Congressman Says Bush, Oil Executives, Criminally Liable For Iraq War,

Perpetual Freedumb Toward a Devastatingly Lethal Climax - or a Return to Freedom, Life, Liberty, Health, with Limitless, Unbounded Potential for all, in a world of exploding human population, with its myriad needs, wants and desires?



Science & Technology had the capacity to promise us the latter back in the late 1940's- Life, Liberty, Health, Unbounded Potential for all - with the revolutionary advanced definitions of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Energy, Gravity (StarSteps) springing forth from an extended view of E=MC2 embracing the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law.


The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when lacking a Bill of Rights for Human Life

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



Bush, oil executives, criminally liable for Iraq War, says Congressman
Saturday 28th June, 2008
A U.S. Congressman, who ran for president this year, and in 2004, this week accused the Bush administration of colluding with the nation's oil companies in targeting Iraq's oil reserves.Surprisingly, the U.S. media has failed to report the allegations, notwithstanding they were aired in the House of Representatives on Thursday.Ohio Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat, in a speech to the House on Thursday, tied the secret meetings of the Cheney Energy Task Force to the recent awarding of non-competitive oil contracts in Iraq, and said that both the Bush Administration and the oil company executives who participated in those meetings in 2001, should be held criminally liable for an illegal war and extortion of Iraq’s oil.“In March of 2001, when the Bush Administration began to have secret meetings with oil company executives from Exxon, Shell and BP, spreading maps of Iraq oil fields before them, the price of oil was $23.96 per barrel. Then there were 63 companies in 30 countries, other than the U.S., competing for oil contracts with Iraq,' said Kucinich.“Today the price of oil is $135.59 per barrel, the U.S. Army is occupying Iraq and the first Iraq oil contracts will go, without competitive bidding to, surprise, (among a very few others) Exxon, Shell and BP.'“Iraq has between 200 to 300 billion barrels of oil with a market value in the tens of trillions of dollars. And our government is trying to force Iraq not only to privatize its oil, but to accept a long-term U.S. military presence to guard the oil and protect the profits of the oil companies, while Americans pay between $4 and $5 a gallon for gas, and our troops continue dying,' said the Democratic lawmaker.“We attacked a nation that did not attack us. Over 4,000 of our troops are dead. Over 1,000,000 innocent Iraqis have perished. The war will cost U.S. taxpayers between $2 to $3 trillion dollars. Our nation’s soul is stained because we went to war for the oil companies and their profits,' he said. 'There must be accountability not only with this Administration for its secret meetings and its open illegal warfare, but also for the oil company executives who were willing participants in a criminal enterprise of illegal war, the deaths of our soldiers and innocent Iraqis, and the extortion of the national resources of Iraq.'“We have found the weapon of mass destruction in Iraq,' said Kucinich in his speech to the House of Representatives. 'It is oil. As long as the oil companies control our government Americans will continue to pay and pay, with our lives, our fortunes our sacred honor,” he concluded.The Democratic Congressman, who has yet to endorse Barack Obama for the presidential election, should also be in the news for his recent efforts to impeach President George W. Bush, however again the media is almost completely silent on the matter. Without U.S. media attention, international news networks too appear to be loathe to pick up on the story.Earlier this month Kucinich moved a motion to refer to committee Articles of Impeachment concerning the president. 'The sheer volume of the Articles required a referral to provide Members with an opportunity for review,' Kucinich said on June 11.'It is now imperative that the Judiciary Committee begin a review of the 35 Articles. I will be providing supporting documentation to the committee so that it can proceed in an orderly manner. The weight of evidence contained in the Articles makes it clear that President Bush violated the Constitution and the U.S. Code as well as International law.''It is the House's responsibility as a co-equal branch of government to provide an effective check and balance to executive abuse of power. President Bush was principally responsible for directing the United States Armed Forces to attack Iraq,' the Ohio lawmaker said. 'The June 5th Senate Intelligence report convinced me it was time to act.'In the report, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, said: 'In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.''I believe that there is sufficient evidence in the Articles to support the charge that President Bush allowed, authorized and sanctioned the manipulation of intelligence by those acting under his direction and control, misleading Congress to approve a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq,' said Kucinich. 'As a result over 4,000 United States soldiers have died in combat in Iraq, with tens of thousands injured, many of them permanently impaired. Over a million innocent Iraqis have perished in a war which was based on lies, a war which will cost the American taxpayers as much as three trillion dollars,' he said.'Now it is incumbent for the Judiciary Committee to review the evidence. If it fails to hold any hearings on the resolution within the next thirty days, given the gravity of the charges and the moment, I will once again bring a similar privileged resolution of Impeachment to the House. We must not only create an historical record of the misconduct of the Bush Administration but we must make sure that any future Administration is forewarned about the Constitutionally proscribed limits of executive authority and exercise of power contravening the Constitution,' Kucinich said.Kucinich opposed the Iraq invasion and campaigned against it before the Congress authorized it. He reportedly persuaded a number of his colleagues to vote against the authorization bill. He challenged the legality of the war in court, and put forward a detailed plan over four years ago to end the occupation of Iraq.Two weeks prior to the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the U.S. Department of Defense said it had plans to protect Iraq’s oil wells and facilities. “Oil is a natural resource of Iraq that provides commerce, income for education and other needs, and infrastructure,' a Pentagon statement said. In warning that the Saddam Hussein regime had both “the capability and the intent to damage or destroy Iraq's oil fields,” the Defense Department said, “Reliable reports indicate that these activities have been planned, and in some cases, may already have begun. Recent information revealed that Iraq has received 24 railroad boxcars full of pentolite explosives.”“Economically, destruction of the oil fields could have enormous and lasting effects on Iraq's post-war economy. Iraq's oil is vitally important for the future of the Iraqi people. The department estimates the potential income to the Iraqi people from oil at $20 to $30 billion a year,” the DoD statement said.“U.S. plans are first to prevent the destruction of Iraq's oil fields and second, if unable to prevent the destruction, to control and mitigate the damage quickly. The department has crafted strategies that will allow U.S. forces to secure and protect the oil fields as rapidly as possible in order to preserve them prior to destruction. U.S. military forces would be responsible for securing and protecting the oil sites, and under appropriate contractual arrangements, private sector companies would extinguish any fires and assess damage to oil facilities,” the Pentagon statement said.“The department has a plan for dealing, on short notice, with oil well fires that might occur in Iraq. Brown & Root Services a division of Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc., Houston developed the plan, which also addresses assessing damage to oil facilities, for the government,” the statement said. Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc., is a division of Halliburton, the company once headed by Cheney.On July 17 2003 Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contained a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available at www.judicialwatch.orgFormer Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has long argued that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention in Iraq well prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level National Security Council official, concerned Cheney’s Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered “the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”

