This is the weekly electronic information service of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility

Editor: Tobias Damjanov, e-mail:   
INES homepages: http://inesglobal.org       http://www.inesglobal.com/
INES International Office   
INES Chair: Prof. Armin Tenner    [Please note that the first "1" in q18 is the number one, while the last "l" is an "L"]

CONTENTS of WNII No. 28/2001

• Membership and Projects' News:
  • Nuclear Free Future Award to Arjun Makhijani
• Special Section: On the US Missile Defence Policy
  • Star Wars Test Expensive and Destabilizing
  • US Congress: Missile Defense Critique Published
  • USA: Administration Missile Defense Papers
• Sustainable Development:
  • Climate change and carbon emissions
  • UNEP Energy Centre Newsletter June 2001
• Briefings:
  • 2001 Human Development Report
• Conferences, Meetings, Seminars:
  • Ecological Economic Management and Planning in Regional and Urban Systems
  • International Conference on Systems Thinking Globally Concerned
• INES Web- and Email Service

MEMBERSHIP AND PROJECTS' NEWS"

Nuclear Free Future Award to Arjun Makhijani

On 16 July, Arjun Makhijani, founder and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a US-based INES member organisation, will receive the Josephine Butler Nuclear Free Future Award.

Josephine Butler, co-founder of the the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital area [Washington D.C. that is; the ed.], dedicated her entire being to the struggle for Peace, Justice and Nuclear Abolition. Her example was an inspiration to thousands here in the national capital area, nationally, and world-wide, and her memory lives on in the work of her many protégés.

John Steinbach of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Committee writes: "Arjun Makhijani exemplifies the spirit and substance of Josephine Butlers memory. From his early years working with the poor in Indias villages, to his current status as one of the worlds foremost experts on environmental issues, Arjun has never lost sight of the importance of informed activism in pursuit of Peace and Justice. Although a serious scientist and academic, as President of the Institute for Energy & Environmental Research Arjun dedicates much of his energy to working with activists on the front lines of resistance to nuclear and environmental madness."

SPECIAL SECTION
ON THE US MISSILE DEFENCE POLICY

Star Wars Test Expensive and Destabilizing http://www.space4peace.org
From Bruce Gagnon, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space < >

The planned July 14 test of missile defense systems from Vandenberg AFB, California will cost over US$100 million and dramatically help to destabilize global disarmament efforts. Testing of the National Missile Defense (NMD) program is just the beginning of aerospace corporation, U.S. government and Pentagon efforts to move the arms race into space.

The recent "Rumsfeld Commission" report states that, "In the coming period the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on the earth and in space."

"George W. Bush and his aerospace corporation allies know that they cannot go to the American people and ask for hundreds of billions of dollars for offensive space weapons that will allow the U.S. to control and dominate space," says Regina Hagen, a German board member of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. "So instead they dress up their new Star Wars plan in sheep clothing and call it a defensive shield to protect the U.S., and now its allies, from purportedly 'rogue' states. In Germany, we can see through this façade."

"While the merits of NMD are debated, the Bush administration is moving to deploy Theatre Missile Defense (TMD) systems in the Middle East. It will also eventually surround China, and will force a chain reaction of nuclear weapons proliferation as Iran, China, India, and Pakistan all move to respond to U.S. destabilizing deployments. First comes NMD, then TMD, then space-based lasers. In the end the world becomes more unstable, the weapons corporations get rich, and the American taxpayer gets hung out to dry," claimed Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network.

Coming on the heels of Bush's enormous tax cut, an expansion of the arms race into space will also force Congress to abandon any real effort to provide health care for those Americans who do not presently have it, and will require dramatic cuts in other needed social programs. Despite claims otherwise Congress cannot provide both guns and butter.

The farewell warning to the American people by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 to "beware of the power of the military industrial complex" seems all the more relevant today as the aerospace industry now has "unwarranted" access and influence in Congress and the White House. Democracy is in danger when such decisions are made to spend the national treasury on plans that will only lead to a more unstable world.

The Global Network is organizing an International Day of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space on October 13. Local actions will be held at military bases and aerospace corporations facilities around the world.

US Congress: Missile Defense Critique Published (Source: BITS' NEWS-Press-Report 2001.27, 13 July 2001)

After an extended tug of war between the Pentagon and Congressman John F. Tierney (D-MA), a critique of the national missile defense program that the Defense Department tried to suppress has now been released to the public. The August 2000 report, which faults the missile defense program for inadequate and unrealistic testing, was prepared by Philip Coyle, then-Director of Operational Test and Evaluation.

