Ninguém muda ninguém. / No one changes anyone.

(Uh oh ... Have I said this all before?)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

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There is a process at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) to ask that a title be purchased - worthy of Kafka so I don't very often indulge. Anyway, it payed out this time - four copies have been ordered and it is now available to be 'held' (sounds like a 21st century sex act).

So, go with your trusty TPL card and 'place' a 'hold' on Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face by Peter F. Sale.

Speaking of sex acts ... two Toronto women (I want to call them 'blonde bookends' though both are competent in the extreme; and one has no idea what colour their DNA is): Jane Pyper, the City Librarian; and Karen Stintz, TTC Chair; bracketing (as it were) two ultimately important front-lines ... I'll leave it there.

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A sweet girl once said to me (with a smile), "Ninguém pertence pra ninguém." / No one belongs to anyone. She is a devotee of candomblé and this song by Virgínia Rodrigues, Depois Que o Ilê Passar, brings that moment to mind (another was sitting together at Teatro Rival in Rio listening to her sing it):

     Rebentou, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     Toque de Angola Ijexá
     Vamos pra cama meu bem
     Me pegue agora
     Me dê uma beijo gostoso
     Pode até me amassar
     Mas me solte quando o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui
     Não me pegue não me toque
     Por favor não me provoque
     Eu só quero ver o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui

[Teatro Rival (aka Petrobras Teatro Rival) is just a few blocks away from the buildings that collapsed on Avenida Treze de Maio this week in Rio (Treze de Maio / May 13, was the date in 1888 when slavery was 'officially' abolished in Brasil, though it has yet to be accomplished); here's a map. It happens every few years (always during renovations it seems) - a big piece of Hotel Canadá fell onto the street in 2007, and a building on Rio Branco near Assembléia collapsed in 2003 sometime. Strange I know but it is one of the things I like about Brasil.]

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Ilê Ayê is a musical group, a huge one, formed in the 70's - a big part of Carnaval in Salvador (where Gilberto Gil comes from). Ilê Ayê might also be a Yoruba (a kind of people, a tribe, uma nação from Nigeria) expression meaning 'the house of life'. Curuzu is a neighbourhood in Salvador where Ilê Ayê (the group) began. Ijexá is a kind of music, a rhythm, also a(nother) kind of people from Nigeria, and a kind of Capoeira (which some people call 'Brasilian ju-jitsu' but it is more like a dance).

     It burst (busted) out, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     A touch of Angola Ijexá
     Come to bed sweetheart
     Take me now
     Give me a delicious kiss
     You can even crush me
     But let me go when Ilê passes by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here
     Don't hold me, don't touch me
     Please don't tempt me
     I just want to see Ilê pass by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here

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It is looking like I am entirely wrong about despair not necessarily leading to paralysis. I still don't think it's 'necessary' but here I am, paralysed, stopped, parado; QED.

Best not to mess (I guess) with bourgeois notions at all unless you have a fireproof floor. I had the ætiology all screwed up - ignored (at my peril) certain social feedback effects. (Could it possibly have to do with Karma? Fear is more like it - 'It's catching y'know'.)

But there's paralysis, and then there is just not moving - hard to distinguish from the outside - catalepsy vs some kind of voluntary renunciation ... a form of, say, transcendental meditation? Or a convoluted passive-aggressive response to isolation, shunning (implicit and explicit)? Or ... a simple lack of resonance?

One of Fernando Meirelles' early films, Domésticas / Maids, includes a fellow who loses his life somehow and winds up in a chair watching TV; until one day his wife comes home (from her job as a maid) and finds him still sitting in the chair, dead. The next husband seems to be going the same way until she realizes that 'It's the chair!' and gets rid of it (it's a comedy y'unnerstan').

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I admit it! When I first saw 'Lake Titicaca" in the headline (Urban population boom threatens Lake Titicaca) I thought it was Mexico City - didn't there used to be a famous lake there?

Of course Titicaca is really on the border between Bolivia & Peru, not far from the Bolivian capital La Paz - here's a map (you knew all this already right?).

One of the highest lakes on the planet - high enough that there are measurable climatic effects associated with increased insolation.

A-and it turns out there is a smallish island in Lake Titicaca, Isla Amantaní, with two hills on it and (naturally) two hilltops: one dedicated to Pachamama and one to Pachatata; and even a hint of love in the name 'Amantani' don't you think? Earth Father doesn't show his face too often but ... yeah.

There is evidence of liminality stretching back over some longish period of time in the form of at-least-partially corbelled stone arches (a tradition carried on admirably by the tourism marketeers and the Catholic Church - but with concrete).

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Mr. Alexander J. Pourbaix has been President of Energy and Oil Pipelines at TransCanada PipeLines Limited (aka TransCanada Corp.) since July 2010. ... Mr. Pourbaix is a 2002-2003 recipient of Canada's 'Top 40 Under 40' Award for leadership excellence (see Bloomberg).

In the first picture there do seem to be several lackeys trailing behind; so, four million a year is about right then?

A lawyer with a name like 'FromBeneath' working for Transcanada; wedding ring on the finger there; an honourable man, no doubt about it.

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Then I went to the barber for a haircut and read this as I waited: 'CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure' from October 2008 (see below) - Hal Kvisle CEO (now past-CEO) of TransCanada. An engineer with an MBA and the instigator of Keystone & Keystone XL. Not a tall man.

In the interview he says, "... I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment." I expect he believes it. Eight million a year and worth every penny.

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The story of Terry Gou and Foxconn; weaving as it does around Steve Jobs and his iStuff (iShit?).

Which brings us back around to the last sentence of Limits to Growth:

The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

[The last chapter of Limits to Growth can be found here (.pdf, pages 17-21).]

Without knowing what things were like before, our grandchildren may very well view the state of the planet they inherit as 'normal' (because yes, some of our grandchildren will still be on it - extinction, even when a meteor strikes, doesn't happen overnight). In that sense, Terry Gou's mistake (not a 'mistake' exactly, but you know what I mean) might have been just - moving too quickly.

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Some perspective on 'quickly': David Suzuki is reported here:

After 50 years of working in Canada and the world for a planet he revers he told the audience that our Earth is in "far worse shape" than it was when he began and that progress "has gone backwards."

[I trust he actually said 'reveres'.]

It is about the same story with John Porter (a generation before Suzuki) on social inequality: The vertical mosaic: an analysis of social class and power in Canada in 1965, and The measure of Canadian society: education, equality and opportunity in 1987.

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Some perspective on jumping to conclusions: Ol' Simon wazizname ... Critchley (whom I was dissing in the post on Peter Sale's book).

I remember some (almost forgotten) when, picking up Simon Critchley and putting him down again for some reason. Then recently a friend mentioned him so I went to the library and ordered up Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance from 2007.

But it was slow coming, so in the meantime I got Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), found it impossibly opaque, threw it at the wall and moved on.

So that when Infinitely Demanding finally arrived I nearly skipped it. Glad I didn't - more on remedies for nihilism next time.

This video from September 2008 (before Obama's election) is interesting (he's more than a bit of a show-off): Branding Democracy: Barack Obama and the American Void (and at Fora TV). (But I like it when he disses Charles Taylor.)

But, seriously folks ... the idea of fundamental politial myth, fiction, a ficção ... of course it is; the power of the people is real enough, while Divine Right of Kings and Perfect Union are management inventions.

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Blancmange (speaking of fiction): The only video I could find is at MSN; transcripts can be found here & here; and I grabbed (poor but watchable) videos of the speech and the Q&A session following (in case they take the MSN one down).

I include a picture of Shawn Atleo ... well, why not? A pawn in the game. Pawns are important too.

Who was that economics guy? Chicago School was it? ... Oh yeah - Milton Friedman; and he and his colleagues, students, tap dancing with Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It is clear that our Milton is not very tall from that first photograph - and his feet are not even in it!

Watching Stephen Harper's Davos speech a few times (as I had to do to grab it) I was remembering certain sermons by certain preachers I have known - they way their mouths go when they are nailing it down tight around sin (or lemons). Times're gonna stay tough ... yup; gotta do what we gotta do to ensure growth ...

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These two verses (15 & 16) in Matthew only work in isolation for me. He embeds them into a procedure which effectively leads to shunning. Taken out of context they make (a bit) more sense:

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.