Starving the poor "to feed the automobiles"

WHAT PART OF FREEDOM INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN WITH EVOLUTION, SURVIVAL, WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND QUALITY OF LIFE, IS STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD ON THE ENERGY FRONT? Evolution Freedom Survival

Latin America Divided Over Ethanol
MEXICO CITY and CARACAS, Venezuela, April 22, 2007
(Christian Science Monitor) This article was written by Sara Miller Llana.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez calls the boom in ethanol the equivalent of starving the poor "to feed automobiles " Ethanol, which is derived from crops such as corn or sugar, is seen by some as a green alternative, a rising star on the path toward reducing independence on foreign petroleum. But it's not just Mr. Chávez who is questioning whether the benefits outweigh the unintended consequences. Now poultry industry executives, who have seen the price of feedstock go up; Mexican consumers, facing a 60 percent jump in the cost of tortillas; and even environmentalists, who look at the amount of fertilizer that will be needed to grow extra crops, are wondering aloud whether ethanol will help or hurt Latin American economies. The South American energy summit that concluded in Venezuela this week provided the latest platform for critics. Even though the debate has been cast as another issue in the long line of ideological battles aligning Chávez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro against the U.S., some analysts say that their point is larger than political: If the price for staple food items rises across the globe because of demand, Latin America will be one of the hardest-hit regions. "I think people worry that rich Americans are trying to fuel cars at the expense of hungry people in poorer countries," says Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. "This increased push for ethanol production could be an incredible foreign policy blunder." What we are seeing now, she says, is the beginning of a very long debate. Chávez's comments came shortly after harsh op-eds penned by Mr. Castro who, in his first public statements since falling ill last July, resurfaced to call the U.S. proposal "genocidal." His words follow mass protests in Mexico, after the price of corn tortillas shot up in January. The South American Energy Summit at Margarita Island was the first meeting between Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva since Chávez lambasted the plan after Mr. Bush visited Brazil last month, when Bush and Lula signed a proposal to promote the industry in the region. For this meeting, Chávez nuanced his position — saying he is not against ethanol production but against the U.S. plan to use corn to produce it. "We're not against biofuels," he said. "They are viable alternatives, as long as they don't negatively affect the lives of the inhabitants of the region." For many analysts, it seemed a retraction of his earlier position that is likely to reduce friction — and ensuing divisions — with Brazil, says Rafael Quiros Corradi, an analyst in Caracas. But it's more than just a political football. Many in the U.S. share great hope in ethanol's potential. President Bush, during his State of the Union address in January, pushed for more production by 2017 to 35 billion gallons, up from 5 billion gallons last year. But there is no doubt, says Pat Westhoff, an associate professor of agriculture at the University of Missouri–Columbia, that ethanol production has contributed to higher food prices. In August the average price paid to U.S. farmers for a bushel of corn was $2.09 — rising to $2.20 in September, $2.54 in October, $2.87 in November, and past $3 in December. By January, angry Mexicans took to the streets to protest the rising cost of tortillas, the central part of most Mexicans' diet. While many factors contributed to the ballooning Mexican corn industry, U.S. prices are reflected on the international market, Mr. Westhoff says. Mexico has reacted most strongly to higher food prices, but it could be the beginning of protests across the world. The food vs. fuel debate poses questions about the management and beneficiaries of resources, says Celso Garrido, an economist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico. "Mexico gets great quantity of corn from the U.S. This will have an impact on the basket of food for the population in Mexico," he says. "It seems that Mexico requires a policy to look at the impact of transferring food to energy." Food price increases represent far less of an impact on most Americans, since U.S. households, according to United Nations figures, spend 7.3 percent of their consumption expenditure on food, compared to low- and middle-income countries such as Mexico, where the number is 24.5 percent. At the summit, Chávez drew a distinction between America's emphasis on using food staples to produce ethanol and Brazil's plan to use sugar. "We have always said that the bioethanol project ... that Brazil has had for more than 30 years is very different from the madness that the U.S. president has proposed," he said. "It's completely the opposite," said Chávez. Analysts say producing ethanol from sugar is also more efficient. Evanan Romero, an international energy consultant in Venezuela, says he doesn't believe that increased ethanol production — whether with corn or sugar — will contribute to drastically higher prices or hunger among the poor. Instead, he sees ethanol as a development opportunity for poor countries that lack substantial natural energy resources. "Central America will no longer be known as the Banana Republic, but rather the Alcohol Republic," he says, referring to potential production there.
