeks to join NATO.

There is, however, an opportunity for a new era of cooperation between the Russian Federation and NATO. European leaders have proposed that with the US putting aside missile defense basing plans for Poland, the opportunity may exist to come together and create a unified missile defense system covering all of NATO and the Russian Federation.

But economic empowerment and global financial regulation may turn out to be dominant themes of the General Assembly meetings. The 2008-2009 global economic crisis has shown the vulnerability of poor nations to the unraveling of sometimes delicate international trade pacts and resource flows. The threat from intercontinental climate destabilization could result in the collapse of food supplies to half the world’s population and the migration of hundreds of millions of people, if one year’s monsoon doesn’t materialize.

The empowerment of poorer nations to be capable of competing for internationally trade resources, including food and water, is vital to preventing mass climate migration and the resulting destabilization of nation states in coming years and decades. The beginnings of these negotiations, to prevent protectionist measures and expand the internationally accessible resource base, will be taking place as world leaders meet in New York.

Rights and democracy as such will also be highlighted. The election of 12 June 2009 in Iran has stirred a global firestorm of opinion over what measures might be taken to guarantee transparency and prevent massive fraud engineered by leaders of government. More than 100 nations whose leaders will be in attendance have significant voting rights issues that must be addressed in order to legitimate their electoral processes and improve transparency.

The US will seek to lead on this question, even as dozens of its own states struggle to clarify election process and balloting laws, to ensure manipulation is not possible and guarantee the transparency of upcoming elections. New Jersey might be held up by some foreign states as an example of a state that still won’t guarantee its voters paper proof of their votes, while Venezuela may claim legitimacy on this point, a contrast that is sure to make for contentious negotiations on standards for international voting rights and ballot-counting transparency.

The Communist party boss for Xinjiang province was is known as one of China’s toughest remaining strongmen, according to numerous reports. But when somewhere between 1,000 and 20,000 residents of Urumqi, the regional capital, took to the streets, Beijing reacted by removing the party chief in hopes of curbing inter-ethnic unrest and growing anti-government sentiment.

Xinjiang is a predominantly Uighur region with a strong separatist movement, where China’s majority Han ethnicity constitutes a minority, despite Beijing’s efforts to fill the region with Han and to favor Han migrants in jobs, politics and business opportunities. That favoritism is considered to be the spark that set off violence between local Uighur muslims and the Han Chinese community.

Nearly 200 people died in the rioting that followed a series of attacks. The Uighur community repeatedly claims that Beijing is engaged in a campaign of soft ethnic cleansing, pushing Uighurs out of positions of influence and giving more opportunity to their Han neighbors. The Han community alleges the local authorities are incapable of providing security and demands a change in leadership.

Some estimates put the number of demonstrators who took to the streets at over 20,000, mostly Han residents, demanding that Wang Lequan. The crowd was reported to be chanting angry slogans like “Down with Wang Lequan!” According to the Financial Times, “Mr Wang is deeply unpopular in Xinjiang, even among many Han residents” despite being himself a member of the Han community, as would be most party leaders in the restive province.

Wang is deeply disliked by the Uighur community, who suspect him of being little more than a partisan strongman sent to ensure their own land is taken from them and to put down a growing separatist movement. The Han community reportedly sees his methods as failing to provide security and blames him for ongoing rumors of random attacks in Urumqi’s streets.

There are reports of a strange series of attacks on residents of Urumqi by one or more attackers wielding syringes. Beijing has announced that authorities have rounded up at least 15 people, but evidence of the attacks themselves has been hard to pinpoint. Some sources are reported to believe claims of the attacks might be little more than rumors.

Wang’s ouster marks an important turning point in relations between Beijing and China’s ethnic minority regions. In a sense, the move to replace Wang Lequan shows that public pressure can achieve a change in governance, and regional groups are likely to seek greater authority over public officials.

A World Bank study has projected that the global financial crisis and resulting recession will plunge some 53 million people across “emerging markets” —like China and India— into absolute poverty, in 2009 alone. In China, tens of millions of people have lost jobs related to the export-dependent manufacturing sector.

Such a collapse in private fortunes for millions in the developing world could lead to major political instability, so China and other nations are on the lookout, ramping up security operations and domestic crackdowns on dissent or public gatherings. Unrest in China’s western Xinjiang province tied to repression of the Uighur muslim minority also has a socio-economic component, as Beijing steers Han Chinese merchants into Xinjiang with subsidies, while Uighurs remain poor.

It is thought the upheaval in response to Iran’s apparently manipulated vote, indeed the manipulations themselves, may be rooted in failing economic fortunes, as foreign wealth to invest in commodities like petroleum shrinks and jobs and wealth across the Islamic Republic are threatened.

The World Bank study also finds that some 400,000 additional children will die each year through 2015, as a result of fallout from the current global recession. Foreign Affairs reports that unstable governments in Africa —like the Central African Republic, the DR Congo or Zimbabwe— could be further destabilized by popular unrest following the near total collapse of investment or lending.

Foreign reserves in sub-saharan Africa are so low that DR Congo, a nation already beset by economic chaos and a multi-front conflict that has taken over 5 million lives, may soon be unable to import basic economic life-supports, like food and fuel. The Central African Republic has no funds to pay government employees, a sign its central authority could collapse and the system come apart amid spreading poverty.

Zimbabwe  earlier this year hit the practically meaningless estimated rate of 230 million % inflation. Its fragile coalition government, between the Zanu-PF party of Pres. Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of his arch-rival and prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, has struggled to act with unity or implement major fiscal reforms.

Both parties have routinely sniped at each other throughout the process of forming a unity government and attempting to govern. Their rivalry has hardly been put aside, and observers continue to fear the violent crackdown against the MDC could resume if Mugabe feels his authority threatened by circumstances.

In the 1960s, architect and philosopher R. Buckminister Fuller delivered a series of lectures compiled in the still highly relevant book Utopia or Oblivion: the Prospects for Humanity, in which he lays out the argument that throughout history, the ratio of easily accessible commodities to human population meant that only about 1 in every 100 people could achieve a comfortable standard of living, but that by the mid 20th century, this logic of scarcity had become obsolete.

Fuller’s argument was that political systems and traditional forms of administering power over people and markets continued to focus on the need for specific entities (cohering geographically, politico-militarily or commercially) to accumulate the largest possible reserves of everything, to the detriment of all others.

His suggestion was that with the new efficiencies achieved by the most advanced societies by the mid 20th century, the only sustainable collective goal for human civilization would be “to make the world work for 100% of  humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”.

Radical free-marketeers have long wrestled with such an idea, both claiming that the totally open market, unconstrained by any regulation whatsoever, would best achieve that goal, while openly decrying such a goal as inherently adverse to the interests of the so-called “free market” (always in truth a partially free or freely programmable market).