But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

Well ... even the second verse already seems to be headed off somewhere compulsive. What exactly could it mean to 'establish' a word in someone's mouth I wonder? Don't know, and only a very limited subset of the possibilities is appealing - if it means the equivalent of 'point taken' then I am with it, otherwise not.

Even that 'gained' in the first verse could be a trap - why not 'regained'? Or 'restored'?

I think someone told me once that the Amish (or the Quakers was it?) use this verse as a prime mover, and even not knowing any more about it than that has endeared them all to me (to a degree).

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Who orders this shit is me.
KOÉ?! / Say what?!

The existential-self-referential pork sausage version of Oroborus.

I can't find much on the artist, Luimau (maybe a nick-name?); the only website I can find is Osso Vozes, which stopped in 2009.

The trail led from Benett to Salmonelas to Porko Parade and Issi Vizes/Osso Vozes and stopped with this editorial:

Osso Vozes destrata a vida de um cartunista que quase nunca desenha, troca o incerto pelo errado mesmo, mistura minas com bombas e, principalmente, não tem uma idéia geral do que seja essa tira. Lui, um cartunista desproporcional.

[... Ah, his name is Lui Duarte, and indeed, he is still busy, just last week in Fortaleza (in the Brasilian state of Ceará - map) at Sobrado Dr. José Lourenço.]

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No one changes anyone? No one belongs to anyone? Au contraire, mon cher frère! Infinitesimally small as they may be, the only changes that occur (like the shoreline and the sea) are there in the interstitial zone (or in the possibly imaginary one involving God). There is no other there ... there. Is there?

Be well gentle reader.

[Is that 'interstitial' or 'intertidal'?]

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Postscript: Le Rendez-vous (refrain)

Garderez-vous parmi vos souvenirs
Ce rendez-vous où je n'ai pu venir?
Jamais, jamais, vous ne saurez jamais
Si ce n'était qu'un jeu ou si je vous aimais.
Les rendez-vous que l'on cesse d'attendre
Existent-ils dans quelque autre univers?
Où vont aussi les mots qu'on a pas pris le temps d'entendre
Et l'amour inconnu que nul n'a découvert?

[paroles: Gilles Vigneault, musique: Claude Léveillée - on an album in the early 60's]

This one is not so good. The original studio version (audio) is much better but there is no way to link to it directly - you have to scroll down and click on it. And a couple of rounds of Frédéric while we are at it: here & here.

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The first one was: They say, "sing while you slave," but I just get bored. Then there was this one: Who am I? Who are you? ... said Moses to the Lord.

I think the next one will start soon: I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet. And with a subtitle: "Je me fous du monde entier."

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Appendices:

1. CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

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CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

TransCanada Corp.’s headquarters in downtown Calgary is striking for its high ceilings and blond, blue and white hues. It’s a coolness that seems to rub off on CEO Hal Kvisle, Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2008. Since taking the top job in 2001, Kvisle has led the transformation of a poky, regulated western Canadian gas pipeline company into an agile, continental gas (and soon to be oil) pipeline operator and power producer. The volume of deals and announcements has been especially high the past two years, but at no time have things been any more hectic than the Monday of our interview in mid-September. Over the weekend, Lehman Brothers announced it was filing for bankruptcy and Bank of America bought the ailing Merrill Lynch. At the same time, Hurricane Ike pounded Houston and the Gulf Coast refinery region. As it turns out, TransCanada had big stakes in both Texas and Wall Street. A few days later, the company would announce US$250 million worth of exposed contracts with Lehman Bros. This morning, however, we begin by talking with Kvisle about TransCanada’s other “exposure” — to hurricanes like Ike in the Gulf.

FINANCIAL POST MAGAZINE: Last year, you bought U.S. pipeline company ANR for US$3.4 billion. That gave TransCanada 17,000 kilometres of new gas pipeline in the U.S., primarily in the Midwest and Gulf Coast. It also means you now have a direct interest in what happens there any time a hurricane hits or tornadoes strike. What are you going through today?

Hal Kvisle: Now that we’ve been involved in ANR, tornadoes and hurricanes are of much more material interest than they were before. The western segment of the ANR line gets hit by a lot of tornadoes. They never hurt the pipeline, but we now have employees who have their houses destroyed by tornadoes going through. They’re in Tornado Alley up through Kansas and places like that. The other line is in Hurricane Alley coming in through the Gulf. Twice now in two years we’ve been hit by big hurricane activity. This one, Ike, has really caused quite a bit of disruption and damage. Many of our people in Houston are unable to use a telephone. It’s been a big job on our part just to check on everyone and make sure all of our people are okay.

FPM: How many people do you have there?

Kvisle: We have roughly 400 people in Houston and we have roughly an equal number of people in locations like Nashville, Greensboro, different places all up and down the system.

FPM: Is expansion into the U.S. the biggest change in TransCanada during your tenure as CEO?

Kvisle: Yes and no. TransCanada was initially an east-west company connecting Alberta to the Ontario and Quebec gas markets. If you roll back the clock to the year 2000, we had some small assets in the United States, but virtually all of our net income and our business activity was related to the transmission of Canadian gas. Today, while our U.S. pipeline business is not as big as our Canadian business, it will be soon. The completion of the Keystone oil pipeline system — our first oil pipeline — will really add to our presence. The game plan is for the U.S. pipes to become as significant to TransCanada as the Canadian pipes.

But we’ve also grown in the power business, in both Canada and the U.S. Officially, we just break our company into two — the pipeline division and the power division. And the pipeline division is still bigger than the power division. But if you break the pipeline division into Canada and the U.S., power is bigger than either of them. So that’s been quite a remarkable development. Since the year 2000, we’ve grown a power business that is bigger than TransCanada was at the time of the 1998 merger with Nova Energy.”

FPM: You’re capping a year of home runs. You won the bidding for the Alaska gas pipeline, announced the Keystone project expansion and bought the Ravenswood power plant in New York. Is this the company you envisioned when you took over in 2001?

Kvisle: I don’t know that I would have foreseen exactly this. But what I did foresee was that we could no longer be a one-trick pony with all of our eggs in the Canadian National Energy Board-regulated, Mainline-plus-Alberta basket. We had to diversify beyond that. We said we’d need to grow in areas where we have some kind of competitive advantage. So those two areas were pipeline throughout North America and big investments in power generation. Power generation was an ideal capital-intensive business to invest in — same capital structure as pipelines, no real limitations on growth. We move about 20% of all the gas in North America and you can’t get a lot bigger than that, but we’re today 1% of the North American power-gen market, so there’s lots of room for growth. Beyond that, working on things like Alaska and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was just part of the longer-term plan.

FPM: You worked for Dome Petroleum in the 1980s, which was big in the Arctic. Now you’ve got a green light on the Alaska line, and we even hear talk of progress on Mackenzie. Has the North’s time finally come? Are we finally going to see these pipelines built?

Kvisle: It is time for the North. The market needs the gas. It’s time for us to develop the Mackenzie Delta and offshore regions. It very clearly puts a Canadian stamp on all that. It’s time from a reservoir perspective, for Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to go on gas sales.

That said, I don’t know whether we’re going to see those pipelines built or not. I’d say it’s highly certain that the Alaska project will go ahead. And if everything turns out in the correct logical way, there will be a pipeline through the Yukon and B.C. to Alberta. And it will connect that gas through to North American markets. The only issue that I raise about that is that there are challenges in Canada to getting that pipeline permitted and built in an expeditious manner. I think Canada has to pay a lot of attention to this, because if we don’t stand behind our commitment to get the Canadian section of that pipe built on time and on budget, there is the risk that Alaskan gas could go to the LNG market.

FPM: LNG — liquid natural gas — is shipped by tanker, correct?

Kvisle: That’s right. Now, we don’t think the LNG market through Valdez, Alaska, is economically the right answer, but it might be the answer if Americans start to perceive that there’s too much risk building through Canada. And why would they perceive that? I think it would revolve around the Mackenzie. The Mackenzie has been an incredibly difficult project to move forward. We have real challenges on the regulatory front in Canada. Things just get bogged down. And no question we’re bogged down in the Mackenzie. We’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar impact on the cost of the Mackenzie project. It’s the complexity of the regulatory process — and the fact that it’s still not over — that has added something like $3 billion to the cost of the Mackenzie project.

FPM: Besides Alaska, what have been the biggest recent highlights in your mind?

