Recycling / Reciclagem
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Since nothing will likely be done collectively, the little that can be done will be done personally - and recycling, including the broader sense of avoiding waste, can be done personally, so.
Hard to tell about Brasilian bureaucracies ... the individuals are often engaged and committed, the organizations themselves are generally corrupt to some degree - but if I had a choice about where to spend these last days (and maybe I do), it would be in the company of such as these.
Fábrica de madeira plástica chega ao mercado brasileiro com capacidade para produzir 900 toneladas/mês, Mônica Pinto / AmbienteBrasil, Fonte / Source.
Wisewood.
Vladimir Kudrjawzew, Reciclagem de PET no Brasil, Fonte / Source.
Ecosorb.
inpEV - Instituto Nacional de Processamento de Embalagens Vazias.
inpEV - National Institute for Processing Empty Containers.
Eloisa Biasotto Mano.
Élen Beatriz Acordi Vasques Pacheco.
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Who benefits from it?
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which way the wind blows
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a hopeful message
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”Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
(see The Perfect Storm below).
15 December 2007, Bali Outcome by Gwynne Dyer (português).
Do not be downhearted about the outcome of the Bali talks. They did not deliver the binding commitments to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that are desperately needed, and as a result millions may die who might have lived. But they did show us something remarkable. They showed us the human race trying to grow up and take responsibility for its common future.
It doesn't feel like that, of course. It feels like 15,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists and activists flew across continents in order to sit in Bali for two weeks and achieve very little. Disappointment and even anger are not out of order, for the commitment to early and deep emission cuts (25 to 40 percent by 2020) that most developed countries wanted to see in the draft treaty had to be dropped in order to keep the United States involved at all.
The Bush administration no longer denies that climate change is a problem, but it is still determined to kill any international deal that involves concrete and legally binding targets. The United States produces about a quarter of the world's emissions, so no deal that excludes it would work. Moreover, the developing countries where emissions are growing fastest, particularly China and India, will never accepting obligations of their own while the United States accepts none. So the American delegation had to be kept on board no matter how obstructive it was.
It was amazingly obstructive. There must be no targets, there must be no timetables, there must be no numbers at all in the "roadmap" that the conference was drawing up for the next two years of negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto treaty, insisted chief US negotiator Harlan Watson. Why not? Because "once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction." Yes, and if everybody's shared goal is cut emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, what's wrong with that?
The United States was almost completely isolated at the Bali talks. Its only two allies among the developed countries were Canada and Japan, both of which promised modest emission cuts under the Kyoto accord ten years ago but then allowed their emissions to soar. And the danger was that the frustration and fury of all the other delegations, in the hothouse atmosphere of a two-week conference, would lure them into a pointless and destructive confrontation with the United States.
It was Al Gore who saved the day with a speech in which he urged the conference to be patient. "My own country, the United States, is mainly responsible for obstructing progress at Bali," he admitted, but "over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now....One year and forty days from today there will be a new (presidential) inauguration in the United States."
"If you decide to continue the progress that has been made here on all the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions, on the hope and with the expectation that, before this process is concluded...you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States), then you can make great progress here." Bush will soon be gone. Even though time is short, you have to wait him out.
The conference took Gore's advice and removed the numbers from the text. Even then, astonishingly, the US delegation declared that it could not support the revised text -- and a chorus of boos rang out in the crowded conference hall. A delegate from Papua New Guinea stood up and told the US delegation: "If you're not willing to lead, please get out of the way." After a short huddle, the US delegation announced that it would support the revised text after all.
So don't believe the cynics who say that public opinion does not matter. A large majority of Americans are far ahead of their government in their desire to see effective action on climate change, and the Bush administration is fighting a delaying action. With both world opinion and American public opinion solidly against it, it suddenly became clear to the US delegation that this line of trenches had to be abandoned fast.
So there is a "roadmap" for the next two years of negotiations, although it has no hard numbers in it. Low-level meetings will continue over the next year, but the next big conference, scheduled for Poland next December, will probably be allowed to slip by a couple of months so that the new US administration is in office. And then, hopefully, they can put the numbers back in.