But such an approach to global economics need not be totalizing or degrading to human freedom in any way; Fuller offers no ideology in his vision, only the scientific fact that human civilization had evolved dangerous enough weapons, large enough populations and enough diversity to allow for either a state of permanent brinksmanship and dangerous conflict or a cooperative international system in which human ingenuity bring dignity and freedom to all people.

The success of campaigns like the ONE campaign, the Global Fund or the Clinton Global Initiative, in refocusing international trade policy and the fiscal and lending policies of the world’s wealthiest governments, at the Gleneagles G8 conference, for instance, shows that such a goal can become part of a viable international system of negotiation among free societies, with the specific aim of spreading relative historical affluence to populations around the world.

But Roger Altman aptly notes in Foreign Affairs that “globalization” —which some view as a complicated attempt to realize something like Fuller’s cooperative vision through capitalist liberalization, while others view it as either the creation of a “global village” or the extension to planetary scale of the reach of multinational firms and wealthy economies— is in fact in retreat.

Altman’s view of China is telling: he suggests that “Beijing’s unique capitalist-communist model appears to be helping China through this crisis effectively”, adding that “measured by its estimated $2.3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, no nation is wealthier”.

There are significant problems with this view: one is that China’s “capitalist-communist model” embodies some of the worst flaws of both systems at their most radical, and its current position on the global stage is also owing in many ways to historical accident as it is to anything resembling responsible stewardship. It has the nakedly nationalistic policies that seem helpful to insulate against fiscal contagion, and its relationship with the US has allowed it to build up those massive foreign reserves, but this does not a sustainable future make.

China’s example is also one of devastatingly high risk in terms of resource management: it’s western deserts are expanding across the northwest of the country at extremely worrying rates, allowing severe dust storms to reach Beijing and beyond, and eroding arable land area at dizzying rates. China now imports more grain than it exports, despite being one of the largest grain producers in the world.

Its infrastructure development plan is car-centered, which may help rig its GDP to continue escalating, unless there is a radical price-distorting environmental collapse that could lead to something like the 1930s dust bowl and Great Depression in the United States, which, like the 1930s, would spread to other nations and contribute to the collapse of China’s needed international trade sector.

With 23 million migrant workers now jobless in China and an escalating rate of unemployment among urban Chinese —figures that do not include migrants—, some observers estimating as many as 50 million Chinese workers may have lost jobs since last fall, when global demand for Chinese manufacturing started to sharply decline and major banking support for foreign investment collapsed.

Altman observes that “Global economic and financial integration are reversing”. He adds that the state is acquiring increasing prominence in the shaping of economic policy the world over. Protectionism is a risk, and voters are demanding solutions. While Altman and others argue that GDP growth must continue to be the focus of government policy, it is increasingly clear that this is a parallel consideration to whether or not international fiscal policy helps or hinders the extension of relative historical affluence —higher standard of living and access to resources— to the world’s poor.

Failure to effectively manage major resources like arable land, fresh water, forests and mineral distribution, will continue to increase the pressure on GDP that results from challenges to the economic stability of billions of poor and working families around the world. Their instability is the instability of communities, regions, markets, and nations.

Altman suggests Obama should use “the enormous global goodwill he enjoys” to lobby for further globalization through market liberalization, but Obama’s task is really far more complex than that. And he appears to understand it as such. He must lobby for global cooperation and for the virtues of human enterprise and democracy, but he must fashion a vocabulary which does so while espousing the need to prevent massive marginal populations from falling into desperation and disarray.

Fuller’s philosophy of cooperative innovation and “world-around” knowledge and resource distribution is instructive, and may blend well with Obama’s message of democratic change and grass-roots enabled reform. But the escalating pressure on human populations around the world, who are threatened with the collapse of their economic life-supports, must be a central concern of all ongoing negotiations on trade, fiscal policy and international lending.

The United States is working to develop closer strategic and economic relations with China. The relationship has always been tricky, due to the binary opposition of strategies, which is convenient for those who would like to disqualify the other side’s policies as “evil” or contrary to all reason. Pres. Barack Obama has been clear that he sees the US-China relationship as one of global ethical responsibility, and the driving economic and political bond in the 21st century.

He has also been clear that he expects regimes that favor authoritarian measures and oppose dissent within their borders to recognize the liberating and resilience-inducing effects of democratic processes and to work to legitimize their policies through a turnover of power to the people. His phrasing has varied widely, sometimes speaking of how American democracy “set the captives free” by achieving the abolition of slavery, or asking rival nations to “unclench your fist” — relax constraints on dissent and free assembly in order to be more active in substantive international negotiations.

China and the US are increasingly immersed in a symbiotic economic relationship, which may or may not be healthy for either of the two nations, their respective political systems, or their obligations to domestic populations or to allied nations. But it is on the question of human rights and “sovereignty” where the two differ most severely. China routinely defends not only its own harsh internal security measures, but also those of nations around the world, under the logic of “sovereignty”, essentially the argument that any nation’s government can do whatever it wants within its own borders.

The American position is generally the opposite —though there are serious questions of “American exceptionalism”—, holding that all nations’ governments have a moral obligation to legitimate any and all government activities through checks and balances, democratic elections, respect for the specific tenets of international law and the broad principles of human rights. Both nations hold permanent positions, with unilateral “veto power”, on the United Nations Security Council, and as anyone might expect, realpolitik dictates that each nation votes according to its perceived interests, as well as its principles.

The question going forward is: how can closer US-China ties bring about a more united front, backed by the global reach of both powers, that promotes responsibility, democracy and human dignity, in economic and security policy? While for hardliners on both sides, these are fuzzy, “academic” questions better dealt with as matters of military superiority and global strategy, the actual way in which these questions play out in US-China negotiations, on a range of issues, will determine much about the geo-political framework of the 21st century.

Sovereignty is used by China to justify its opposition to binding emissions reduction targets, even where those targets are more favorable to China —still in the midst of industrial “development” and economic “modernization”— than to wealthy industrial democracies. Breaking down this staunch opposition to international commitment may be the trickiest and most perilous job of diplomats representing the Obama administration’s “3D” diplomatic agenda — development, diplomacy, defense.

The above-mentioned question of “American exceptionalism” is the perceived double-standard, whereby the US is supposed to be granted more leeway —immunity from prosecutions before the International Criminal Court, for instance— in security matters, due to 1) its self-professed role as defender of democracy and human liberty and 2) its outsize contribution in dollar terms to funding the UN system and security operations around the world.

The exceptionalism is seen as such by nations or factions that perceive US security policies or operations, or its economic agenda, as hostile or as working against certain principles of international law. The feeling that such a special status might be justified tends to be rooted in the idea that US involvement abroad is done altruistically, or in defense of commonly held ideals. Pres. Obama’s talk of “universal values” is an updating of this kind of language, but represents a more generous diplomatic approach as well.

