Former British prime minister Tony Blair backed Iraq war claimed ‘I’d do it again’ and why wouldn’t he; politicians and senior bureaucrats cashing in on contacts is common and as a British MP said ‘revolving door politics at its worst’.

Mr Blair is using his role as the West’s Middle East envoy for personal gain and revelations also shed fresh light on his astonishing earnings, which include lucrative after-dinner speaking, consultancies with banks and foreign governments, a generous advance for his forthcoming memoirs, as well as the pension and other perks he enjoys as a former prime minister.

Blair Man of Steel John Howard forged close alliances with US President George W. Bush during his invasion of Iraq, and earning blood money – using your own countrymen as front-line troops - doesn’t just look bad, it stinks; being the leader of your country and being on the payroll of big foreign oil corporations and keeping people in the dark about it tells us more than fessing up.

The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war; Blair’s fee have not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and is odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.

This is but the tip of the iceberg ….

Not only are the Poms running out of oil (they are a net importer now), but depleted fish stocks and population spread and a reduced number of farmers see grim days ahead.

Defra (their department of primary industries) suggest the public must accept genetically-modified food.

Their membership in the EU means the Common Agricultural Policy adds £52 a year to every Briton’s annual food bill; however, to help local farmers, they will require food clearly labeled with the country of origin to help consumers choose.
The UK’s Sunday Telegraph campaigned for country-of-origin labelling and highlighted cases where consumers are misled as to where their food comes from; however, typical of Governments everywhere (looking after their sponsors) will stop short of promising compulsory labeling and will instead recommend a voluntary scheme.

The current food production system needs reform because it emits too much greenhouse gas, is overly bureaucratic and does not pay enough attention to soil quality and water use, the report, called Food 2030, will state.

The food industry needs to prepare for “sudden shocks” such as natural disasters, disruption to fuel supplies or transport networks, and commodity price spikes.

Gordon Brown – in his atypical double-speak – suggests to Britians ‘we need to think differently about food and that food production must increase without damaging the air, soil, water and marine, resources, biodiversity and climate that we all depend on; we need to feed more people globally, many of whom want or need to eat a better diet; we need to tackle increasing obesity and encourage healthier diets; we need to do all these things in light of the increasing challenge of climate change and while delivering continuous improvement in food safety’.

The rub is that farmers in the UK are efficient becaused of competition and regularly accuse ministers of failing to support British agriculture and allowing the number of farms to decline, along with the acreage of land under cultivation.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that world food supplies need to rise by 40 per cent by 2030 and by 70 per cent by 2050 to feed a forecasted global population of nine billion in 2050.  In my opinion, a physical impossability.

The country of origin labelling was defeated by the UK government and nine other countries (proven via leaked papers) in spite of promises to UK farmers, food producers and consumers. A controversial report will urge consumers not to insist on buying locally produced food, because doing so would reduce the prosperity of farmers in developing countries.

Environmental campaigners have called on shoppers to buy local as a way to minimise their carbon footprint. The term food miles (coined by Dr Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, in the 1990s), measures the distance food travels from field to plate, as a way of measuring its environmental impact; however, the government is against it, but only to a point, halting imports from countries outside the EU such as Australia and Brazil, which inflates food prices dramatically.

But the British may have to buy most of their food from the southern hemisphere as scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics.

The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic. Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004.

The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight. Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.

Warm water brought to Europe’s shores raises the temperature by as much as 10 degrees C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier. Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the recent 10-day hiatus. Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre said ‘we’d never seen anything like that before and we don’t understand it; we didn’t know it could happen; is this the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt; I want to know more before I say that’.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as ‘the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record; it only lasted 10 days, but suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days; how can we rule out a longer one next year ?’

Prof Bryden’s group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.

The study prompted the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a “freak observation”- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.

Mr Nicholson successfully argued that his moral values about the environment should be recognised under the same laws that protect religious beliefs. In the landmark ruling, Justice Michael Burton said that a belief in man-made climate change is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the religion and belief regulations.

The decision could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles such as providing recycling facilities or offering low carbon travel.

“What the judge has said today is that a belief, a philosophical belief in climate change, is capable of being afforded that same protection,” Mr Nicholson said. “Now my belief is underpinned by moral and ethical values which are comparable to those promoted by many of the religions around the world.”

Mr Nicholson does strongly believe that temperatures are rising and the environment is suffering for it.

“I believe passionately in the need to protect the environment and particularly from the catastrophe that runaway climate change will be, and to do that we need to cut carbon emissions urgently and on a massive scale,” he said.

But it is those beliefs that Mr Nicholson says lost him his job. He told the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London that he had tried to set up a carbon management system for the company but that he could not work out its carbon footprint because staff had refused to give him the necessary data.

Mr Nicholson also accused the company’s chief executive of showing contempt for his concerns and claimed he once flew a member of staff to Ireland – with all the carbon emissions that entails – to deliver his phone which he had left in London.

“I was employed as head of sustainability, I felt that I was frustrated from fulfilling that role properly and that my dismissal was a response to my philosophical belief in climate change,” Mr Nicholson said.

The 42-year-old was given permission to make his claim under the Employment Equality Regulations 2003; that covers any religion, religious belief, or philosophical belief.  The ruling was challenged by Grainger Plc on the grounds that green views were not the same as religious or philosophical beliefs. It was a view supported by Andrea Williams – the director of the Christian Legal Centre.  “Every philosophy will have a place to compete in the public legal social square and that lends itself to then there being chaotic laws being created with no consistency in law-making,” she said.

The company maintains that Mr Nicholson’s redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company during a period of extraordinary market turbulence which also required other structural changes to be made within the company.

By Europe correspondent Emma Alberici for AM

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/04/2732928.htm?section=justin

Can or will anyone tell me that Australia is not being paid in US$ for our exports from other countries intent of divesting themselves of the American greenback?

The Europeans are perhaps more sophisticated and less trusting than us in the ebb and flow of commerce with the Americans and rightly so when we saw protectionist policies prevent our goods being sold in the USA but no such restrictions of theirs – or other countries – products that damaged or killed off jobs – being sold here.

Apart from the Chinese (Yuan) and the Arab States (Gulf), Japan (Yen), Russia (Rubble) and the Euro, now Latin America is about to float a new currency, the Sucre, which is directly aimed at scaling back the use of the US dollar.

There are 9 countries of ALBA, a leftist bloc conceived by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who met in Bolivia and vowed to press ahead with a new currency for intra-regional trade to replace the US dollar.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales – who is hosting the summit – said its a done deal and the roll out date is next year in a non-paper form, which is the way the European Union introduced the Euro. The ECU was an account unit designed to tie down stable exchange rates between member states before the national currencies were scraped.

ALBA’s member states are Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominica, Saint Vincent and Antigua and Barbuda. It will be interesting to see whether other Latin countries join and if they do, the likes of Argentina and Brasil will present a formidable bloc to other currencies as the USA$ is printed into irrelevance.

But even more importantly, this bloc also called for the replacement of the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, which arbitrates international contract disputes and has probed a slew of disputes involving ALBA members and western energy firms.

Bolivian media reported that the country intents to nationalize a electricity distribution firm owned by Spain’s Red de Electrica de Espana, so this will place Spain in a bind, given its economic ties to the EU and its cultural and physical position to Latin America.