 9th May 07 - Dave Lindorff ~ STWR MemberIn case you’re wondering why crude oil prices are down from last year, hanging around at about $60 a barrel, while gasoline prices have soared past $3.10/gallon nationwide, just check out the latest profit reports from the oil companies. They are at record levels.
The answer for this seeming contradiction is simple: Americans are being robbed blind by the oil industry.
Sure, the oil companies, and their PR and lobbying agency, the American Petroleum Institute, will give you all kinds of reasons for higher gasoline prices at a time of falling crude prices: problems at two refineries in Texas and Oklahoma, rising demand or whatever. But the real answer is that there is simply no competitive market in this industry.
As Tim Hamilton, a researcher and petroleum industry consultant with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, observes, the oil companies all store their crude oil and refined gasoline in the same tanks, and all know exactly how much inventory each other company has, so they don’t have to meet and collude on pricing in order to reap the huge rewards of deliberate supply constraints. |
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23rd March 07 - Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) As the number-one user of water worldwide, the agriculture sector must be in the lead in addressing the rising global demand for water and its potential drain on the earth’s natural resources, FAO said today on the occasion of World Water Day. |
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 23rd March 07 - Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service
The idea of water wars to follow soon in the wake of oil wars has been around as another doomsday scenario for a while. But a dismissal of the scenario as something that has not materialised, and will not, has meant also an under-rating of the potential for conflict that continues to float around water sharing.
"We need to make a distinction between violent conflict and conflict itself," Mark Zeitoun, researcher with the London Water Research Group, a part of the Centre for Environmental Policy at King's College and the London School of Economics told IPS.
"There are no examples of states engaging in violent conflict strictly over water resources. But water is often an element in violent conflicts, and there are conflicts that fall short of war. Absence of war does not mean absence of conflict."
At the sub-national level there are many instances of violent conflict over water, he said. "In Chad, in Western Darfour, you have different tribes, sometimes members of the same tribe fighting over limited resources of water." |
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 14th March 07 - Antonia Juhasz, New York Times
Today more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way. Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back. Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” |
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FAO heads UN water initiative
Rome, 14 February 2007 -- By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stress conditions, FAO said today.
Water use has grown at more than twice the rate of population increase over the last century, making sustainable, efficient and equitable management of scarce water resources a key challenge for the future, according to FAO's Pasquale Steduto, current Chair of the United Nations coordination mechanism, UN-Water.
Coping with water scarcity
This year, FAO is also the coordinating agency within the UN system for World Water Day, which is observed every year on 22 March. This year’s theme, “Coping with Water Scarcity”, highlights the need for increased cooperation at international and local levels to protect global water resources.
Coping with water scarcity requires addressing a range of issues, from protection of the environment and global warming to equitable distribution of water for irrigation, industry and household use. Even people in areas with plenty of freshwater experience water scarcity when they are unable to gain access to enough water for their basic needs.
Worldwide, 1.1 billion people do not have access to adequate clean water to meet their basic daily needs and 2.6 billion do not have proper sanitation.
Agriculture biggest water user
Agriculture is the number-one user of water worldwide, accounting for about 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawn from lakes, waterways and aquifers around the world. The figure is closer to 90 percent in several developing countries, where roughly three-quarters of the world’s irrigated farmlands are located.
Water shortages are most acute in the driest areas of the world, which are home to more than 2 billion people and to half of all poor people. Most countries in the Near East and North Africa suffer from acute water scarcity, as do countries like Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, and large parts of China and India.
“Water has a major impact on the capacity of people everywhere to improve their lives,” says Pasquale Steduto, Chief of FAO’s Water, Development and Management Unit. “In many regions, farmers trying to produce enough food and income face the added challenges of repeated droughts and competition for water.”
Much of the answer to water scarcity can be found in farming-related techniques that harvest more rainfall, reduce waste in irrigation and increase productivity, and in changes in crop and dietary choices, Steduto says.
Joint effort
UN-Water is made up of the UN agencies that have a significant role in tackling global water concerns and includes major non-UN partners who cooperate with them in advancing progress towards the water-related goals of the Water for Life Decade (2005-2015) and Millennium Development Goals. FAO will serve as lead agency of UN-Water for the next two years.
“Sound water resource management at all levels can help countries adopt flexible approaches that allow more people to have the water they need while preserving the environment,” Steduto says. “The global community has the know-how to cope with water scarcity, but we have to take action.”
Contact:
Teresa Buerkle
Information Officer, FAO
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
(+39) 06 570 56146
(+39) 348 141 6671 |
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 16th Jan 07 - Gilles d'Aymery, Swans Opponents of the current Bush administration's policies who take to heart the famous words of iconoclastic muckraker I.F. Stone -- "If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words, 'governments lie.'" -- too often ignore that powerful people can be quite sincere and honestly believe in the policies they formulate and implement. Generation after generation, these people have used brute force and the abundance of cheap resources to create material wealth, which though unequally shared is undeniable. While the United States economy has been in relative decline since the 1950s the U.S. remains by far the wealthiest country on earth. Why then would these people change policies -- the acquisition of resources through coercion -- that have worked so well for so long? And why would the American people want to change course when it has in its majority benefited from these policies, especially when no other course, say a specific programmatic agenda, is presented to them? To ignore these facts, to keep howling against systemic policies, to revel in focusing one's attention and energy on the darkness, the ulterior motives of our decision makers (the powers that be), without offering any positive alternatives and solutions to the challenges the country and the world confront are a distinct failing of our imagination and proof of our lack of intellectual and political credibility. What is more and more urgently needed is to break with the conceptual framework that creates enemies out of people one disagrees with -- actually mirroring the attitude of those powerful people -- and come up with practical solutions. We must confront the issues, not the personalities. |
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 Pavin Pankajan, 26th Dec 06, Blog
The United Nations has recognized access to water as a basic human right, stating that water is a social and cultural good, not merely an economic commodity. Today, due to increasing consumption patterns water is becoming scarce and this scarcity is an emerging threat to the global population. Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. At present more than one billion people on earth lack access to fresh drinking water. By the year 2025 the demand for freshwater is expected to rise to 56% above what currently available water can deliver if current trends persist (Barlow, 2003).
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