Kvisle: Home run No. 1 from my perspective was the successful integration of ANR. It’s all well and good to go around doing these $4-billion deals, but it takes an enormous effort inside the company to make it part of TransCanada. The fact that we’re generating excellent profitability and getting good financial results from what was a pretty big investment, that makes us happy. The second big win for the year was the regulatory rate approval that we got through on the TransCanada GTN system to California and the renegotiation of certain terms there. That was a real positive outcome that we’d been working on for two years since we acquired GTN. The third big home run is Keystone. And there are two parts to it. We are under construction on the main Keystone project. So for me that’s really significant. And then on the Keystone expansion, which is the short cut across and the extension to the Gulf Coast, we’ve announced significant, binding, long-term contracts. My fourth one would be Ravenswood, the New York power deal. Financial results will tell the story of Ravenswood and it’s too early to say. We remain very optimistic. That is a very significant asset in a very significant market. There’s also the Bruce nuclear plant in Ontario. We’re now two-thirds of the way done the biggest nuclear construction project in North America.

FPM: A lot of what we’re talking about in terms of the deals and the transformation of the company led to your selection as Outstanding CEO of the Year. Can you tell us a bit more about your role in the process, your footprint on these things?

Kvisle: The merger between TransCanada and Nova occurred in July 1998, about a year before I joined. And when I started talking to TransCanada about coming to work here — not as the CEO but to run the trading and business development department — I was attracted to it in part because I’d been through one of these big mergers before. I was there for the Dome-Hudson Bay merger in 1982. And one of the things I learned then is if you bring two organizations of people together and you keep all the right people and you keep the right projects and you get the right focus, things can work out really well.

People always talk about the cost synergies. Or they talk about the heft of the company in the financial markets or the business community or whatever. But to me, the single biggest upside of a merger is the coming together of two teams of people that actually might see the world a bit differently, might have better ideas. If you can get them properly organized you’re going to have a winner.

FPM: How did things play out after you arrived?

Kvisle: We discovered after I joined and Doug Baldwin had stepped in as stopgap CEO that much of what I’d been hired to run had to be sold. TransCanada had quite a bit more debt than anyone expected coming out of that merger, and less revenue, and we had to do something about that. I essentially spent my first 18 months at TransCanada selling off businesses that I’d been hired to run.

I took the CEO job in May 2001. The No. 1 job at that point was to establish what strategies we were going to pursue and get the organization focused behind those. A real key to our success has been our executive leadership team and some of the changes that have occurred on that team over time. This includes people like Alex Pourbaix, whom I elevated to the senior team and gave a mandate to grow a very significant power business. Similarly, we identified the big northern projects as a priority. And so I elevated Dennis McConaghy as the guy to carry those forward. Russ Girling was the CFO and it was seen to be very important that we maintain our standing in the financial community and our credit rating, so Russ agreed to carry on in that job. But we started thinking about who might be the successor to Russ, as he really wanted to run a business unit. A couple of years ago that occurred, when Greg Lohnes came back after five years at Great Lakes and became the CFO.

What I’m trying to convey is that there was a whole lot of important organizational work that was required over that period: What are the strategies of the company going to be? How much money do we have for investment in big opportunities? How are we going to cultivate the best opportunities? To me it was a question of getting the right people into the executive leadership team and then working with them to make sure that they each had the strongest possible department.

FPM: Is there a point through there where it all started to click?

Kvisle: I’d say all of that started to come together in ’03. It took us a couple of years of really focusing on the operation of the existing assets to try to increase cash flow. Our investments in energy got us through that early period, when there weren’t many opportunities on the pipe side. And then starting in about 2006, a whole bunch of stuff started to come together in pipelines. We did the GTN acquisition. We acquired effectively 100% of Great Lakes, we acquired ANR, we took over operatorship of Northern Border, we kicked off the Keystone project — all of this happened in the last two years.

FPM: What does that mean in quantitative terms?

Kvisle: We generated a billion dollars a year in cash flow in year 1999-2000. Today, we generate almost $3 billion a year in cash flow. So the cash coming out of our existing assets has gone up two and a half times. Our capital program was about $400 million then. We’ll invest just under $6 billion this year. And lately, our finance team has had an extraordinary run. We’ve issued over $3 billion of equity, of TransCanada common stock, in an 18-month period. And we’ve issued twice that much debt.

FPM: Do you see the market meltdown affecting TransCanada and other companies like it?

Kvisle: I do. In times of uncertainty, everybody pulls their horns in a little bit. And it’s so uncertain what is going to happen in the world next. Five months ago, if you’d have asked anybody what could possibly happen to Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy would not have been on the radar screen. Yet today, here we are. To see Merrill Lynch taken over by Bank of America, it’s an astounding thing.

FPM: Let’s talk more about the Keystone pipeline. It’s slated to carry oilsands oil into the U.S. starting in late 2009 and to refineries in the Gulf by 2012. The price tag: US$12.2 billion. How did it come together? Why is it important?

Kvisle: Clearly, there’s a big supply of oil being developed in Alberta. That supply needs an outlet. So we looked around and said, “Where is the market in North America that would most likely want this crude oil?” A lot of people put pressure on us to look at the Pacific market. But I’ve just never been a fan of pipelines to the Pacific coast. Why go there and compete head on with all the middle-east crude when we could deliver the crude into the middle of North America — a close-at-hand market in which we have more advantages than disadvantages in serving? So we landed first on the Wood River-Petoka market, near St. Louis. Secondly, the Cushing, Okla., market. Thirdly, it was always our plan to ultimately extend to the Gulf Coast and hook into the biggest refining market in the world.

FPM: As a gas pipeline builder, you’ve had lots of experience with protestors and opposition to your plans. But while these hurdles are mostly local with gas, opposition to oilsands oil — aka “dirty oil” — is global. Does that concern you?

Kvisle: It just makes things more complicated. It’s not unlike getting involved in Bruce Nuclear. All of a sudden now we have to deal with the issues related to nuclear power plants. There are foes out there to nuclear power. Generally, there are foes out there related to anything an engineer might ever do. And so you have a certain number of well-organized parties that are very opposed to the development of Fort McMurray. I don’t agree with any of their criticism. I’ve spent a fair bit of time up there. I know quite a bit about it. I know that Fort McMurray is not devastating the boreal forest of all of northeast Alberta, and yet that’s what they say. I know that Fort McMurray uses less than 1% of the water that flows in the Athabasca River, but you know the Kennedys would have you believe that it’s something much more than that. And the latest one is this issue of “dirty oil,” that somehow oilsands production is dirtier than any other production, when the truth is that between 85% and 92% of the CO2 emitted from any barrel of oil is emitted by the end user. And the other 8% to 15% is emitted during production, transportation and refining. So, is a barrel that has a little more emission in the production phase really a dirty barrel compared to any other, when between 85% and 92% of the CO2 is emitted by the person who uses the barrel at the end of the process?

Our position is that we move what the market wants us to move. If the market wants us to move that crude, we are to move it and we are going to do it without having an impact on the environment.

FPM: One can’t help but think of the global attacks Canadian forestry companies faced. And how that hurt the whole sector.

Kvisle: We appreciate the global elements of this. Nowhere is that a bigger issue than on the CO2 front. In the world, generally, people want to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we emit and I don’t have an issue with that. But if mankind wants to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 it emits, we need a 30- or 40-year program of shutting down plants that emit a lot of CO2 at the right point in their lifecycle and replacing them with something new, and we need to do it in the normal course of capital replacement. On the other hand, having us proceed in a direction where many of these high-quality, long-life plants are going be required to shut down prematurely is an enormous mistake.

I think we are in a very difficult situation in Canada, where a whole variety of governments have led the electorate to believe that we can solve the CO2 problem relatively easily and that the burden of doing so will be borne by somebody else. In fact, we have a situation where everyone is going to pay enormously if we don’t proceed in a much more careful manner and respect the lifecycle of these big assets that we have. There’s no way of meeting Kyoto targets, Canada should know that by now. It’s a very serious public policy failure in Canada, firstly, not to recognize the reality of what you can and have to do, and secondly, to head off in a direction that’s different than the United States, not recognizing that we’re 90% integrated with the U.S. in terms of our economy. This is a very difficult thing. It’s the toughest issue I deal with in my job.

FPM: Tell us about your personal environmental ethic.

Kvisle: I grew up in west central Alberta. My father was a biologist and a school teacher and he was really involved in conservation. He would research things like how do you provide better habitat for the moose and elk in the Alberta foothills. So I had a lot of exposure to that and I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment.