China, however, does not see such language as inherently friendly: the perception tends to be that politics is rooted less in values than in interests, and the old-world idea that there is never enough to go around of any major resource or living-standard driver, means every negotiation among polities must be a negotiation of self-interest, never shared interest. In this light, the US president speaks of “universal values” only as part of a thinly veiled effort to place intolerable constraints on China’s discretion, domestically and abroad.

The Obama administration has to walk the rhetorical tightrope between such perceptions and the opposing viewpoint —that negotiations on economic or climate policy that avoid confrontations over alleged detention and security abuses are capitulation to tyranny—, if there is to be any progress on actions and attitudes of shared interest on any of these matters. The best approach might be to not veil the real goal at all: to openly present, as Pres. Obama has done, the defense of human rights and the democratic decentralization of power as tools for strengthening the state and promoting future prosperity.

The two nations are also hard pressed to make such negotiations happen effectively, because both are rare cases of “successful” revolutionary systems, the one 233 years old, the other 60 years old. Both nations have established well-used and ideologically deep-rooted legal systems and structures of government, based in revolutionary ideals that are not to be put aside. The US experiment with democracy has an ethical leg up by not being totalitarian in its underlying assumptions or in practice, but China’s system also rests on ideals that can be used to foster decentralization, democracy and human rights.

As the US-China relationship moves forward, finding ways to demonstrate this dynamic, the productive interplay of revolutionary ideals within a pragmatist approach to economics and human well-being, may be the single common key to success or failure in any negotiation. The Chinese government does not want “regime change” at home, and the US does not want to further the methods of the totalitarian state abroad or in its political relations… so every step toward better promotion of shared human interest and human rights protections will require an incremental approach with demonstrably pragmatic benefits.

Related stories:

• Death Toll in Xinjiang Unrest Rises, as Public Assembly Banned
• G8 Summit Hits Snag in Establishing Global Emissions Reductions
• Nuclear Weapons-free World the Right Goal, Best Way to Serve American Ideals
• China Backs Away from ‘Green Dam’ Censorship Technology
• AP Reports Repression Marks 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre
• ‘Ghost Net’: Cyber-spying Probe Reveals Vast Network of Cyber-espionage Based in China
• It’s Time for China to Start Defending those Victimized by Corruption

Access to the internet must be a basic human right, across the globe, for a number of reasons. First of all, legitimate, transparent democratic processes of government require in today’s world that information flow freely and that citizens be empowered to share information and to find information, according to their choices and their needs.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effect that enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress and among federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

The death toll in the capital of Xinjiang rose last week from initial reports of 100, to 140 killed, then 156. Now, there are reports that over 180 people have died in the inter-ethnic clashes between Uighur muslims and ethnic Han Chinese, relative newcomers to the region, brought in by policies imposed from Beijing. Reports of who exactly has borne the brunt of the violence are still difficult to confirm.

The Christian Science Monitor is now reporting:

The disputed death toll is now 184, and the number of injured is higher, too. A top Chinese official visited the region for the first time this weekend, accusing a dangerous fringe of organizing the unrest and calling on people of all ethnicities to build “a steel wall” against instability.

China is now seeking to crack down on any expression of dissent, flooding the streets of Urumqi with thousands of military police and armored transports. CNN reports today that the city of Urumqi has banned all public assembly in an effort to prevent further clashes. The city’s Public Security Bureau released a statement through China’s state-run media agency Xinhua, reading “Assemblies, marches and demonstrations on public roads and at public places in the open air are not allowed without the permission by police”.

Over the weekend, an explosion occurred at the China National Petroleum Corp. refinery in Urumqi. Last year, a series of bomb attacks in Xinjiang raised tensions between the western province and Beijing, which feared the emergence of a separatist threat.

The government’s ban on public assembly came on the eve of the 7th day after the deaths, which Han Chinese traditionally mark as the day of mourning. Security forces may fear a public expression of grief and outrage that could spur a new surge of violence.

Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has voiced criticism of China’s treatment of the Uighur muslim minority. The Uighurs are a Turkic central Asian ethnic group, speaking a language from the same family as Turkish, which some pan-Turkists view as the far eastern reach of the central Asian Turkic sphere.

Erdogan has said China’s crackdown is based in ethnic and religious intolerance and is part of a campaign to suppress the people of the Xinjiang region. He has called for action by the UN Security Council to investigate and/or denounce the violence against Uighurs.

There are reports the unrest has caused a stifling of travel and business in the region. Other towns and cities have seen a slowing of their economic activity, with visitors to “ethnic” recreation areas, set aside to keep Han and Uighurs from mixing uncomfortably. Some industrial facilities have been damaged in rioting, in part as symbols of what is seen as a Han invasion orchestrated by Beijing.

US president Barack Obama convened a G8-parallel Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, comprised of 17 nations representing over 80% of the world’s industrial and consumer greenhouse gas emissions. The goal was to push governments to move their emissions and energy strategies closer to consensus for meeting bold targets for carbon emissions reductions, in anticipation of the September G20 summit in Pittsburgh and the UN climate summit at Copenhagen in December.

Copenhagen has as its specific aim the establishing of a global climate treaty to surpass and replace the Kyoto Protocol. Scientists and major powers agree that the boldest reductions possible should be established. G8 leaders agreed earlier this week there should be concerted action taken to prevent global average temperatures rising more than a total of 2ºC throughout the entire arc of industrial human-induced climate change.

The total warming is near 1ºC already, and some project dire consequences for a further 1ºC rise this century. With carbon emissions expected to rise significantly before peaking sometime in coming decades, even with dramatic global efforts to impose reductions, climate scientists are fearful that the 2ºC target cannot be met.

Earlier this year, a poll of hundreds of leading climate scientists led to the finding that nearly 9 in 10 (86%) believed a 4ºC to 5ºC temperature rise by century’s end was more likely. The commitment of the world’s leading polluters to aim for protocols that bring the 2ºC target within reach may be a vital step in reducing overall climate fallout from carbon emissions, but without specific actions that effect concrete reductions, almost immediately, many believe the 2ºC target may already have slipped from possibility.

For the first time in history, the US, China and India have all agreed to a common climate-policy goal —the 2ºC target—, but specific steps designed to optimize chances of achieving that goal have not been agreed. The G8 summit and Major Economies Forum had aimed to set a target of worldwide 50% carbon emissions reductions by 2050, with the worst carbon polluters reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.

The climate crisis is proving to be one of the most globalizing public policy affairs ever confronted by a united global community, as every nation, from the most significant emitters, like the US and China, to the smallest developing nations, is wary of agreeing to major cuts, entailing costly infrastructure reforms, if any of the major economies fails to follow through on emissions reduction pledges.

As The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The G-8 included the percent cuts in its communiqué. But the G-8 also left unresolved the issue of what year to use as the basis for comparing before-and-after emissions: “…1990 or more recent years.”

And the 2050 date is so far off that developing countries say they won’t take such an agreement seriously unless developed countries also commit to aggressive mid-term targets for 2020 to ensure they would reach the 2050 goal. So far, developed countries haven’t been ready to do that.