"The Department of Defense has not approved the release of this report to the general public," wrote Stewart F. Aly, DoD Acting Deputy General Counsel in a May 31 letter to Rep. Dan Burton, Chairman of the House Government Reform Committee. "Accordingly, the report should not be disclosed to persons other than Members of Congress and professional staff members who have an official need to see it," Mr. Aly continued. "We specifically request that you not post this report on any web sites."

But Democrats on the Government Reform Committee, led by Rep. Tierney, quickly determined that there was no legal justification for withholding the unclassified document. They have posted the full text of the Coyle report, with accompanying analysis and related correspondence, here: http://www.house.gov/reform/min/nmd.html  

USA: Administration Missile Defense Papers

A new consensus statement of administration policy prepared by the White House has been distributed by cable to all U.S. embassies and post abroad to provide American diplomats with talking points to help persuade other governments to support President Bush's plans for deployment of missile defense systems. The cable is presented in four parts: "Principal Themes on Missile Defense," "Questions and Answers," "The Impact of the ABM Treaty on U.S. Missile Defense Programs," and "Misconceptions about Missile Defense."

The US-based The Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project obtained a copy of the cable and is posting it on the web to increase public understanding of the Administration's proposals: http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/resources/EmbassyCableNMD.htm  

Project Director Joseph Cirincione provides an analysis of the defense plans in a Carnegie Analysis: http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/templates/article.asp?NewsID=955  

For key documents and background materials on missile defense, please see the Project's Missile Defense section: http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/weapons/weapon.asp?ID=5&weapon=missiledefense  

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Climate change and carbon emissions

• Note that the US-based International Project for Sustainable Energy Paths (IPSEP) has just released a study entitled "Cutting Carbon Emissions at a Profit: Opportunities for the U.S." which is written by IPSEP Director Dr Florentin Krause. The study is available from the WNII Editor as an PDF-formatted email attachment.
• Another IPSEP study, "Cutting Carbon Emissions While Making Money: Climate-Saving Energy Strategies for the European Union", can be freely downloaded from: http://www.ipsep.org/Carbon.pdf
• As Reuters reported on 8 July, a new report by Britain's Royal Society said too little is known about how much farmlands and forests, so-called carbon sinks, can absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. Carbon sinks will be a major issue in Bonn when environmentalists and policy-makers resume international climate talks, which have been jeopardized by the withdrawal of the United States from the Kyoto agreement on global warming.
  In its report, the independent body of top scientists said better methods are needed to verify the impact of carbon sinks on global warming. Reducing the amount of CO2 from burning fossil fuels should be the main way to reduce global warming.
  "These carbon sinks are of rather limited size and also will only work for a relatively short duration, a few decades. That means they can't make a major contribution to reducing carbon emissions and solving the global warming problem," said Professor John Shepherd, an author of the report. Shepherd, the director of Britain's Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, said carbon sinks were diverting the talks from the main issue which is cutting emissions.
  According to the report, carbon sinks and soil absorb about 40 percent of CO2 emissions and could soak up as much as 45 percent. But it added that the maximum that could be absorbed would only be equivalent to a quarter of that needed by 2050 to prevent major rises in global temperature.
  "Our view is that the argument is being diverted into what is really a rather unproductive area and people should get back to talking about carbon emission reductions at source by use of renewable (fuels) and whatever else they think is necessary," said Shepherd. The scientists also warned that in the future carbon sinks could become a source of CO2. They could release greenhouse gases, such as methane.
  "The primary benefit of land carbon sinks is that they can be effective immediately and provide a financial incentive for the preservation and sustainable use of forests and agriculture land," the report said. But the long-term solution must be cuts in CO2 emissions through energy saving and replacing fossil fuels with renewable and nuclear energy [sic! Th. Ed.].

UNEP Energy Centre Newsletter June 2001

The June 2001 newsletter from the UNEP Collaborating Centre on Energy and the Environment, based in Riso, Denmark, is now available online at: http://www.uccee.org/UcceeNews/June01.pdf  

Articles deal with:

• May Workshop on Baseline Methodologies for CDM and JI Projects
• Regional Workshops on Energy Subsidy Reform
• March Beijing Workshop on Kyoto Mechanisms
• Sustainable Energy Advisory Facility in Action
• January Regional Meeting on Energy and Sustainable Development in Africa

BRIEFINGS

2001 Human Development Report http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/  

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has released its Human Development Report "Making new technologies work for human development". All chapters of this Report can be downloaded as pdf files from the website indicated above.