I’ve spent decades working in oil and gas development in the foothills region of western Alberta, and I think it’s a real credit to the companies that work in that part of Alberta that the landscape isn’t destroyed by oil and gas activity. There’s no other industry where you can make a $3-million investment and all you see is a wellhead sticking out of the ground. You know, we invest $30 billion or $40 billion a year in the oil and gas sector, and with the exception of Fort McMurray, the surface disturbance is really minimal.

FPM: We hear you’re applying those principles at your ranch, too?

Kvisle: A big part of what we’re doing on the ranch is preserving the nature of the area. I share the view that we need to maintain these different ranching areas in Alberta in a very pristine condition. We can’t overgraze them. We can’t let the cattle ruin the creeks. All of that stuff has to be done in a long-term, sustainable way. There were no buildings on this particular property. So we went out there and said we’re not going to develop this in a big grandiose fashion. We’re going to have minimal impact. All the electricity is supplied through solar panel systems. It’s entirely off the grid. All the heat is wood heat. We just find all the trees that are going to fall down and rot and turn into CO2 anyway and burn them.

FPM: When did you build there?

Kvisle: I’ve had a farming property up by Innisfail for about 15 years. We picked up this cattle-grazing operation five years ago.

FPM: It sounds like a nice place for retirement. You’re now 56. You’ve been CEO of TransCanada for eight years. Have you given any thought to how much longer you’ll want to stay in the job?

Kvisle: I think it’s important that you don’t stay longer than you’re really significantly contributing to the leadership of the company. In my case, I look at it in terms of a half-dozen different projects that we’ve got on the go here. I see things like reaching commercial agreements on Alaska — that’s a job that I take very seriously and I think I can contribute to. Second, we have acquired this Ravenswood asset that is essential to electricity supply in New York City — so making sure that we get through the full integration of Ravenswood, that we run it really well. I want to see oil flowing through the Keystone pipeline. We did all the work to get that going. I don’t leave part way through something like that, that’s got a few years to run. Similarly, Bruce Nuclear. I am convinced that we’re going to have a tremendous success story when we get A1 and A2 refurbished and we start them up and get them running. Those are the kinds of things I think about before retiring.

---

Down.

why nobody came ... a bust then? XXVII

Up, Down.

as usual, the most relevant and balanced news comes to me from Brasil, tinged with a refreshing whiff of naïveté, maybe that's the appeal, but here - the headline is Dia para o Clima mobiliza milhares de manifestantes em todo o mundo/Climate Day mobilizes thousands of demonstrators all over the world - yet they fail to see, or at least fail to report, that milhares/thousands should be fucking MILLIONS! if it's to have any effect that is, "aos milhares/by the thousands" has to be, has to somehow become "aos milhões/by the millions" because the politicians are MAGGOTS, they are lazy and stupid and eat up the money they extort from you (with the implicit threat of their police forces - see below), take your flesh if you let them, until they are positively forced to act

a proof, weak and inconclusive proof maybe but proof nonetheless, is presented right on the very Ambiente Brasil page giving the news ... "ambiente-se/environment yourself", catchy little bit of turning the language on its head, making a noun into a verb, putting a few cute little leaves sprouting out of the dot on the 'i' of ambiente, it took a clever person to do that, which clever energy was co-opted by the politicians and buried down five levels deep in their website so they can pretend to be having it both ways, or from both ends as the case may be - that can be fun too as André Dahmer, another very clever Brasilian, shows us:

Orgy of Intellectuals
It's that a drop spilled on his book ...

and there at Ambiente Brasil I found another straw piling on the camel's back from Raúl Estrada-Oyuela:
"Acordo sobre o quê"?
     Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, 2009.

more acronyms in his resumé than you can shake a stick at, he seems to think that our Connie Hedegaard is not the woman for the job, and that nothing will get done until the USA gets its act together ... he was the main man at Kyoto and probably makes good guesses ... a few notes: The Elder Statesman - Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, Copenhagen needs a strong lead negotiator, Climate of compromise.

I stood and listened on Saturday as the current Moderator of the United Church of k-k-Canada, Mardi Tindal, spoke a few words, a walking allegory entirely delivered in new-age Christian code: “In order to love each other, we have to love the garden; In order to love the garden, we have to love each other,” (ugh!), and which garden would that be then exactly? the one from Solomon's Song? "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed"? I found myself wondering if her parents had wanted to name her after Tuesday Weld but were embarassed by the alliteration? God knows - maybe she is named after the start of Carnaval (?) her 60 character Twitter "bio" tells us that she is a "Circle of Trust Facilitator, Adult Educator & Lover of Poetry," ... from what I (myself personally) heard she is no preacher, nor much of a speaker, and not much of a thinker either, maybe she was having a bad hair day, sweet though, sweet enough to choke whatever it is that chokes on saccharine

and I had another vision, not titties this time but a mini-epiphany: having watched all of the TCC nitwits & invitees flailing about so ineffectually on Saturday at Queen's Park, I realized that the naïve and silly deniers, Margaret Wente and Rex Murphy and Lawrence Solomon, are serving us better than the naïve and silly demonstrators ... these deniers force anyone with a brain into a kind of return-to-first-principles, which is a truly useful and salutary exercise, witness the indefatigable (and mostly dignified) Alan Burke as he takes on the howling herd (Globe Comments on Margaret Wente's article & on Rex Murphy's)

do you suppose that our Bud Mercer of the RCMP and head of the ISU for the Vancouver Olympics is an arrogant, obstinate, person?

have the RCMP ever learned anything except the most blatantly self-interested & obvious? they are no more than the police equivalent of the Wall Street greed-heads.

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least,
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

"haply I think on thee" ... in my case it is Northrop Frye and his last little book The Double Vision, I never knew him, never met him, and if I had he might not have cosidered me very much ... but when I get low I re-read this book and catch a glimpse at least of something you could call heaven's gate ... from the chapter on nature comes this:
"The Bible is emphatic that nothing numinous exists in nature, that there may be devils there but no gods, and that nature is to be thought of as a fellow-creature of man. However, the paranoid attitude to nature that Pynchon describes survives in the manic-depressive psychosis of the twentieth century. In the manic phase, we are told that the age of Aquarius is coming, and that soon the world will be turned back to the state of innocence. In the depressive phase, news analysts explain that pollution has come to a point at which any sensible nature would simply wipe us out and start experimenting with a new species. In interviews I am almost invariably asked at some point whether I feel optimistic or pessimistic about some contemporary situation. The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both."
     Northrop Frye, 1991.

some nonsense reflections on "Happyness" from the left coast, and some more reasonable ones from Olivia Judson, aptly titled "A Language of Smiles," a-and speaking of heaven's gate & smiles, here are a few more smiles from our Tatiane de Moraes:

turpitude/turpytude (shameful character, baseness, vileness; depravity, wickedness)? concupiscence/concupyscens (eager or vehement or libidinous desire, sexual appetite, lust)? obsession (hostile action of the devil or an evil spirit besetting any one, actuation by the devil or an evil spirit from without, idea or image that repeatedly intrudes upon the mind, subconscious effect of a repressed emotion or experience)? incontinece/incontynence (want of continence or self-restraint, inability to contain or retain bodily appetites especially the sexual passion)? melancholy/malyncoly (the condition of having too much ‘black bile’)? liminal/borderline (of or pertaining to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold’)?

none of the above? "seriously though," I'll give the last word to John Cleese: "the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are" ... (?)

the bare bones of a story are emerging (and I am a sucker for a story), life in a São Paulo favela, off at 15 around South America with a dutch boyfriend, Europe (Holland?), Spain, marriage (?), child, distinction between nude modelling & pornography ... we need wazizname ... Fernando Meirelles and his buddies Paulo Lins & Bráulio Mantovanito to do a partner to Cidade de Deus, music by Fernanda Porto & her bateria, but starting in Rio's Vila Mimosa just after WWII ... eh? now there's an idea.

Appendices:
1. Dia para o Clima mobiliza milhares de manifestantes em todo o mundo, Ambiente Brasil, 26/10/2009.
     1a. Blog Comissão Meio Ambiente e Desinvolvimento Sustentável, Câmera dos Deputados.