There is no guarantee that the emissions cuts they finally agree in 2009 will be big enough, or that everybody will meet their commitments. Runaway global warming is a serious possibility, in which case we may be facing megadeaths by mid-century. But Bali was not a futile or a shameful exercise. It was six billion people in 180 separate countries trying to cope with a shared danger in a cooperative way. It was actually quite inspiring, and even fifty years ago it would have been inconceivable.
15 dezembro 2007, Resultado de Bali Outcome por Gwynne Dyer.
Não fica desanimado sobre o resultado das negociações em Bali. Elas não entregaram as obrigações comprometidas para reduzir as emissões dos gáses estufados cujas precisamos desesperadamente, e por isso milhões morrerem que outra vez vivessem. Mas sim, eles mostraram algo extraordinário. Eles mostraram-nos a raça humana tentando de crescer até responsibilizar pelo futuro comum.
It doesn't feel like that, of course. It feels like 15,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists and activists flew across continents in order to sit in Bali for two weeks and achieve very little. Disappointment and even anger are not out of order, for the commitment to early and deep emission cuts (25 to 40 percent by 2020) that most developed countries wanted to see in the draft treaty had to be dropped in order to keep the United States involved at all.
The Bush administration no longer denies that climate change is a problem, but it is still determined to kill any international deal that involves concrete and legally binding targets. The United States produces about a quarter of the world's emissions, so no deal that excludes it would work. Moreover, the developing countries where emissions are growing fastest, particularly China and India, will never accepting obligations of their own while the United States accepts none. So the American delegation had to be kept on board no matter how obstructive it was.
It was amazingly obstructive. There must be no targets, there must be no timetables, there must be no numbers at all in the "roadmap" that the conference was drawing up for the next two years of negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto treaty, insisted chief US negotiator Harlan Watson. Why not? Because "once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction." Yes, and if everybody's shared goal is cut emissions and avoid catastrophic climate change, what's wrong with that?
The United States was almost completely isolated at the Bali talks. Its only two allies among the developed countries were Canada and Japan, both of which promised modest emission cuts under the Kyoto accord ten years ago but then allowed their emissions to soar. And the danger was that the frustration and fury of all the other delegations, in the hothouse atmosphere of a two-week conference, would lure them into a pointless and destructive confrontation with the United States.
It was Al Gore who saved the day with a speech in which he urged the conference to be patient. "My own country, the United States, is mainly responsible for obstructing progress at Bali," he admitted, but "over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now....One year and forty days from today there will be a new (presidential) inauguration in the United States."
"If you decide to continue the progress that has been made here on all the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions, on the hope and with the expectation that, before this process is concluded...you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States), then you can make great progress here." Bush will soon be gone. Even though time is short, you have to wait him out.
The conference took Gore's advice and removed the numbers from the text. Even then, astonishingly, the US delegation declared that it could not support the revised text -- and a chorus of boos rang out in the crowded conference hall. A delegate from Papua New Guinea stood up and told the US delegation: "If you're not willing to lead, please get out of the way." After a short huddle, the US delegation announced that it would support the revised text after all.
So don't believe the cynics who say that public opinion does not matter. A large majority of Americans are far ahead of their government in their desire to see effective action on climate change, and the Bush administration is fighting a delaying action. With both world opinion and American public opinion solidly against it, it suddenly became clear to the US delegation that this line of trenches had to be abandoned fast.
So there is a "roadmap" for the next two years of negotiations, although it has no hard numbers in it. Low-level meetings will continue over the next year, but the next big conference, scheduled for Poland next December, will probably be allowed to slip by a couple of months so that the new US administration is in office. And then, hopefully, they can put the numbers back in.
There is no guarantee that the emissions cuts they finally agree in 2009 will be big enough, or that everybody will meet their commitments. Runaway global warming is a serious possibility, in which case we may be facing megadeaths by mid-century. But Bali was not a futile or a shameful exercise. It was six billion people in 180 separate countries trying to cope with a shared danger in a cooperative way. It was actually quite inspiring, and even fifty years ago it would have been inconceivable.
