Ride a Bicycle, Save the Planet

The gloom and doom just never ends. Expect a tenfold increase in hysteria by the time the Concert for Goracle rolls around Saturday.

UN calls for pedal power to reduce environmental damage

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - More bicycle riding and other lifestyle changes are urgently needed to reduce climate-altering carbon emissions that are damaging Asia's health and could also threaten the economy, the World Health Organisation said Monday.

Climate change contributes directly or indirectly to about 77,000 deaths per year in the region, according to WHO estimates.

Some evidence of this claim would be nice. Oh, there isn't any?

"So far the impact is on the health of the people. If the trend continues, it may have an impact on the economy," said Shigeru Omi, WHO's regional director for the Western Pacific.

"Of course the threat is there. We should not wait for that to happen," he told reporters at the start of a four-day conference on the impact of climate change and health in Southeast and East Asian countries.

Omi said urgent action was needed because Asia's share of the world's greenhouse gas emissions was expected to grow larger with the rapid economic expansion of China and India.

"We have now reached a critical stage at which global warming already has seriously impacted lives and health and this problem will pose an even greater threat to mankind in coming decades if we fail to act now," Omi said.

He said that in some countries environmental issues were not given the highest priority but "if we ignore the environment, humanity will suffer."

(AFP photo)

How To Attract Foreign Investment

The Soviets Russians are busy re-writing the rules regarding foreign investment in that model republic.

The Russian government is pressing a bold strategy this spring to secure for Gazprom, the state natural gas company, a monopoly on exports of the fuel to Asia.

In the latest onslaught, Moscow is threatening one of the crown jewels of BP's global investments: the Kovykta gas field. And it is using methods similar to those deployed last fall to force Royal Dutch Shell to sell a controlling stake in another Far Eastern Russian energy development, the Sakhalin-2 project. In that case, too, Gazprom was the beneficiary.

On Monday, BP, which operates through a Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, moved closer to losing its license to the Kovykta field when a Siberian court declined to hear the company's arguments.

Kovykta is BP's largest natural gas project in Russia and valuable because it is within pipeline range of industrial cities in northeastern China.

At play, energy analysts say, is a Russian strategy to form a government monopoly on natural gas exports through Gazprom to Asia similar to what exists in Europe, with the scope and range to dictate prices and eliminate competition.

President Vladimir Putin has discussed playing the two markets off against each other in a grand form of haggling - though one that would depend on government control of the export routes.

That did not bode well for private energy companies operating in the country's Far East, like TNK-BP. Shell's ill-fated development, too, was aimed at the Asian market.

And some consider Putie a reformed communist.