Many in the US have heralded Obama’s complicated rise to power as the moment to enable and to commit to such near-term reductions. A deep global recession, trillions of dollars in wealth lost, millions of job losses in the US and tens of millions in China, and major generative economic refocusing of spending priorities, mean the US could seize the opportunity to spur a major energy revolution, capable of allowing for steep emissions reductions within a decade.

Former US VP Al Gore, whose work on climate policy won him a shared Nobel Prize —along with the IPCC— and an Academy Award, joined a nationwide movement to “Repower America”, aiming for 100% renewables-sourced electricity within a decade. There is science to back up the proposition, but industry and the financial markets are skeptical about the viability of spending in the way required to achieve that total energy revolution.

Obama’s Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate is perhaps the single most solid effort by any US president to spur global movement toward consensus on major emissions reductions, and allowed him to show clear leadership on arranging the field for coming negotiations. Observers expect the summer will see intensifying behind-the-scenes negotiations between governments, in anticipation of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, where many hope the world’s wealthiest industrial and developing economies will lay the groundwork for comprehensive global emissions commitments at Copenhagen.

The Major Economies Forum declaration did achieve the important milestone of industrial economies promising to lead by “promptly undertaking robust … reductions in the mid-term consistent with our long-term objectives”, while developing countries pledged to “promptly undertake actions whose projected effects on emissions represent a meaningful deviation from business as usual.”

• Going Deep Green: renewables to guarantee clean energy supply for export (discussion)
• Official House Energy & Commerce Committee Summary of H.R. 2454: Climate Bill
• Climate Bill Would Achieve Far Lower Costs than Critics Projected
• 190-page White House Report Urges Immediate Climate Action (discussion)
• Transition to Renewables Cannot Wait, Devotion to Carbon Fuel is Folly
• Comprehensive US Energy Bill: Does it Do Enough? (discussion)
• ‘WindCube’ Marks New Phase in Wind-power Amplification
• THE END OF AN ERA: Closing the Door on Building New Coal-fired Power Plants in America
• ‘We Cannot Rebuild this Economy on the Same Pile of Sand’
• Fmr. VP Al Gore Testifies in Hearings Related to Landmark Emissions Legislation
• Obama Acts to Enable Energy Innovation, Raise Emissions Standards
• Economic Downturn Cannot Be Allowed to Slow Shift to Green Resources
• EPA Chief Says Congress Should Pass Laws to Mandate Emissions Reduction Regulations
• US Supreme Court Rules EPA Must Regulate Carbon Emissions, Citing Clean Air Act

Developing nations have failed to deliver the collaborative consensus sought by US president Obama and other G8 leaders in anticipation of the Copenhagen Climate Conference scheduled for later this year. While G8 leaders agreed global climate policy should be oriented toward avoiding any increase in global average temperatures of more than 3º Fahrenheit, they did not reach agreement on how to cap or reduce emissions to set levels by 2050.

Pres. Obama had invited China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and other developing economies, to join the G8 discussions on emissions targets. The leaders gathered would represent 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and were to debate ways of reaching a 50% overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with the most advanced industrial nations committing to reductions of 80% by 2050.

With the US, China and others still heavily dependent on coal for electricity generation, and many developing nations uncertain about spending on the costs of infrastructure necessary to shift to green energy, planning for such massive cut-backs is still not universally accepted. And while the US, Europe and Japan, have been planning for and shifting governmentn funding to permit a green energy shift, nations like China and India say they should not be asked to cut back emissions at an earlier stage of industrial development.

The US Congress is currently debating the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), or HR 2454, legislation that would restrict carbon emissions from industry and promote the transition to renewable fuels for both power-generation and transport. While ACES pushes the transition to new fuel sources, and discourages continued dependence on carbon-heavy combustible fuels, it does not guarantee the level of emissions reductions being sought this week in L’Aquila.

China’s president Hu Jintao left L’Aquila, Italy, where the G8 summit is being held, in order to return to China to deal with the growing unrest in the western region of Xinjiang, where over 150 people have been killed in ethnic clashes and a tightening security clampdown. The next G20 summit will take place in September, in Pittsburgh, and will require leading developing nations like China, India and Brazil to find more common ground with the world’s richest nations, in order to lay the groundwork for success in Copenhagen, in December.

Pres. Obama plans to unveil a $15 billion food security initiative on Friday that will help deal with mounting stresses —environmental, economic, political and microbial— on the global food supply. Such moves, that would help ease the struggles of people suffering from lack of development or political stability in poor countries, are thought to be part of Obama’s broader vision for a more responsible and collaborative global approach to economic policy.

Winning the trust and the good will of top developing nations, who remain unconvinced both of the need to cut emissions and the political will in rich countries to actually follow such rigorous emissions-reduction schedules, is a vital step toward getting them to agree to concrete targets, as a foundation for a global carbon-emissions protocol, sought for Copenhagen.

A demonstration for Uighur rights in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province, turned violent when security forces clashed with demonstrators, raising the specter of deepening ethnic tensions between Uighur muslims and ethnic Han Chinese. At least 140 people were killed and over 800 injured in the rioting that ensued. (Official estimates later Monday put the number of dead at 156.) Military police were brought in to “lock down” the entire section of the city typically seen as the Uighur quarter.

Some onlookers appear convinced the majority of those killed were Uighurs attacked by the security forces, who allegedly used deadly force in response to rock throwing and the overturning of vehicles, while others report the majority of the dead were ethnic Han Chinese brutally attacked by Uighur mobs. China says the violence was orchestrated by “organized criminal groups” abroad and carried out by enemies of the state from within China. It appears the clashes emerged from mounting ethnic tensions between Uighur muslims and Han Chinese.

Tensions involving the cultural aspirations of the Uighur minority have been many and varied. 17 Uighur muslim detainees held at Guantánamo Bay have been released to small island nations, as US law barred their return to China where it was feared they would be mistreated. Last year a movement for Uighur rights was crushed by Beijing, to avoid embarrassment during the Olympic Games, and a bomb attack in Kashgar killed 16 paramilitary soldiers.

China’s response to major demonstrations has routinely been to accuse organizers of organized criminal activity or of conspiracy to overthrow the government. Such accusations were levied against the pro-democracy demonstrators massacred at Tiananmen Square, at Tibetan demonstrators in Tibet and in neighboring provinces, at religious rights protesters supporting the Falun Gong movement, and at Uighurs supporting ethnic diversity and historical heritage, nevermind political autonomy, in Xinjiang.

There are now fears that such language may presage a more severe crackdown against the ethnic Uighur community, which has long alleged its people are routinely stripped of basic rights and legal status simply because of their ethnicity or religious faith.

Adam Grode, an English teacher living in the neighborhood where the violence occurred, told the press “There was a lot of tear gas in the streets, and I almost couldn’t get back to my apartment. There’s a huge police presence.”