2-1. Raúl A. Estrada-Oyuela, 2004 UN mini-bio.
2-2. EUA barram tratado em Copenhague, diz diplomata, Claudio Angelo, 26/10/2009.
2-3. The Elder Statesman - Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, Rolling Stone, Nov. 03 2005.
2-4. Copenhagen needs a strong lead negotiator, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, 21 October 2009.
2-5. Climate of compromise, Nature Editorial, October 21 2009.

3-1. The Double Vision Chapter Two - The Double Vision of Nature, Northrop Frye, 1991.
3-2. Don't worry, be happy, whatever that meansVancouver Sun Editorial, Oct. 24 2009.
3-3. A Language of Smiles, Olivia Judson, October 27 2009.



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Raúl A. Estrada-Oyuela, 2004 UN mini-bio.

Ambassador Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, born in 1938 in Buenos Aires, Argentina is a career diplomat Married to Leticia Vigil Zavala, he has eight children and twelf grandchildren. He is a journalist and a graduate in Law from the National University of Buenos Aires. He was admitted to the Argentine Foreign Service in 1966. He has been posted in Washington D.C., Vienna, Brasilia, and Santiago, and was the Argentine Ambassador to the People's Republic of China. Mr. Estrada-Oyuela was a member of the National Commission on Global Change of the Argentine Republic, and has served in Buenos Aires, inter alia, as Deputy-Director for South American Affairs, Deputy Director-General for International Organizations and Director General of the Special Unit on Environment in the Foreign Ministry, Director General for Cultural Affairs and currently is Ambassador at large for Environment Negotiations.

Among other international meetings, he has attended several sessions of the United Nations General Assembly since 1968. Has been a member of the Board of Governors of the Atomic Energy Agency, a member of the Industrial Development Board (UNIDO) and has participated in numerous regional and sub-regional meetings, such as the Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly and the Inter-American Conferences of Foreign Ministers. He was also Deputy Head of the Argentine Delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995)

From 1990 until 1994, most of his time has been devoted to the international negotiations on environmental matters, attending the Second World Climate Conference, several sessions of the UNEP Governing Council, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Plenary and Bureau Meetings, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Participants Assembly, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) and all substantive sessions of its Preparatory Committee. In November 2000 he was elected Vice President of the VI Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change and during 2001 he has moderated the debate in the Ministerial Group on International Environmental Governance.

In February 1991, Mr. Estrada-Oyuela was elected Vice-Chairman of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change (DSfC/FCCC) created by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 45/212. In March 1993, he was elected Chairman of the INC/FCCC and two years later, Chairman of the Committee of the Whole of First the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and Chairman of the Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate (AGBM) created to negotiate a legally binding instrument on climate change today known as the Kyoto Protocol. To finalize that negotiation at Kyoto in December 1997, he was again elected Chairman of the Committee of the Whole of the Thiid Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC.

Mr. Estrada Oyuela was the Argentine Ambassador to China from October 1994 until December 1997, when he returned to his country. In 1998 was appointed Distinguished Lecturer on the Global Community and its Challenges, at the Institute for International Studies, Stanford University and, in the fall semester of 1999, invited to lecture a seminar on 'International Environmental Law and Polic/at the Columbia University Law School.

Back in Argentina in 2000 for a short period he was Director General for Cultural Affairs in the Foreign Ministry and in August of that year was appointed Ambassador at large for Environment Negotiations, attending since then meetings on environmental matters, including UNFCCC and CBD COPs an the WSSD.

December 2004



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EUA barram tratado em Copenhague, diz diplomata, Claudio Angelo, 26/10/2009.

Raúl Estrada-Oyuela devolve ao jornalista a pergunta sobre se haverá acordo na conferência do clima de Copenhague: "Acordo sobre o quê"?

O embaixador argentino, 71, diz que "não se pode ter" um acordo ambicioso de combate ao aquecimento global em dezembro na capital dinamarquesa. O motivo é o de sempre: os EUA não estão prontos, e não há acordo possível sem o maior poluidor do planeta.

Além disso, afirma, a ministra de Energia da Dinamarca, Connie Hedegaard, responsável por liderar as negociações, provavelmente não é o melhor nome. Hedegaard tem defendido agressivamente a postura europeia de cortes ambiciosos de emissões, e conta com a desconfiança de vários países. "Os dinamarqueses têm tido uma posição agressiva demais para poderem exercer a liderança."

Estrada sabe uma coisa ou outra sobre esse tipo de negociação. Foi ele quem presidiu, em 1997, a conferência do clima de Kyoto, Japão, que deu origem ao tratado climático vigente - e que o acordo de Copenhague deveria ampliar.

Em um artigo publicado na última quinta-feira no periódico "Nature", o diplomata afirma que o ideal seria que a conferência fosse interrompida e reconvocada no meio do ano que vem, para que os EUA tenham tempo de aprovar, no Congresso, a lei de mudanças climáticas que estabelece metas nacionais de redução de gases de efeito estufa.

A lei, aprovada neste ano na Câmara dos Representantes (deputados), aguarda votação no Senado. Sem o aval do Congresso, o maior emissor histórico global não pode se comprometer com metas em Copenhague. No entanto, o presidente Barack Obama está investindo seu cacife parlamentar na reforma do sistema de saúde dos EUA, e a maioria dos analistas considera remota a possibilidade de o Senado votar a lei do clima antes de dezembro.

"Que haverá acordo, haverá, mas não será minucioso como se desejava", disse Estrada por telefone à Folha, de seu escritório em Buenos Aires. "Esses acordos se constroem tijolo por tijolo. Copenhague deve construir não a cúpula, mas os alicerces, e criar espaço para um acordo posterior. Criou-se uma falsa expectativa no público de que haveria um acordo detalhado", continuou.

Segundo Estrada, é preciso ter em vista em Copenhague um "leque de possibilidades" de acordo. O leque menor consistiria em avançar nos compromissos de redução de emissões dos países emergentes, como Brasil, China e Índia.

"O outro extremo não é possível, porque os EUA ainda não têm sua posição. E a decisão dos EUA é chave, porque condiciona o quanto (os países ricos devem cortar emissões)."

Ecoando as declarações de Estrada, dadas na última quarta-feira, o Japão afirmou ontem que pode recuar de sua meta, proposta em setembro, de 25% de corte de emissões em relação a 1990 até 2020. O ministro do Ambiente japonês, Sakihito Ozawa, disse que a meta, aplaudida como uma das mais ambiciosas entre as dos países ricos, era condicional à adoção de metas também ambiciosas por outras nações.

Egoístas - O embaixador argentino, aposentado do serviço diplomático em 2006 após uma briga com o então presidente Néstor Kirchner, criticou o que ele chama de "egoísmo" dos congressistas americanos.

"Se eles têm mostrado tanta resistência em aprovarem a reforma da saúde, que diz respeito às vidas dos próprios americanos no presente, como se espera que ajam em relação ao futuro do planeta?"

Foi esse mesmo Congresso, lembrou, que rejeitou o Protocolo de Kyoto em 1997 "por conta do lobby do carvão". A decisão abriu caminho para a rejeição de Kyoto por George W. Bush, em 2001.

Segundo Estrada, nem mesmo uma eventual presença de Barack Obama em Copenhague salvaria a conferência. "Obama em Copenhague não resolverá o problema dos EUA. Mas, se Lula for, certamente ganhará aplausos da plateia."



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The Elder Statesman - Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, Rolling Stone, Nov. 03 2005.

In 1997, Argentinian diplomat Raul Estrada Oyuela presided during a two-week conference in Japan, where thousands of international delegates were meeting to hammer out the first global treaty on climate change. On the final night, after three days of nonstop negotiations, the delegates were close to an agreement. But at the last minute, U.S. representatives refused to sign, insisting that the treaty include a provision allowing countries to buy and sell "emissions credits" from one another, essentially trading the right to pollute. Tempers among the exhausted delegates grew short -- until Estrada, a portly and distinguished statesman known for his love of good food, stepped in and eased the tension with rapturous descriptions of his wife's home cooking. At the eleventh hour, he accepted the American provision, sealing the deal on a unanimous agreement he named the Kyoto Protocol.

"Estrada is a grandmaster of diplomacy and the godfather of Kyoto," says David Sandalow, an assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who helped negotiate the agreement. "It wouldn't have happened without his leadership, excellent judgment and good humor."

Eight years later, the landmark agreement has become the centerpiece of international law. In February, 131 countries -- including Canada, Japan and every member of the European Union -- began implementing the treaty, which requires nations to limit heat-trapping gases by 2012. But Kyoto failed to receive a single vote when it was brought before the U.S. Senate in 1997, and the Bush administration has refused to implement it, insisting that it would have "wrecked our economy."