2007 The Christian Science Monitor

Pollution: A life and death issue

WHAT PART OF FREEDOM INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN WITH EVOLUTION, SURVIVAL, WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND QUALITY OF LIFE, IS STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD ON THE ENERGY FRONT? Evolution Freedom Survival

Pollution: A life and death issue
By Alex Kirby BBC News website environment correspondent
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2004/planet/default.stm
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
· Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
· Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
· Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chronic problem
Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol - a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents - are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
Affected species include polar bears - so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals - and to us.
About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
Trade-off
But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria. Where does the priority lie?
The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
Perhaps the best example is climate change - the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
For one and all
One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple - the polluter pays.
Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price. But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' - and there's no such person as the 'other'".
Ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee, and for me.
Story from BBC NEWS:

Global Warming Called Security Threat

WHAT PART OF FREEDOM INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN WITH EVOLUTION, SURVIVAL, WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND QUALITY OF LIFE, IS STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD ON THE ENERGY FRONT? Evolution Freedom Survival

NYT April 15, 2007
Global Warming Called Security Threat

(& Could Global Warming Cause War? Christian Science Monitor - below)

By ANDREW C. REVKIN and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.
A report, scheduled to be published on Monday but distributed to some reporters yesterday, said issues usually associated with the environment — like rising ocean levels, droughts and violent weather caused by global warming — were also national security concerns.
“Unlike the problems that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,” Richard J. Truly, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and former NASA administrator, said in the report.
The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military.
The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.”
The report, called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” was commissioned by the Center for Naval Analyses, a government-financed research group, and written by a group of retired generals and admirals called the Military Advisory Board.
In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable.
One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies climate risks and other trends for the Defense Department and other clients, said the climate system, jogged by a century-long buildup of heat-trapping gases, was likely to rock between extremes that could wreak havoc in poor countries with fragile societies.
“Just look at Somalia in the early 1990s,” Mr. Schwartz said. “You had disruption driven by drought, leading to the collapse of a society, humanitarian relief efforts, and then disastrous U.S. military intervention. That event is prototypical of the future.”
“Picture that in Central America or the Caribbean, which are just as likely,” he said. “This is not distant, this is now. And we need to be preparing.”
Other recent studies have shown that drought and scant water have already fueled civil conflicts in global hot spots like Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sudan, according to several recent studies.
This bodes ill, given projections that human-driven warming is likely to make some of the world’s driest, poorest places drier still, experts said.
“The evidence is fairly clear that sharp downward deviations from normal rainfall in fragile societies elevate the risk of major conflict,” said Marc Levy of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which recently published a study on the relationship between climate and civil war.
Given that climate models project drops in rainfall in such places in a warming world, Mr. Levy said, “It seems irresponsible not to take into account the possibility that a world with climate change will be a more violent world when making judgments about how tolerable such a world might be.”