UPDATE, 4:08 GMT, 7 July 2009: After authorities detained over 1,400 Uighur men (one BBC reporter said in a live radio broadcast that as many as 14,000 had been rounded up), Chinese authorities invited foreign press in to see that order had been restored to central Urumqi. But an apparently spontaneous demonstration began massing, made up mostly of women, including old ladies, young women with babies, and children, demanding “freedom” and the return of the detained men.

At least one report from the scene said security forces armed with batons, water cannon and possibly firearms, were pulling back to avoid doing harm to the women. Uighur witnesses told the international press on Monday that the demonstrations that turned violent had been prompted by the killing of two Uighurs in a clash with Han Chinese, for which the community felt there was not enough serious pursuit of justice.

Reports emerging from Xinjiang early Tuesday cite hundreds of demonstrators massing in central Kashgar, possibly clashing with security forces there. China says violent separatists are trying to spread the violence across the province. The spreading civilian demonstrations appears to mirror public reaction to discriminatory treatment that outraged many Tibetans, both in Tibet and in neighboring provinces, in early 2008.

As ethnic Tibetans in Tibet, indigenous Uighur muslims in Xinjiang say the Beijing authorities have given overwhelming privileges to a minority population of Han Chinese migrants who are taking their jobs and their autonomy. Uighur complaints include the banning of teaching in their languages, attempts to close mosques and religious schools, the destruction of ancient heritage sites, and the barring of Uighur access to many basic state services and commercial privileges.

Related stories:

• Liu Xiaobo Arrested for Suggesting Reform to China’s One-party System
• AP Reports Repression Marks 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre
• June 1989 Was Not the First Tiananmen Military Crackdown
• ‘A Tragedy to Shock the World’: Secret Zhao Memoirs Acknowledge Tiananmen Massacre
• China jails man who applied for permit to protest during Olympics…
• 8 Killed in Aftermath of Bomb Attack in China’s Xinjiang Province
• Demonstrations Against China’s Tibet Policy Spread to Nepal, Police Attack Demonstrators
• Tibet Crisis Deepens, Chinese State Media Say “Crush” Protesters
• Chinese Security Forces Accused of Firing into Crowd of Demonstrators in Lhasa, Tibet

Barack Obama has been observing, researching and critiquing nuclear weapons policy for three decades. He seeks to put in motion the most ambitious global denuclearization effort ever conceived, grounding his approach in a hard pragmatist awareness of what drives the build-up of ever more destructive weapons arsenals. He has said throughout this year that his plans would never remove the US nuclear deterrent capability while any nuclear threat remains in the world. Now, he goes to Russia to seek a bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty.

The New York Times today reports that Obama’s 1983 Columbia University essay “Breaking the War Mentality” criticized the dangerous logic of the limitless Cold War weapons build-up and warned that policy-makers who sought to find ways to champion the fighting and winning of nuclear war might be inviting destruction and chaos. In that article, written for the Columbia newspaper Sundial, the young Obama called for steps to bring about “a nuclear free world”, as the only “decent” choice.

Obama was at that time writing during the massive build-up of the most destructive weapons the world had ever seen, as top Reagan advisers like Richard Perle —whose policies won him the honorific “the prince of darkness”— argued for a first-strike capability designed to eliminate the entire Soviet Union from existence. The popular “nuclear freeze” movement sprung up, with millions demonstrating in the streets of New York and other cities, decrying the devotion to a weapons regime that could wipe out all life on Earth.

Catholic bishops banded together to release a pastoral essay denouncing nuclear war as a great evil. The nuclear freeze movement was so successful —and was in part driven by nuclear accidents at peaceful facilities on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, and later at Chernobyl, in Ukraine— that no new nuclear plants have been built in the US since then. Pres. Ronald Reagan was persuaded, by the potential catastrophic destruction that would result from nuclear war, to promote and achieve, in cooperation with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbechev, the most aggressive denuclearization treaties ever undertaken.

Now, as the world enters what could be a new nuclear weapons age, with 9 nations —the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea— proven or thought to possess nuclear weapons, the student has become the teacher, in a sense, and he seeks to re-orient the prevailing global nuclear policy toward total denuclearization.

While old hands like Perle —despite having been proven wrong by history on nearly every count of their nuclear policy advice— continue to argue that only the naïve would favor the elimination of nuclear weapons, brazenly siding with the most sinister rogues on the world stage, it is hard to imagine how anything allowing the continued proliferation of new nuclear devices among the 9 nuclear nations would help prevent proliferation to those who seek to join the club. Obama’s goals are bold, but they are the most appropriate for long-term global nuclear strategy.

There are concrete, measurable steps being undertaken to move the US and the world toward a reduced nuclear future: the cancellation of development of new nuclear weapons —which could spur a global arms race of unprecedented proportions—, locating and sealing all “loose” nuclear material around the world, new strategic arms reduction treaties (StART), strengthening the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and reducing abrogation or cheating, and a global ban on the production of weapons-grade fissile material, which would put an upper limit on the number of weapons that could be built.

Each of these points would make for measurable means of regulating or restricting outright the production of nuclear weapons, making it easier for a global regime of inspections to detect even the slightest variation from the arms reduction protocols. Taken together, these proposals would make the intelligence game more precise and more effective the work of preventing even accidental nuclear detonation or release.

He was critical not only of the spread of nuclear weapons, but of the facile and tempting doctrines of confrontation and cynicism that aided in promoting their proliferation. He wrote of “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” in his 1983 article and has consistently warned that giving in to such attitudes undermines both the security of the United States and its allies and the values on which American democracy is founded.

Obama, who has remained committed to global denuclearization throughout his course of study and career in public life, took on the issue immediately upon entering the United States Senate. He has observed that “The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” adding that “any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world”.

He developed under-reported but very heavyweight international arms control credentials when he sponsored and piloted through the Senate a major new arms control initiative, related to securing nuclear weapons-related materials. He traveled to Russia to study nuclear deactivation and containment efforts, including the complicated work of retrieving all proliferation-potential materials from now independent former Soviet republics, some of which have too little funding or too lax a regime of controls to keep the valuable science and materials under lockdown.

Sen. Richard Lugar, Obama’s Republican backer in the nuclear security initiative, says “When we got there, he was clearly all business — a very careful listener and note taker and a serious student”. Obama visited nuclear facilities and deactivated nuclear silos, studying the virtues and the perils of Russia’s existing activities to contain or scale back its own nuclear arsenal, giving him more hands-on insight into the problem than most Washington policy-makers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama continued to ramp up his efforts to build consensus for an aggressive non-proliferation and denuclearization policy, aligning himself with such heavyweights as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz (both Cold War era Republican secretaries of State), William Perry (a Clinton Defense secretary) and fmr. Sen. Sam Nunn, who has fought persistently for aggressive non-proliferation policy.