In fact, as Estrada points out, Kyoto is proving to be an advantage: Germany, for example, has created 450,000 new jobs while cutting carbon emissions by nearly twenty percent. "We expected the United States leaders to comply," says Estrada, "because the protocol is economically forward-thinking." What's more, he adds, American companies can't escape the treaty: Any U.S. business that operates in a Kyoto-endorsing country must comply with the agreement's emissions restrictions at its overseas plants.

A father of eight and grandfather of twelve, Estrada started out as a journalist before getting his law degree and serving in embassies from the U.S. to China. His global experience makes him confident that America will eventually join Kyoto. "I believe that international collaboration is the only way to solve this global problem," says Estrada, 68. "And I have faith that U.S. leaders will eventually agree to participate in this greater good."



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Copenhagen needs a strong lead negotiator, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, 21 October 2009.

Reaching an international climate agreement requires someone with exceptional skill, knowledge and diplomacy, says Kyoto chair Raúl Estrada-Oyuela.

As the professional diplomat who presided over the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, it is clear to me how vital it is to have a good leader to steer negotiations at the Copenhagen conference on climate this December. Time is short, and matters are very complex. Although it may prove impossible to agree on quantified commitments at the meeting itself, a strong effort should be made for a deal that at least settles the main political objectives, with the aim of finalizing the agreements at subsidiary meetings in June 2010.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) currently involves 192 governments, making negotiation a major exercise in diplomacy. To come to an agreement, the process needs a well established leader who is fair, forceful, committed and well informed on the subject under debate and on the aspirations and bottom lines of all parties.

Often, the host country can take on this role. But Denmark, the host of December's 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, has pushed the objectives of the European Union so aggressively that a leadership role from that country is likely to generate a negative reaction from some parties, such as India. The difficulty of Denmark's position in leading the talks was emphasized on 12 October when the country's chief climate negotiator Thomas Becker left his post in the wake of an expenses scandal. Plus, the nation's intended leader of the conference — Anders Fogh Rasmussen — resigned as prime minister earlier this year to become NATO's secretary-general. The current Danish minister of energy and climate — Connie Hedegaard — will therefore officially preside over the talks, but it is not clear to me that she has the necessary experience to truly lead the negotiations.

A whole solution

The best option, I think, would be to create a Committee of the Whole that would combines negotiations from the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, which are currently run by separate committees with separate chairs. It is still possible to do this, and it will remain possible until the conference starts. The last preparatory meeting, in Barcelona on 2–6 November, will be an opportunity to consider this point. If such a committee is formed, its elected chair would naturally lead the negotiations at the Copenhagen summit. If this doesn't happen, the chance of making a good deal will be lessened.

My own role in climate negotiations began with the Second World Climate Conference, held in Geneva in 1990, where I was Argentina's representative and the de facto speaker for the Group of Latin America and Caribbean countries. A graduate in law, I had joined the foreign service in 1966 and participated in a number of multilateral negotiations, including on environmental issues. Diplomats at the 1990 conference were, surprisingly, not allowed to attend the science segment devoted to the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Before the conference, from my desk in Buenos Aires I had to send junior colleagues to attend meetings they barely understood in Geneva to get a handle on the IPCC's activities. Eventually I was lucky enough to recruit a good scientific team, led by Osvaldo Canziani, to educate myself and my colleagues.
Copenhagen needs a strong lead negotiator

I learnt many good lessons from other diplomats about the skills required to negotiate a good agreement. Jean-Maurice Ripert, for example, was a distinguished French economist who was ambassador to the UN and chaired the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in 1991. This was the body tasked with creating a legal multilateral instrument on climate change (what came to be called the UNFCCC). I was vice-chairman of that committee at the time, and witnessed Ripert's skill first-hand. He was an optimist in the most adverse of circumstances. He was well aware of the need to have the United States and Japan on board, yet also had authority among developing countries, because he was in charge of promoting their participation on the IPCC. He consulted privately with most delegations on every issue to understand their thinking.

Also a master of this trade is ambassador Tommy Koh — former dean of the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore, a UN representative and eventual chair of the preparatory committee for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (and chair of the Committee of the Whole in that conference). During the Earth Summit negotiations, he commanded daily results from the leaders of sub-groups he had created. When he felt that an area was failing to progress, he took the matter on himself, making emotional appeals in the plenary if necessary and even jokingly comparing his appearance to Mickey Mouse to soften the debate. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development is, in large part, a product of his personal drafting.

Clever tactics

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee met for the first time in February 1991 just outside Washington DC. From the start, as today, the United States and India made progress difficult: at one point, the US representative, Bob Reinstein, refused to participate in a crucial meeting. After insisting in many ways without success, I obtained a suite for an impromptu luncheon and invited all the relevant delegates, including Reinstein. Using a trick learned from Koh, I appealed to their good manners and the rules of polite diplomacy to point out that they could not decline the chairman's invitation. We had lunch, we forged an agreement and, fortunately, I had a credit card to cover the bill.

Final success in drafting the UNFCCC was reached only because Ripert worked full time to host a multitude of consultations during and between the official sessions. Once each paragraph of the convention was completed, we still needed to obtain consensus on the package. In delegates' jargon, 'consensus' means that everybody can live with the text even if not fully satisfied by it; it is reached not by a vote, but by the lead negotiator taking the responsibility to declare that a consensus has been reached. OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) members vehemently held back their consent, but Ripert managed to moderate their resistance to a point at which he felt justified in declaring a consensus. That took guts.

The UNFCCC then went to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where it was signed into being. Further work was needed to create a set of rules by which it would be enacted. This again required a series of meetings by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, for which I was elected chair.

The main product of the first meeting, held in 1995, was the Berlin Mandate, which established the basis for the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol. This complicated document was created under the leadership of ambassador Bo Kjellén and Angela Merkel, then Germany's environment minister. Merkel is a superb politician. Having grown up in eastern Germany, she was versed in the uselessness of inflexibility and devoted to constructive compromise. Merkel worked a whole night as president of the conference, shuttling from one room to another, to work out the final text at around 6 a.m. of the last day. Like Ripert before her, she had obtained a strong enough position to declare the mandate adopted by consensus despite protest from the OPEC members.

We worked on the text for the protocol from August 1995 until December 1997, with the final stage in Kyoto. Although Japan held the presidency for this conference, it was unable to field a player similar to Merkel because of internal squabbles between the ministries of foreign affairs, international trade and industry, and environment (this continues to be the case in Japan). Instead, I took the lead.

Having studied Koh, Ripert and Merkel, I used diverse instruments to steer the discussions, always consulting with all sectors. At the request of the United States, we slowed the process until President Bill Clinton was re-elected. To placate the constant claims of the OPEC countries, I asked my Iranian friend Mohammad Reza Salamat, now a programme officer in the UN Secretariat, to find a way to placate the oil producers (which he did by drafting two paragraphs of the protocol). The United States favoured a 'cap and trade' approach from the beginning, allowing the market to drive emissions cuts, whereas the European Union was initially more inclined to adopt 'policies and measures', relying on rules and regulations to reduce emissions. We created an elaborate mix, with 'cap and trade' dominating, to satisfy all.

No regrets

The political decisions made for the Kyoto Protocol had their shortcomings. We opted to put targets on a range of gases, knowing that we had very different degrees of certainty on the estimation of emissions for each of them. Selecting 1990 as the base year for emissions comparisons was arbitrary, if politically convenient, as was selecting a 100-year horizon. The target of a 5% emissions reduction was too modest, but it was the only one politically possible. Despite this, the Kyoto Protocol has had an undeniably positive impact in international policy: climate change is now at the centre of the international scene, and I have no regrets about the negotiation.

Some have suggested that large deals always result in unsatisfactory compromise, and that smaller agreements are better alternatives. The administration of former US President George W. Bush, for one, prompted meetings among some 15–20 governments to discuss their own climate initiatives. These talks continue, but with no results. Differences between large world economies remain the same even in small meetings. Plus, only large meetings can properly capture the needs of the developing world.

Who will be Copenhagen's Merkel or Ripert? I hope this will be established before December.