==================================================================
2 January 2008, The perfect storm could really blow by Anthony Westell.
As we enter the New Year, serious minds are debating whether the mighty U.S. economy is slipping into a shallow cyclical recession or poised for new growth. Consider a third possibility: that a perfect economic storm is forming with the capacity to knock the global economy into a full-blown depression, closing the Age of Excess in which we now wallow.
Don't say it couldn't happen. I grew up in a time of austerity, in wartime and postwar Britain. Incomes were low; taxes were high. There was barely enough to eat, clothes were strictly rationed and toothpaste came in cardboard tubes. I live now in a society with too much to eat, rack upon rack of clothes always ”on sale.” Incomes climb, taxes fall, money managers, even executives who fail, become the new rich. The problem is not to find some desired object, but to choose among the many on offer.
So I know economies and societies can change completely in the course of a lifetime, and I suspect they will again. The question is merely when, and I think I see on the horizon the conditions for a devastating storm. The Perfect Storm, you may recall, was first a book and then a movie describing what happened when several weather systems collided, as it were, off the east coast of North America in 1991. Any one of those systems could have produced bad weather, but when they fused, the result was devastating for those at sea.
I fear there are now several economic storms gathering, any one of which would be uncomfortable – but which taken together could bring about huge changes in the way the world now lives.
Storm No. 1 is the teetering U.S. economy. Once, the United States financed development around the world; it is now a debtor to the world. Americans have been living beyond their means for years, with individuals maxing out their credit cards and borrowing against inflated home prices while the national government borrows billions from foreigners, rather than raising taxes, to finance wars. The last time that happened was during the Vietnam War, and it was a major cause of the damaging inflation that followed. Now, America's bills are coming due, starting in the housing market, which may be heading into a long-term depression – not just a short-term recession. Stock markets are shaky, but don't worry, the optimists say, because Wall Street is run by speculators, not real investors. So now they tell us, when millions are set to lose billions.
If the U.S. economy turns sharply down, Canada and much of the world – including China – will follow. China is Storm No. 2. The world marvels at its rapid growth without reflecting that such booms inevitably end in bust – even in capitalist economies run by communists.
The decline in the United States, China's largest market, will probably be enough to prick the bubble. What would happen then? For one thing, China would want to call upon the billions upon billions of dollars it has effectively lent the United States. Watch the value of the world's favourite currency fall then.
Even if the Chinese bubble does not burst, it's clear the United States is turning protectionist. Frightened by the trade deficit with China and the debts the Bush administration has run up, Democrats in particular are looking for ways to slow the flood of Chinese imports. Poisonous toys lend cover to protectionism, as does China's refusal to let its currency rise, as it should if trade were truly free. One way or another, or maybe all ways together, China is riding for a fall.
The Middle East is Storm No. 3. Able to see on TV and movies what a better life looks like, people in the less developed world are demanding it for themselves. Most regions lack the no leverage to force concessions from the wealthy world, but the Middle East does: in the oil on which the U.S. and Europe depend. They have also an increasingly militant religion to take over from complaisant politicians. The region would have been in turmoil anyway, but the United States has made itself a handy target by blundering into Iraq, threatening Iran and supporting unpopular governments in the Muslim world.
Fearing what may come, oil traders have already run up their prices, increasing economic pressures upon the United States. There is no reason to expect things to improve, and plenty of reasons for them to get worse in the year ahead, leading to a serious interruption in oil supplies.
The fourth and potentially worst storm is global warming. It appears that climate change is coming far faster than expected. That doesn't mean a major change this year, but it does mean increasing awareness and alarm as the consequences impinge on private lives. The only effective way to reduce greenhouse gases in the short term would be by deliberately reducing industrial activity, and unless a recession or depression does it for us, that must become a policy option for discussion, adding to the general economic instability.
So, have a happy and excessive New Year while you can, and remember there's always an alternative lifestyle: ”Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Anthony Westell is a retired journalist, and an uneasy observer of Canadian and world affairs.
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