Obama has been relentless in pushing his belief in the virtues of deeper and more informed imagination in policy-making, constantly highlighting and criticizing the failures and the risks of intellectual inertia and ungrounded thinking about the virtues of militarism. He has demonstrated both with his record of public service, his legendary campaign of innovation and his immensely productive first year in the White House, that talent and drive can do more than doctrinaire cynicism, and he now takes that spirit of possibility and efficacy to Russia, to show that both former Cold War enemies can see immediate, real-world benefits to spurring a new age of non-proliferation.

• There is No Button to Push, Thankfully
• Reports Say DPRK has Launched More Missiles, Abandoned Armistice
• North Korea Has Tested a Nuclear Device
• The Radical Naïveté of Newt Gingrich
• Taliban Foothold in Buner Severe Risk to Pakistan/Regional Security
• Against the Good Nukes / Bad Nukes Fallacy, or: David Frum’s Prophecy Problem
• Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons More Realistic than Selective Non-proliferation
• Bush-era Policies Have Put Nuclear Weapons within Reach of Taliban
• ‘6 Powers’ (including US) invite Tehran to Denuclearization Talks
• Obama Calls for Coordinated Global Effort to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
• Obama Prague Speech on Global Denuclearization (video + transcript)
• US, Russia to Discuss Improving Ties in Geneva Meeting

Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner have a few things in common, among them that they know the rigors of market economics, the ups and the downs, the arguments for and against regulation. They have both seen duty at high levels during good times and bad. But neither of them has a strong record of pushing to include real ecological math in the standard approach to judging value or resource availability across the economy broadly.

No one can question their experience or their knowledge, and they both are known for a fierce independent streak, but they are also both tied to the period of massive deregulation that led to the current crisis, and fair observers have to ask: do they really understand the need to feed green thinking into the whole economic outlook? Of course, it is only in the last few years that economists became aware of the need to include ecological calculations in the valuation of economic trends and assets.

One wonders if either has a flexible enough view of the marketplace to now include the complex and maddening array of deep resonance relationships that coalesce into ecology in a new model of economic growth and prosperity. To some extent, this has been ordered by their boss, and the public has been sympathetic and Congress is working to make sure that energy-related legislation is green enough, but really looking at the world through a new greener lens, from the perch atop the US Treasury Dept. is another thing altogether.

Because this has not been required in the job description before, because there is really no precedent, no record to go on, it is a must-learn, must-do task of the current and future Treasury secretaries which will demand of Mr. Geithner an astonishing amount of intuition and market savvy. Some make an argument about Timothy Geithner, however, that might explain how he will outperform anyone else who might have taken the job: he knows China.

Geithner not only knows China, he speaks Mandarin and has already been involved, in the early months of the Obama administration, in very high-level, even contentious negotiations with his counterparts in China, regarding details of the increasingly symbiotic economic relationship between the two nations. It could be that Geithner will simply follow the lead of those who know ecological economics, while using his depth of experience in the study of China to find artful ways to incentivize China’s adoption of greener behavior.

How could a Treasury secretary do this? The answer to that question lies partly in the daily exchanges between himself and Pres. Obama. It is a pressure game that must be invented. It is a trial-and-error exercise of the mind that cannot be allowed too much room for error. Geithner could succeed where Obama has succeeded at home, in demonstrating how effective it can be both politically and economically to work major green improvements to the economy into economic recovery legislation and needed regulatory reforms.

Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, a company that seeks to build a global network of electric car-battery switch-out stations, says China is the EV “tipping point”. If electric vehicles become the standard there, then the industrial momentum to produce them on a massive enough scale to completely overhaul the global auto industry will follow. China and the US could collaborate in a very fruitful effort to globalize the EV industry and speed the overhaul of the global automotive fueling infrastructure.

China could also mimic the desert energy plan being undertaken in the Sahara, where 400 billion € in new investment will be poured into building the world’s largest solar farm complex in the north African desert, for energy to be exported to Europe. China is seeing its western deserts expand at a worrying rate, and environmental degradation is rife across the country. An effective means of combatting sooty pollution that sometimes blankets China’s largest cities would be to build solar and wind farms in the no longer arable deserts.

Some pure market theorists would balk at the idea that the US Treasury secretary would be involved in something so specific regarding the planning of a Communist-run planned economy, but it would be foolish to miss the opportunity. With Geithner attuned to how China works and to how best to communicate in that environment, and with the urgent need to spur China to climate-responsible action, intense economic negotiations and strategy sessions that are already ongoing may offer an incomparable opportunity to make the needed transition to a world more sustainable and ecologically aware.

If Geithner were to undertake such an initiative and be successful, China could be brought to the table on major climate treaty negotiations; its industrial production capacity could be directed with great speed to producing the necessary tools and technologies that would help spread the renewable energy revolution across Asia, and the boom-time associated with the arrival of whole new industries could be spread across the two economies on which the world is now most dependent.

A direct benefit to the US would be the lowering of the costs of production for making the transition to a renewables-based energy economy, as China ramped up production of the necessary ingredients. Many other bold but convincing ways of integrating green thinking into the top level economic decisions made by US officials await debate and/or adoption, and the agenda laid out by Pres. Obama, to reform and rebuild the nation’s energy infrastructure and curb the negative impact on global climate, will require some of them.

Of vital importance, also, is the tempting and widely accepted attitude that long-term investment is not the best or most competitive behavior. Such reasoning has repeatedly undermined the transition to clean energy because the relatively easy money associated with the vibrant and volatile markets for carbon-based fuels is seen as a better business bet than the long-term economic or even societal benefits that might emerge from environmentally friendly choices that cost more in the short term.

Pres. Obama has said “we cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand” and has given ample signs of understanding the market paradoxes inherent in the pile-of-sand problem, the valuing of immediate capital gains over the real generation of sustainable value. So we should expect his top economic officials will see the pile-of-sand problem as a focal point of steering a broad economic recovery that is genuinely sustainable as it relates to the value-base that makes the structure itself sound.

So, are Geithner and Summers and the rest of the top-tier economic team fully in the know on these issues, or is there a steep learning curve? Have they acquired adequate information on the human economic realm being just a small part of the ecological value-base? How do we work such wisdom into policy-making? There can’t be too many mistakes made in integrating traditional thinking on market dynamics, supply and demand and free enterprise, with a new, deeper understanding of the pervasive value of finite resources, or of renewable ones. These officials will be making key choices that decide how well and how smoothly we stage that convergence.