CONFERENCES, MEETINGS, SEMINARS

Ecological Economic Management and Planning in Regional and Urban Systems

Fifth International Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics Russian Chapter (ISEE/RC 2001)

• Date: 26-29 September 2001
• Venue: Moscow, Russia
• The Conference will focus mainly on the following topics:
  • Indicators and Strategies of Regional and Urban Sustainable Development
  • Environment, Institutions and Society
  • Natural Resources Valuation and Integrated Environmental-Economic Accounting
  • Social Factors of Sustainability
  • Health of Population in Urban Areas
  • Biodiversity and Regional Development
  • Urban Planning and the Ecology of a Region
  • Transportation, Energy, and the Environment
  • Ecological-Economic Modeling and Information Systems
  • Environmental Management Systems
  • Environmental Policy Mechanisms, Risk Management and Insurance
  • Environmental Protection Technologies and Innovation
• Abstracts of papers (up to 300 words) for plenary and parallel sessions, as well as for panel discussions and round tables, are to be submitted on the above listed (and closely related) topics only by e-mail to: < > no later than July 30, 2001.
• Registration and full paper submission (for inclusion in conference CD): August 15, 2001

For more details, visit: http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/STAFF/safonov/ISEERC2001.htm

International Conference on Systems Thinking Globally Concerned

Bertalanffy Anniversary Conference 2001 http://www.bertalanffy.org/discus 

• Date: 1-4 November 2001 [+] Venue: Vienna, Austria
• Symposium (I): "The creation of a sustainable society depends on Innovative Systems Thinking (IST) supported by General Systems Weltanschauung (GSW)"aims at exploring how it might be feasible to reach Sustainable Development as a steady state or flow equilibrium of humankind's dynamics.
• Symposium (II): "Wholism (or Holism) The way forward into the 21st century"aims at searching further how human beings may and also should learn to develop their way of thinking for clearly seeing the forest before they may start dealing with one or another tree; and also for grasping the meaning of a tree before trying to handle one of the leaves or a flower or a fruit.
• Symposium (III): "General Systems Theory as a Methodological Maxim" aims at pondering why and how GST could and should prescribe better foresight rather than hindsight; be used for crisis prevention in preference to crisis management: may widen the scope of inquiry for asking first whether a certain project, policy or action is justified,...
• Symposium (IV): "New Image of Man and Woman" supported by a new General Anthropology" aims at searching reliable ways for building the interdisciplinary enterprise (comprising human biology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, linguistics, economics, the arts,...) that may help to create societal circumstances needed for allowing the individual emergence during the life of every person learning on his/her own to consciously develop his/her peculiar personality, while his/her intrinsic spontaneity was confronted to diverse cultural, economic and social conditions determined peculiarly by the performance of those humans that constitute every human society,...
• Symposium (V): "Development of Perspectivism, as a Systems Epistemology" aims at making more evident the disciplinary and multidisciplinary validity of the Bertalanffian Perspectivism as a way of getting closer and closer, though diversely, to the 'absolute truth' of every aspect of the whole reality through the truth of many different perspectives of each one of these aspects, gradually as soon as each perspective is expressed.
• Symposium (VI): "Business based on Bertalanffy's Weltanschauung" aims at searching how to build the optional circumstances that are needed for the emergence of a new Entrepreneurship Spirit. The spirit required for leading business to be oriented by the "Weltanschauung" suggested by Bertalanffy, as the global awareness that may generate the ecological, ethnological & ethical values needed: 1) for taking care of the proper preservation of GAIA's features; 2) for maintaining the Biodiversity that may help humans to learn how to increase the survival chances of our species; 3) for making feasible to interpret humanely and implement cogently a Terrestrial Bill of Human Rights and Comments.
• Everybody is invited to send a 'position text ' (around 1000 words), arguments and comments, for the Conversazione that will take place before the Conference. Abstracts of papers (500 words), for being submitted in the Conference, may also be sent to: < >
• There is also a Discussion List opened. To take part, send the line "subscribe bertalanffy-list" to: 

For more details, contact: < >

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