The main task for Copenhagen is shared by two groups. The working group on long-term cooperative action must propose a "comprehensive process to enable the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention", with the intention of including commitments from the United States and the 'mega' developing countries — China, India, Brazil, Mexico and North Korea — that do not have quantified commitments in the Kyoto Protocol. In addition, the working group on further commitments for 'Annex I' countries under the Kyoto Protocol must propose targets for beyond 2012 for developed nations who had caps for their emissions in the 2008–12 commitment period.

This March, ambassador Michael Zammit Cutajar of Malta, former executive-secretary of the UNFCCC, took the chair of the long-term co-operative action group. Cutajar has the necessary capabilities and the knowledge to lead this group. His nation is a member of the European Union but it is in many aspects a developing country, giving him respect from many quarters. In June, he produced an excellent draft negotiating text of fewer than 60 pages based on proposals submitted by various governments. The document has not met with much success, however: government representatives have added paragraphs that push the text up to 200 pages.

At the same time, ambassador John Ashe, of Antigua and Barbuda, took the chair of the further commitments working group. He, too, has produced a draft negotiation document and has considerable experience as a chairman, but he too has been confronted with a lack of cooperation by the parties.

Hedegaard has a difficult task at Copenhagen. It might be advisable not to end the conference in December at all, but rather, as we did with the 6th conference at The Hague, reconvene it six months later. Such a delay is not the best option, but may be the only way to reach a meaningful agreement.



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Climate of compromise, Nature Editorial, October 21 2009.

The chances of a strong treaty emerging from the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen seem small, but recent progress offers hope.

With about six weeks left before nations gather in Copenhagen to finish negotiating a climate treaty, hopes are rapidly dwindlinug that countries will be ready to sign a strong, ratifiable agreement. The pessimism has spread so widely that it could be considered a global pandemic. News stories are already talking about the 'failure' of Copenhagen and squandered opportunities.

But viewed from the perspective of just a few years ago, the Copenhagen summit could already be considered a partial success. In a short span, many nations have pledged to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by considerable amounts, well beyond any commitments they had made before, such as through the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Norway, for example, offered this month to reduce its own emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Indonesia said it would curb its emissions over that same time by 26% below the levels expected under a business-as-usual scenario, with even stronger cuts possible under an international agreement. The European Union has committed to a 20% reduction below 1990 levels and would increase that to 30% with a global pact. And, for the first time, the US Congress is moving towards establishing laws that mandate emissions cuts.

These words are not to be confused with achievements, but they at least show that countries have started to analyse their own emissions seriously and to develop domestic agendas that would set them on course to meet their commitments. Such unilateral decisions are an essential starting point for an international agreement, and they suggest that countries are now ready to back up their rhetoric in a way that was not true 12 years ago, when they signed the Kyoto Protocol. This is real progress, and it would not have happened without the pressure to produce a treaty.

Nevertheless, such vows fall short of what is needed to protect against the dangers of global warming. Nations need to reduce global emissions far more in the longer term, and the endgame gets much tougher if leaders delay making those reductions.

In a package of articles this week (see below), Nature looks at some of the issues that will play crucial parts in the negotiations in Copenhagen. Several articles focus on factors concerning the developing world, which will endure some of the severest effects of climate change and which will also be responsible for much of the future growth in greenhouse-gas emissions. At the moment, major gaps remain between the world's wealthiest nations and those still in the process of providing their citizens with basics such as clean water and electricity.

The negotiating impasse can be breached only by concessions on both sides. Developed nations, particularly the United States, must agree to substantial reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, both in the next decade and in the long term. And developing nations must commit to controlling their greenhouse-gas pollution in some fashion. China has recently taken over as the leader in carbon dioxide emissions and there can be no hope of containing global temperatures without Chinese action.

At the same time, developing nations will need monetary and technical assistance in steering their economies towards a low-carbon future. The wealthy nations have so far committed too little on this front, and the effects of the global recession have tightened budgets around the world. But as economies improve, the wealthiest nations should fashion innovative ways to assist the developing world, whether through the proceeds of carbon trading or through new technical collaborations.

Another major financial obstacle is the issue of support for adaptation. Some estimates suggest that the developing world will require in excess of US$100 billion in aid every year to cope with the effects of global warming. But the international funds created to help adaptation efforts in the world's poorest nations contain orders of magnitude less money, and even the available funds have not flowed smoothly to countries in need. The process of distributing funds should be streamlined. But there must be safeguards to ensure that adaptation money is used effectively.

With such major issues still unresolved, pessimistic observers see no chance of success in Copenhagen. But there is still time left for leaders to reach significant agreements if they make it a personal priority and recognize the urgency of the problem. Some leaders, such as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, have indicated that they would be willing to attend the conference to seal a deal, but more should step forward and they should commit to going. This would lend stature to the negotiations and would raise the chances of achieving a substantial agreement.

It will not be possible to resolve many of the important issues in the remaining time this year. But leaders could make strong progress by building on the momentum at the national level. Many of the commitments made by nations this year are conditional — they depend on other parties taking specific actions as well. These could provide a model for approaching strong targets through a stepwise process.

In the end, successful international negotiations share some important characteristics with scientific research. Both are iterative processes, in which results from one step help to determine the path forward. They require time and perseverance. And they rarely travel in a straight line. Countries should endeavour to build on the positive actions of the past year, both before and after the Copenhagen summit.



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The Double Vision Chapter Two - The Double Vision of Nature, Northrop Frye, 1991.

The Bible is emphatic that nothing numinous exists in nature, that there may be devils there but no gods, and that nature is to be thought of as a fellow-creature of man. However, the paranoid attitude to nature that Pynchon describes survives in the manic-depressive psychosis of the twentieth century. In the manic phase, we are told that the age of Aquarius is coming, and that soon the world will be turned back to the state of innocence. In the depressive phase, news analysts explain that pollution has come to a point at which any sensible nature would simply wipe us out and start experimenting with a new species. In interviews I am almost invariably asked at some point whether I feel optimistic or pessimistic about some contemporary situation. The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both.

We do emerge, however, to some degree, from the illusions of staring at nature into building a human world of culture and civilization, and from that perspective we can see the natural environment as the 'material' world in the sense of providing the materials for our unique form of existence. Practically all of our made world represents a huge waste of effort: it includes the world of war, of cutthroat competition, of stagnating bureaucracies, of the lying and hypocrisy of what is called public relations. Above all, it has not achieved any genuine rapprochement with nature itself, but simply regards nature as an area of exploitation. Where God may belong in this duality we have yet to try to see, but as he is not hidden in nature, he can only be connected with that tiny percentage of human activity that has not been hopelessly botched.



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Dia para o Clima mobiliza milhares de manifestantes em todo o mundo, Ambiente Brasil, 26/10/2009.

Milhares de pessoas foram às ruas em várias cidades do mundo como Sydney, Nova York, Paris, Londres e Berlim para mobilizar a opinião pública mundial sobre o problema do aquecimento global, cinco semanas antes da conferência de Copenhague.

"Mais de 180 países participaram do evento. Este Dia Mundial para o Clima foi acompanhado em todo o planeta", declarou neste sábado em Times Square, no centro de Manhattan, um orador do movimento 350.org, organizador da manifestação.

Em Sydney, milhares de pessoas se reuniram no porto e na praia de Bondi com faixas com a inscrição "350", em referência à concentração de gás carbônico na atmosfera: 350 partes por milhão (ppm), um número que não pode ser ultrapassado para evitar um aquecimento global de consequências irreversíveis, segundo alguns cientistas.

Manifestantes formaram o número 350 com seus corpos nas escadas da Ópera de Sydney, e os sinos da catedral tocaram 350 vezes.

Em Londres, mais de 600 pessoas se reuniram à beira do Tâmisa para formar o número 5. Uma foto aérea desta reunião será agregada a outras que formaram, em outras partes do mundo, os números 3 e 0, para escrever o número 350, informou à AFP uma porta-voz da ONG "Campaign against Climate change".

Em Nova York, uma centena de militantes se reuniu sob uma chuva fina com cartazes nos quais aparecia o número 350.

Em Paris, duzentas pessoas colocaram seus celulares e relógios para tocar às 12h18, em alusão ao dia do encerramento da conferência sobre o clima, prevista de 7 a 18 de dezembro em Copenhague.