• Climate Bill Could Bring Total Energy Revolution
• Going Deep Green: renewables to guarantee clean energy supply for export (discussion)
• Waxman Includes Titus-Giffords-Heinrich Clean Energy Amendment in H.R. 2454
• Official House Energy & Commerce Committee Summary of H.R. 2454: Climate Bill
• Climate Bill Would Achieve Far Lower Costs than Critics Projected
• 190-page White House Report Urges Immediate Climate Action (discussion)
• Transition to Renewables Cannot Wait, Devotion to Carbon Fuel is Folly
• Comprehensive US Energy Bill: Does it Do Enough? (discussion)
• Cap & Trade: Paradigm Shift or Same Ole Story?
• ‘WindCube’ Marks New Phase in Wind-power Amplification
• THE END OF AN ERA: Closing the Door on Building New Coal-fired Power Plants in America
• ‘We Cannot Rebuild this Economy on the Same Pile of Sand’
• Fmr. VP Al Gore Testifies in Hearings Related to Landmark Emissions Legislation
• EPA to Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions, After Review Shows Dangers
• Obama Tasks Interior Dept. with Conservation, Energy Security, Science-based Policy
• Obama Acts to Enable Energy Innovation, Raise Emissions Standards
• Obama May Issue Executive Order to Raise Fuel Efficiency Standards
• Economic Downturn Cannot Be Allowed to Slow Shift to Green Resources
• Massive Pollution-based Weather-system Choking South & East Asia
• EPA Chief Says Congress Should Pass Laws to Mandate Emissions Reduction Regulations
• US Supreme Court Rules EPA Must Regulate Carbon Emissions, Citing Clean Air Act

Amid a storm of protest from Chinese citizens, businesses, rights activists and foreign governments, China has suddenly halted its planned installation of a new enhancement to the ‘Great Firewall’ called ‘Green Dam’. In a statement the UK’s Guardian calls “terse”, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported “China will delay the mandatory installation of the ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers.”

The Green Dam censorship software was planned for installation on every new computer sold in China, allowing the government to monitor and control all internet traffic at the individual level. There appears to have been debate in the government as a result of passionate and even hostile criticism across China’s tightly controlled online community. 

An estimated 300 million people in China are able to access the internet, driving an increasingly sophisticated “arms race” between Chinese government censors and the increasingly tech savvy and independently minded online population. Several incidents in recent years have brought the government’s aggressive censorship operation to the forefront of Chinese public awareness. 

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An attempt to conceal information about the SARS outbreak led to accusations the government had endangered public health around the world, exacerbated the risk of the disease spreading and embarrassed the nation out of an overzealous reflex to avoid the embarrassment of SARS itself. The earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan led to a spontaneous nationwide online volunteer networking drive, that enabled citizens to contribute aid remotely or by traveling to the hardest hit areas to volunteer. 

Increasingly, Chinese citizens are seeing the internet as a source of information, and censorship as a barrier to being well informed. Chinese businesses and universities have pressured officials to loosen aggressive controls on the flow of information, and there is increasing pressure from the international community to open China journalistically and informationally, for the benefit of its own people and to legitimize 

• Liu Xiaobo Arrested for Suggesting Reform to China’s One-party System
• AP Reports Repression Marks 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre
• China Still Seeks to Hide What Happened at Tiananmen Square 20 Years Ago (video)
• ‘A Tragedy to Shock the World’: Secret Zhao Memoirs Acknowledge Tiananmen Massacre
• Lin Zhao, Poet Executed for Dissent, Remembered as Tiananmen Anniv. Nears
• ‘Ghost Net’: Cyber-spying Probe Reveals Vast Network of Cyber-espionage Based in China
• China Blocking Websites in Effort to Crack Down on Press Freedom
• 3rd Day of Clashes in Tibet Without Independent Media Being Permitted to Verify Death Tolls
• China frees NY Times reporter it jailed for 3 years; 35 journalists, 51 ‘cyber-dissidents’ still in prison in China… 
• China Detaining, Intimidating Journalists in Effort to Control Public Image Abroad
• China Plans ‘Smokeless War’ Against Press, Dissidents

Chinese rights activist Liu Xiaobo has been detained on charges of “inciting subversion of state power”. Liu was jailed for 2 years following the TIananmen Square protests in 1989 that ended with a massacre of unarmed protesters. He was one of the co-authors of Charter 08, a petition calling for the diversification of China’s one-party system. Human Rights Watch and other watchdog organizations have strongly condemned his arrest.

Chinese authorities have now charged Liu with crimes related to agitation and conspiracy to destabilize the state and overthrow the socialist system. Calls for his release have been persistent and widespread. China has warned international delegations it will not be pressured and views the issue as entirely an internal affair. Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said China is a nation governed by laws and that the case will be reviewed by independent jurists ruling on matters of law. 

Richard Buangan, a representative from the US Embassy in Beijing, is quoted as saying “The US government is deeply disturbed by reports that Liu Xiaobo has been formally arrested and charged with serious crimes”. Buangan added: “We call on the government of China to release Mr. Liu and respect the rights of all Chinese citizens who peacefully express their desire for internationally recognised freedoms.”

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The Times, of London, reported on Xiaobo’s detention in December:

Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic first jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, was taken from his home in Beijing late on Monday by a dozen police officers and was asked to sign a document acknowledging his detention. They searched his flat and took away three computers, mobile phones and documents, friends told The Times.

The Charter 08 [full text, English translation] was released on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and draws from that foundational UN bill of rights. 303 prominent critics of the Beijing government risked retaliation and imprisonment by putting their names on the document. Signatories include lawyers and rights activists, former top figures in the Communist party and a prominent Tibetan blogger. 

The document’s preamble opens with these words:

This year is the 100th year of China’s Constitution, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A “modernization” bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a “modernization” under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and long a vocal critic of China’s human rights record, has called for condemnation of the arrest from the international community. She also has said Liu has “courageous” and suggested that his ideas should be heard by a wider audience in China. 

There have been reports that other framers and supporters of the Charter 08 movement have been harassed, threatened or detained. China recently sought to suppress efforts to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre of pro-democracy supporters at Tiananmen Square. A number of other important anniversaries will occur this year, and China has made clear it intends to treat the Charter 08 backers as hostile to the state, fearing the possibility of widespread unrest due to a worsening economic downturn and tens of millions of workers laid off.

As Eva Pils, a Hong Kong law professor, writes in the Wall Street Journal: 

… the voices of dissatisfied citizens have grown stronger and louder: The Internet is burgeoning with citizen-journalists uncovering new cases of corruption and official venality. More streets and fields have become scenes of labor and land-rights protests as more citizens have taken the freedom at least to demand justice.

In 2004, the Chinese government amended the national constitution to include a guarantee of protection for human rights. But the intervening years have not demonstrated a political willingness to follow through on the spirit of that pledge. Charter 08 is born of the frustration many feel regarding the government’s failure to improve its record on the treatment of basic human rights and instituting checks and balances in the system.

There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen, as some suggest.

A quick look at Europe, which is far ahead on this, from Lester Brown, one of the most respected sources on ecological science and renewable energy, for four decades:

Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy. In its late 2003 projections, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) shows Europe’s wind-generating capacity expanding from 28,400 megawatts in 2003 to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and 180,000 megawatts in 2020. By 2020, just 16 years from now, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy the residential needs of 195 million Europeans, half of the region’s population.

