Arundhati Roy writes: We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in
Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels
informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a
Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our
parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and
done before.

As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned
Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had
personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist
camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai
was India’s 9/11.

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t
Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our
tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own
broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It’s odd how, in the last week of November, thousands of people in
Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their
vote, while the richest quarters of India’s richest city ended up
looking like war-torn Kupwara — one of Kashmir’s most ravaged
districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist
attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore,
Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur, and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts
in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If
the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects,
both Hindu and Muslim, all are Indian nationals, which obviously
indicates that something’s going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you might not have heard that ordinary
people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway
station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish
between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness.

The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror
that breached the glittering barricades of “India shining” and spread
its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two
incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish center.

We’re told that one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai.
That’s absolutely true. It’s an icon of the easy, obscene injustice
that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers
were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel
rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved
(ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a
small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national
newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) said, “Hungry, kya?”(”Hungry eh?”). It, then, with the best of intentions I’m sure,
informed its readers that, on the international hunger index, India
ranked below Sudan and Somalia.

But of course this isn’t that war. That one’s still being
fought in the Dalit bastis (settlements) of our villages; on the banks
of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in
Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand,
Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal; and the slums and shantytowns of our
gigantic cities.

That war isn’t on TV. Yet.

So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is. (12/14/08)
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BBC Medical Science – US research may pave the way for a drug to cut the permanent damage caused by a heart attack. The researchers found that blocking a specific protein in mice was enough to cut potentially crucial scarring significantly. Their work could also make it easier to employ other treatments, such as stem cells, to help improve heart function, said a UK specialist. The research was published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

When the heart is starved of oxygen during a heart attack - normally because of a blockage in one of the arteries supplying it, it sets off a damaging chain of events. This initial injury sparks inflammation, and the laying down of collagen scar tissue - a process called fibrosis - in the organ which can interfere permanently with its ability to pump blood.

The researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison and Cornell University in New York have been looking for the chemical messengers which set this chain reaction going. In particular, they looked at the role of a protein called sFRP2, which had not previously been linked with the laying down of collagen. They used mice deprived of this protein to test whether it made a difference after a heart attack, and found that those lacking sFRP2 had far less scarring.

Professor Daniel Greenspan, one of the researchers, said: “Importantly, we found that when we reduced the level of fibrosis, heart function significantly improved in the mice.” (12/14/08)
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BBC Environmental Politics — Australia has said it will start a carbon trading scheme by the middle of 2010, despite appeals from the business community for a delay. The plan will cover 75% of the country’s emissions. It has also announced that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by between 5% and 15% by 2020, from the 2000 levels.

Australia has the highest per capita levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world, due to its heavy use of coal for generating electricity.

On Saturday, a UN climate change conference wrapped up in the Polish city of Poznan, the halfway point in a two-year process aimed at reaching a deal in Copenhagen by the end of 2009. That agreement is supposed to have two major elements - an expanded Kyoto Protocol-style deal committing industrialised countries to deeper emission cuts in the mid-term, perhaps by 2020, and a longer-term agreement encompassing all countries.

The Australian carbon trading scheme will be the most extensive outside Europe, and will see industrial polluters bid for government licences to emit carbon. It is expected that the permits will be sold for between A$23 and A$32 ($15 - $21) per tonne, with the price capped at A$40. The level of greenhouse gas cuts will be dependent on the outcome of the UN climate change talks a year from now. (12/14/08)
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Richard Heinberg writes: Our continued national dependence on fossil fuels is creating a
crippling vulnerability to both long-term fuel scarcity and
catastrophic climate change.

The current economic crisis
requires substantial national policy shifts and enormous new government
injections of capital into the economy. This provides an opportunity
for a project whose scope would otherwise be inconceivable: a
large-scale, coordinated energy transition away from fossil fuels and
toward renewable energy.

This project must happen immediately; indeed, it may already be too
late. We have already left behind the era of cheap and plentiful fossil
fuels, with a permanent decline of global oil production likely
underway by within three years. Moreover, the latest research tells us
we have less than eight years to bring carbon emissions under control
if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Lacking this larger
frame of understanding and action, a mere shift away from foreign oil
dependence will fail to meet the challenge at hand.

The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines
and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic
and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap
fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and
our electricity grid, but also our food system and our building stock.

Our 21st century nation’s dependence on 20th century fossil fuels is
the greatest threat we face, far more so than the current financial
crisis. A coordinated, comprehensive transition to an economy that is
no longer dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and no longer emits
climate-changing levels of carbon—a Post Carbon Energy Transition—will be the Obama Administration’s greatest opportunity to lead the nation on a path toward sustainable prosperity.  (12/14/08)
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