Apelo aos políticos - O objetivo dos manifestantes era "despertar" os políticos para que se preparem da melhor forma possível para esta conferência, que será precedida por uma cúpula europeia nos dias 29 e 30 de outubro. "Nicolas, acorda", podia-se ler em uma faixa dirigida ao presidente da França, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Considerada crucial, a conferência de Copenhague tem como objetivo estabelecer um novo tratado internacional sobre o clima para substituir o Protocolo de Kyoto, que expira em 2012.

O primeiro-ministro dinamarquês, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, avisou que as discussões sobre o clima não estavam progredindo o suficiente para permitir a conclusão de um acordo internacional em Copenhague.

Em Estocolmo, 30 manifestantes se reuniram no centro da cidade exigindo discussões "imediatas" sobre o clima.

Em Berlim, 350 militantes, muitos dos quais usavam máscaras da chanceler alemã Angela Merkel, se reuniram diante do Portão de Brandenburgo, no centro da cidade.

Na cidade sérvia de Novi Sad, 350 pessoas formaram o número 350 com seus corpos. Em Praga, 30 militantes ecologistas distribuíram 350 balões pretos com a inscrição "CO2".



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Don't worry, be happy, whatever that meansVancouver Sun Editorial, Oct. 24 2009.

The notion that happier people are healthier people is widely accepted as an incontrovertible truth based on studies that claim to have tested the hypothesis time and again.

"People who are happier heal more quickly, have stronger immune systems and, on average, live longer," says Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, who has studied happiness for more than two decades and authored 240 publications, including the popular Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, sanctioned by Oprah Winfrey.

Work by Prof. Sarah Pressman at the University of Kansas psychology department has been described as linking happiness to faster recovery from surface wounds.

Happiness is said to lower the risk of heart disease and the levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which weakens the immune system, and plasma fibrinogen, which may be associated with heart disease and stroke. Reports on Pressman's research assert that being happy may even offer protection against the common cold virus.

Some governments are jumping on the happiness bandwagon. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed that his country's economic progress be measured by a happiness index, Gross Domestic Contentment, if you will. The World Health Organization has cited the importance of happiness for good health. Major companies are conducting happiness audits in the belief that a happy employee is a productive employee.

"Study after study has shown that happier people lead healthier lives," said Prof. Felicia Huppert, director of the University of Cambridge's Well-being Institute. "They eat better, exercise more, meet their friends more often and are less prone to obesity."

Huppert's observation leads naturally to this question: Is it possible that researchers have put the cart before the horse? Perhaps healthier people are happier people. Those who eat well, exercise and meet with friends are more likely to be happier than those who don't, aren't they? For instance, strenuous exercise releases endorphins which, pharmacologically speaking, generate a feeling of well-being. It's the activity that produces the result, not the other way 'round.

Another problem with this sphere of research is that happiness is an elusive thing. Sure, the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right in the United States (and a moderately successful 1980s indie-rock band in Canada), but it is difficult to define. Some are happiest when they dream of The Rapture, when God will carry them to Heaven while he destroys a world of unbelievers. This is not a happy outcome for unbelievers.

Simon Critchley, chairman of philosophy at the New School in New York City, wrote in the New York Times recently that to be happy is to be like God, "with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself."

He spoke of Rousseau's ideal state, floating in a row boat on Lake Bienne near Neuchatel in Switzerland, "with no sign of the passing time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely ... as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy."

Happiness for philosophers is clearly a contemplative life. But how will that fly with the masses?

For 72 years, researchers at Harvard University have followed 268 men from college through old age, subjecting them to all manner of physiological and psychological tests, in an effort to find out what makes people happy. We still don't have an answer.

A major problem for happiness researchers is that health can be empirically measured while happiness is self-reported. People report that time with family makes them happy, then say having children has diminished their happiness. They say money doesn't make them happy, but research finds a strong correlation between income and happiness. In fact, digging a little deeper into some of this research we find the quality under study is often not happiness but rather a "positive attitude" or "optimistic outlook."

One paper that surveyed the happiness literature came up with a key finding: While life expectancy grew in developed countries after the Second World War almost continuously, self-reported happiness did not increase and sometimes even decreased.

The decoupling of health and happiness indices should serve as a warning that happiness is not a permanent state of being but an unpredictable, ephemeral emotion, making it a flimsy foundation for public policy on health, economics or anything else.



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A Language of Smiles, Olivia Judson, October 27 2009.

Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.”

Maybe I’m easy to please, but doing this a few times makes me giggle. “Eeee.”

Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.” And, I think, it’s why I don’t get the giggles from “aaaa” or “oooo.”

The mere act of smiling is often enough to lift your mood; conversely, the act of frowning can lower it; scowling can make you feel fed up. In other words, the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.

(The notion that facial expressions affect mood isn’t new. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his story “The Purloined Letter”: one character reports that when he wishes to know someone’s mind, he attempts to compose his face to mimic the expression of that someone — then waits to see which emotions arise. And the idea was developed, in different ways, by both Charles Darwin and William James. But telling stories and developing arguments is one thing. Showing, experimentally, that making a face can make a mood is harder; it’s only in the past 30 years or so that data have started to accumulate.)

Exactly how frowns and smiles influence mood is a matter of debate. One possibility is classical conditioning. Just as Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the expectation of food, the argument goes, so humans quickly come to associate smiling with feeling happy. Once the association has been established, smiling is, by itself, enough to generate happy feelings. Another possibility is that different facial gestures have intrinsic properties that make them more or less pleasant, perhaps by altering the way that blood flows to the brain.

But here’s what interests me. As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?

As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn’t mean no one has; it just means I haven’t been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea’s not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

Separating these various factors will be difficult, and the overall impact on mood through the facial gestures of a language may well be small, if indeed it exists at all. Nevertheless, I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it. In the meantime: have a giggle with “meeeeeee.”

Notes:

For a fascinating overview of experiments on frowning, smiling and mood, see McIntosh, D. N. 1996. “Facial feedback hypotheses: evidence, implications, and directions.” Motivation and Emotion 20: 121-147. This paper also discusses possible ways that facial expressions can influence emotions including both the conditioning idea and the blood flow idea. Further experimental results can be found in, for example, Kleinke, C. L., Peterson, T. R., and Rutledge, T. R. 1998, “Effects of self-generated facial expressions on mood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 272-279; see also Schnall, S. and Laird, J. D., “Keep smiling: Enduring effects of facial expressions and postures on emotional experience and memory,” Cognition and Emotion 17: 787-797; Flack, W. F. 2006, “Peripheral feedback effects of facial expressions, bodily postures, and vocal expressions on emotional feelings,” Cognition and Emotion 20: 177-195; and Duclos, S. E. and Laird, J. D. 2001, “The deliberate control of emotional experience through control of expressions,” Cognition and Emotion 15: 27-56.

Poe’s purloined letter can be read here. Darwin’s arguments about emotions can be found in his book, first published in 1872, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”; James’s arguments are described in his book, first published in 1890, “The Principles of Psychology.”

For evidence that facial movements can affect the way blood flows to the brain, see McIntosh, D. N. et al. 1997, “Facial movement, breathing, temperature, and affect: Implications of the vascular theory of emotional efference,” Cognition and Emotion 11: 171-195.

For babies telling the difference among languages based on lip movements, see Weikum, W. M. et al. 2007, “Visual language discrimination in infancy,” Science 316: 1159. For computers being able to do this, see Newman, J. L. and Cox. S. J. 2009. “Automatic visual-only language identification: a preliminary study,” IEEE Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing vols 1-8: 4345-4348. A less technical account of the results are given here.

For my smidgen of evidence that the faces you pull when speaking a language can affect your mood, see Zajonc, R. B., Murphy, S. T. and Inglehart, M. 1989, “Feeling and facial efference: implications of the vascular theory of emotion,” Psychological Review 96: 395-416. This paper describes what happens if you read stories full of the “ü” sound, or are made to repeat it over and over again.

The idea that the words in a language can affect the thought processes of the speakers is often attributed to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf; it has been controversial. However, some recent experimental evidence supports it, at least when it comes to processing colors. See, for example, Winawer, J. et al. 2007. “Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 7780-7785 and Regier, T. and Kay, P. 2009, “Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13: 439-446. The idea that emotions might be similarly affected has been discussed by Perlovsky, L. 2009, “Language and emotions: Emotional Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” Neural Networks 22: 518-526.

This piece grew out of a conversation with Ismael Ludman about the different muscles used for speaking Spanish and German: many thanks. Many thanks also to Dan Haydon and Gideon Lichfield for insights, comments and suggestions.



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