Read more about this at the Earth Policy Institute. These are serious people, doing real science, and real economic analysis. Their research is read by world leaders and UN agencies. Anyone who wants to understand the global economy as we shift to a less primitive, less dangerous way of harvesting energy would do well to read their work.

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The US Department of Energy found in 1991 that Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone had enough wind “resources” to generate 100% of US domestic electricity needs. Almost 20 years later, the standard wind turbine is more than twice as tall, with much larger blades, and is able to capture a much greater supply of wind energy. Advances in efficiency and delivery mean that those three states alone could potentially account for all US energy consumption, via wind power. If the infrastructure is built, that is.

The ONLY reason it is not considered the cheapest, most efficient method of producing a reliable energy flow is because our infrastructure is designed to harvest carbon for combustion, and our government literally pays the oil companies to do what they do. If the infrastructure is built, and the subsidies shift, you’ll start to hear industry types complaining about how hard it will be to be in the oil business, and you’ll see quieter, subtler minds figuring out how to make huge profits from wind power.

In a recent debate on the issue of climate destabilization and the potential fallout from glacial melt in the Himalayas, a critic of the carbon-free vision of the future suggested that it is “alarmist” to express concern about people whose life-sustaining resources are being rapidly depleted. The Gangotri glacier, which feeds the Ganges, and a vast network of river systems across south Asia, is melting at an unprecedented rate.

We know that burning carbon-based fuels contributes to the warming of the global climate. A mere 1 degree increase in the annual average global temperature started the process. The annual average global temperature has risen another 2 degrees since that time, and in the course of just one century, the glacier, which took millions of years to form, has retreated by 70%.

500 million people rely on the river systems that are fed by that one glacier in order to survive. Bangladesh and India have already come close to armed conflict over these water resources. There are 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayan range. Over 1 billion people across the region depend on those glaciers for fresh water. Scientists estimate that at the current rate of melt, every Himalayan glacier will be gone by the year 2035. 

This is not alarmism. This is happening now. “Nature” can survive burning a little more petroleum, of course, even a lot more, but not every ecosystem and not every species will survive the changes “nature” will undergo. We knew in the 1950s that the Gangotri glacier was melting at three times the rate for the previous 200 years, yet nothing was done to prepare to make responsible changes. Even now, when the rate of melt is by far the fastest on record, there is still a prevailing skepticism about what practical measures might be taken to slow melt. 

If you study the history of the relationship between climate and human civilization, you find that relatively minor climate variations have brought an abrupt end to periods of great prosperity: ancient Sumeria is one case; ancient Egypt is another; the Mayan civilization as well; and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a man-made climate disaster. Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China also saw tens of millions each die from environmental degradation and agricultural collapse. 

Lester Brown, whom I mention above, actually helped to save hundreds of millions of lives in India, in the 1960s, by working with the UN to prevent famine. Those kind of things can only be accomplished once we learn to pay attention to the relevant facts. We have learned from those experiences, or at least some of us have, and responsible nations have established methods of preventing the collapse of harvest yields, fisheries and other environmentally sensitive sectors of the economy.

But those are just baby steps. We have not even begun to apply most of what we already know, and weaning ourselves off carbon-based fuels is part of what we need to do. Other nations may indeed continue to rely on carbon-based combustible fuels for their energy they may lag dramatically in making the shift, which would reduce the overall usefulness of efforts to cut emissions and combat climate change.

This is often cited as a reason why we should also voluntarily lag, and invest in more oil, and coal, and not in renewables. That plan is not sound economics, however. In fact, it would be like economic suicide, because we have the wealth, the science and the technology to speed our transition to renewables, so that we don’t have to compete for the overpriced oil of 10 to 15 years from now and bankrupt ourselves in the process. Doing nothing will make us far more vulnerable to oil shocks, perpetuating unnecessary economic weaknesses we could overcome by innovating now.

California-based Korean-American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea for “grave crimes” allegedly stemming from their filming video across the North Korean border, from Chinese soil. Reports suggest the two women were abducted by North Korean border guards, who crossed into Chinese territory to seize the journalists in a military raid, while the two women were reporting for Current TV.

Analysts suggest North Korea plans to use Ling and Lee as pawns in high-stakes negotiations with the US over its nuclear program and the US regional initiative to prevent the shipping of nuclear contraband into or out of its territory. According to the LA Times, Ling and Lee could face torture and subhuman conditions in North Korea’s “notorious gulag system”, as part of its “reform through labor” regime.

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The report specifies:

While Pyongyang has not said where the women will serve their time, their future likely includes the possibility of hard labor, starvation and torture in a penal system many consider among the world’s most repressive, said David Hawk, author of the 2004 study “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps.”

Hawk adds that “The casualties from forced labor and inadequate food supplies are very high.” The international community has expressed outrage at the holding of the two American reporters, from their abduction at the Chinese border, to the secret trial proceedings and apparently arbitrary sentence to extreme harsh treatment.

Sec. of State Clinton yesterday said the US administration is examining measures to reclassify North Korea as one of its blacklisted “state sponsors of terror”, a classification that had been withdrawn in response to Pyongyang’s participation in ongoing negotiations regarding its nuclear program. But the North Korean regime has withdrawn from those talks, and has begun testing not only medium and long-range missiles, but also at least one nuclear device.

Pres. Obama said Pyongyang cannot be “rewarded” for continued provocations, and has called on the international community to unite against the North’s provocative and bellicose actions, and initiate a tougher round of talks on comprehensive denuclearization. The US government has said it is “deeply concerned” about the sentence and has called for Ling and Lee’s unconditional release.

North Korea’s totalitarian government may be descending into a contentious and destabilizing succession process, as ailing dictator Kim Jong-il, son of the regime’s founder, reportedly seeks to hand power to his youngest son. In what may be a desperate political struggle to appear strong enough to maintain the hard-line status quo, the regime has engaged in increasingly belligerant activity, saying it would “consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard line measures”.

• Washington Post: “North Korea Convicts 2 U.S. Journalists”
• LA Times: “North Korean labor camps a ghastly prospect for U.S. journalists”
• Current TV: “What should Obama do about North Korea?”
• Café Sentido: “Laura Ling & Euna Lee, Two American Journalists Jailed in North Korea, to Face Trial” (April)

The Associated Press is reporting that China has marked the 20th anniversary of the bloody military assault on demonstrators gathered peacefully in Tiananmen Square with a comprehensive crackdown on media or public mention of the tragedy. While the regime refuses to acknowledge what was done to unarmed Chinese citizens on 4 June 1989, an effort has been underway for months to prevent reporting online or in print, as well as to track or block text messages that might mention the day’s meaning.

Only in Hong Kong were Chinese citizens allowed to gather or remember the massacre. An estimated 150,000 people gathered in Victoria Park to remember the dead and call for democratic reforms in Beijing. One of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, formerly hunted by the regime, told the crowd in Hong Kong there was still a widespread hope that the leaders of the one-party system would leave the stage and make room for democratic processes.