HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
In December, 50,000 people converged on Copenhagen to attend, protest, lobby, observe or report on the global climate conference. The original purpose of this long-awaited summit was to complete a new international agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. However, instead of a new agreement, the 50,000 attendees, protestors, lobbyists, and observers were left with what Friends of the Earth described as a “sham agreement” that was agreed to by just five countries on the last evening of the two-week-long gathering. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso termed the accord a “commitment to the lowest common denominator.”
The so-called “Copenhagen Accord” is indeed a sham of an agreement because it’s nothing more than a statement issued by the leaders of just five countries after a brief closed-door meeting to which the remaining 188 countries were not invited. Especially infuriating was the complete exclusion of the European Union (the only region of the world to have offered ambitious and firm measures to curb greenhouse gases) and the bulk of the world’s developing countries that stand to lose the most from global warming. So Copenhagen produced an Accord arrived at completely outside the normal participatory United Nations process. Worst of all, the Accord established no goals, targets, strategies or even a process for future negotiations. Amazingly, President Obama—one of the five leaders who put the Accord together in a couple of hours (the leaders of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa were the others)—acted as if he’d engineered a breakthrough.
Read morePosted In: Environment
Loring Wirbel, Citizens for Peace in Space
Colorado Springs, Colorado
The speed with which Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles have transformed the face of war-fighting is almost as dazzling as the technology itself. Five years ago, these robot planes were still pretty much generally regarded as the stuff of science fiction. Today, however, unarmed reconnaissance drones (ranging in size from a dragonfly to almost the size of a two-seat Cessna) and the rarer armed drones (equipped with missiles or smart bombs) are staples of the Pentagon’s war-making efforts—their numbers and uses destined only to increase.
Read morePosted In: StratCom & Nuclear Weapons
TIM RINNE
STATE COORDINATOR
A version of this article originally appeared in the February 13, 2010 Lincoln Journal Star.
Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (or ‘drones’) are more and more becoming the weapon of choice for waging America’s international ‘War on Terror.’ The ‘Predator’ and the ‘Reaper’ models in particular have become so popular that, in its 2011 budget, the Air Force is actually requesting more drones than piloted combat aircraft.
Read morePosted In: StratCom & Nuclear Weapons
Paul Olson
UNL Emeritus Professor
My parents didn’t believe in comic books or Big Little Books. They were frivolous, unchristian and expensive. In the age when Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel came to life (the 1930s), I had to bum books off my friends, read them at recess and dream the rest of the day of rescuing the world from evil. One of my favorite comics was Buck Rogers, a space warrior repeatedly forced to battle the villainous Killer Kane and his paramour Ardala. Fighting with Buck to save the world were Lieutenant Wilma Deering and Prince Tallen of Saturn.
Read morePosted In: Speaking Our Peace
HENDRIK VAN DEN BERG
UNL PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Both the Bush/Cheney and Obama Adminstrations and the Republican and Democratic leadership in Congress have openly supported the concept of ‘clean coal’—or what is more precisely called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Billions of government dollars have already been allocated to funding test projects that will serve to develop new technologies that (1) remove carbon from the emissions of coal-fired power plants, plants that convert coal to synthetic oil, and other industrial plants that use coal as an energy source; and (2) store the carbon permanently underground.
These technologies will, according to the coal lobby, make our most abundant carbon fuel ‘clean.’ CCS technologies thus simultaneously reduce global warming and our dependence on foreign oil. The coal lobby then continues to argue that, even though these new technologies are not yet available, spending taxpayer money on test projects and other types of CCS research justifies the construction of more familiar coal-fired power plants instead of more expensive alternative wind, solar or conservation projects because these coal-fired plants can be ‘cleaned up’ in a few years ‘when the technology becomes available.’
Read morePosted In: Environment
