cheap oil's over...

The Window Is Closing

To say that we have been warned would be an understatement. Yet, as George Monbiot put it, we have made a Faustin pact. The Sydney morning Herald explains,

CLIMATE change may have passed a key tipping point that could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it being harder to tackle global warming, research suggests.

Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said: "We could be seeing the carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct. But it's bad news for everybody else."

Its about time!

New York Times.

Last year, Congressional Democrats allowed the Bush administration to ram through one of the worst laws in the nation’s history — the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This year, the Democrats pledged to use their new majority to begin repairing the profound damage the law has done to the nation’s justice system and global image.

lawmakers propose NIE studying threat of climate change

New York Times reports.

That question is being argued in Congress, as Democrats are fighting for a measure that would require intelligence agencies to produce a comprehensive study on the effects of global climate change on America’s national defense.

Democrats are arguing that large-scale crises caused by climate change, like drought, pandemics, famine and rising sea levels, will affect how the United States conducts foreign policy and where American military resources will be used over the next several decades.

The proposed National Intelligence Estimate would project the effects of global warming over the next 30 years, examining political, social, economic and agricultural risks.

They want us out

Iraqi lawmakers demand withdrawal.

Some 133 Iraqi lawmakers from different political blocs, calling themselves the "free deputies," signed a document demanding a scheduled withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational troops from their country, according to the Sadrist bloc in Parliament.

Where is the USS Nimitz?

Tomdispatch.

But something was missing -- as it is regularly from American reporting on the U.S./Iranian face-off. The Bush administration is, at this very moment, sending a third aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to the Persian Gulf. Although the three carriers and their strike forces will add up to a staggering display of American military power off the Iranian coast, American journalists aren't much impressed. Evidently, it's not considered off the diplomatic page or particularly provocative to mass your carrier battle groups this way, despite the implicit threat to pulverize Iranian nuclear and other facilities. Journalistically speaking, this is both blindingly strange and the norm on our one-way planet. If Iranians send the materials to make some roadside bombs into Iraq (as the Bush administration, at least, continually claims is the case), it's a huge deal, if not an act of war; but put the most powerful fleet in history off the Iranian coast. No sweat.