Could Global Warming Cause War?
April 19, 2007
(Christian Science Monitor) This article was written by Brad Knickerbocker.
For years, the debate over global warming has focused on the three big "E's": environment, energy, and economic impact. This week it officially entered the realm of national security threats and avoiding wars as well. A platoon of retired U.S. generals and admirals warned that global warming "presents significant national security challenges to the United States." The United Nations Security Council held its first-ever debate on the impact of climate change on conflicts. And in Congress, a bipartisan bill would require a National Intelligence Estimate by all federal intelligence agencies to assess the security threats posed by global climate change. Many experts view climate change as a "threat multiplier" that intensifies instability around the world by worsening water shortages, food insecurity, disease, and flooding that lead to forced migration. That's the thrust of a 35-page report by 11 admirals and generals this week issued by the Alexandria, Va.-based national security think tank The CNA Corporation. The study, titled "National Security and the Threat of Climate Change," predicts:
· "Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states. ... The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and the growth of terrorism.
· "The U.S. may be drawn more frequently into these situations, either alone or with allies, to help provide stability before conditions worsen and are exploited by extremists. The U.S. may also be called upon to undertake stability and reconstruction efforts once a conflict has begun, to avert further disaster and reconstitute a stable environment." "We will pay for this one way or another," retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of American forces in the Middle East and one of the report's authors, told the Los Angeles Times. "We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today … or we'll pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives." As quoted in The Associated Press, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who presided over the United Nations meeting in New York on April 17, posed the question "What makes wars start?" The answer: "Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use. There are few greater potential threats to our economies ... but also to peace and security itself." This is the concern behind a recently introduced bipartisan bill by Sens. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois and Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska. It would require all U.S. intelligence agencies — the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the FBI — to conduct a comprehensive review of potential security threats related to climate change around the world. "Many of the most severe effects of global warming are expected in regions where fragile governments are least capable of responding to them," Senator Durbin said in a story from the Inter Press Service news agency in Rome. "Failing to recognize and plan for the geopolitical consequences of global warming would be a serious mistake." Rep. Edward J. Markey (D) of Massachusetts, chairman of the newly formed House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, is proposing companion legislation that would fund climate change plans by the Department of Defense. On his Web site, Mr. Markey called for action based on the retired senior officers' report, saying: "Global warming's impacts on natural resources and climate systems may create the fiercest battle our world has ever seen. If we don't cut pollution and head off severe global warming at the pass, we could see extreme geopolitical strain over decreased clean water, environmental refugees, and other impacts." In a speech April 16 to BritishAmerican Business Inc., a trans-Atlantic business organization, British Foreign Secretary Beckett "praised the growing actions of U.S. business executives and state politicians in addressing climate change, including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced plans last year to work toward a possible joint emissions-trading market," reported The Associated Press. Ms. Beckett also told the business executives that clean technology is going to create a "massive" market opportunities: "Those who move into that market first – first to design, first to patent, first to sell, first to invest, first to build a brand – have an unparalleled chance to make money." The Bush administration has taken a less stark view of the security implications of greenhouse-gas emissions than many scientists and military officers. But in a broader context, the administration has agreed that environmental issues could present national and international security challenges. In its 2006 National Security Strategy, the administration acknowledged that environmental destruction, including that caused by human activity, "may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response." "These challenges are not traditional national security concerns, such as the conflict of arms or ideologies. But if left unaddressed they can threaten national security." These concerns are likely to keep growing and continue to be on the agendas at international meetings. A strongly worded draft communiqué for June's G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, warns that "tackling climate change is an imperative, not a choice," reported the British newspaper The Independent on Sunday. The draft says: "Global warming caused largely by human activities is accelerating [and it] will seriously damage our common natural environment and severely weaken [the] global economy, with implications for international security."