She knows the polar bears are losing their habitat, watches natural history progs, but has little grasp of how immense the problem is.

Middle America is the principle target for pursuasion imho. Places where it is freezing much of the winter, often 100f in the summer.

Sophisticated mobile Americans are probably less of a problem. Let us hope they don’t elect another oil millionaire . . .

Although when we were in California a few years ago, the republican friends we stayed with had been using cold water in their washing machines since the Los Angeles power cuts.

They now live in Florida – and last year was the first year since they moved there were hardly any hurricanes. Wonder what this August will hold.

Or after the tidal wave reflected from the Canary Islands affects the whole of their eastern coast?

Wonder who?

The Taleban picking off German hostages in Afghanistan is designed to weaken public opinion and their politicians even more. Thank goodness their present chancellor Angela Merkel has more ‘balls’ than Schroeder and even France at the time of Kosovo. Blair has influence with her and Sarkozy. It’s just public opinion which is against.

Politics – the art of the possible. And Blair likes to ‘give the impossible a go’, does he not?

It’s only two days a week in the Middle East, Tony. Blair can do the climate the rest of the time ;0)

WOW – as my new commenter describes him – Walks On Water.

“Speaking from his home in New York, James Wolfensohn, a former World Bank president who resigned after only 13 months as envoy, said the job was doomed because Israel and America had undermined him. Unless this situation changed, Mr Wolfensohn said Mr Blair would effectively be wasting his time.”

Not encouraging. I hope that Bush & co are straight with giving this job, Blair could be doing a lot of good work re Global Warming instead.

Small extracts from a BBC interview.

I will add your link to other pages in this blog.

http://www.humanemergencemiddleeast.org/

The best of luck to you all.

“It is Our Future After All!”
Dear Mr. Blair,

We are the young men and women of Palestine.

We write to you from our Palestinian home that is in transition, wanting to seize the moment to co-create a successful Palestinian state.

We are the Future; we wish to participate in shaping our future!

We are young, educated, forward thinking, and globally-minded men and women. We hold advanced degrees in Engineering, Information Technology, Sciences, Law and the Humanities.

We need a partner in the world community who will give us a chance to show our leadership.

We know that you, Mr. Blair, do not subscribe to the perception that all young Palestinians are blinded by ideologies or a limited vision of Palestine.

We are very keen on initiating an international dialogue with an overarching vision and overarching goals.

We want to lead an accelerated process towards peace, one that guarantees for both Palestinians and Israelis their rights and their future.

We extend our invitation to young Israelis to work with us towards the common good, and to build with us the bridge needed for true peace.

We would like to bring to the world’s attention that a new generation of young Palestinians has emerged and is connected to the world through Google, yahoo, Facebook, MySpace …

We would like to bring to the world’s attention that our worldview represents the majority in Palestine, despite the media and the international community’s attention on radical behavior. (For every helpless, angry or misguided Palestinian brother or sister, there are thousands of us who are holding the hands of our fellow Palestinians to forge forward towards a successful Palestine. )

We are ready to serve as a conduit to wide scale change and make positive systemic contributions to our culture, our educational and legal systems, government and social institutions.

We believe in capacity building and empowering Palestinians to move from where they are now to where they need to be.

We can serve as a bridge between Western culture and Arab culture.

We believe in building a Palestinian model for societal development that is culture-appropriate to our Palestinian values and we can deliver the concepts of indigenous democracy in ways that our people can accept and embrace

We can co-lead an international dialogue about Peace. Most importantly our unique contribution will be to translate the outcome of the bi-lateral agreements and accords in a way that our culture can embrace.

We aim to produce positive responses to any accord that focuses on building a healthy Palestinian state. We want to avoid the failures of the the Oslo Accord, where our leaders did not communicate the desired outcome to us and our people. The decisions made unilaterally by a disengaged leadership came as a shock to an unprepared culture that rejected a premature deal.

We are mindful of the breakdown in communication between our leadership and our people, especially with the youth.

We can form that link to translate international decisions into local implementations.

We ask you to deal with new faces and young people. As you interact with our formal leadership, we need you to encourage the inclusion of our positive voices. We will work very well with people in leadership positions whose expertise and strategic thinking are well respected.

We want to be a free Palestine, that is our goal!!

We know that as prerequisites to Palestinian Statehood we need to achieve the following:

Build healthy institutions for a well functioning governement
Build capacity in our people to enable them to take Palestine to the 21st century
Address holistically the psycho-social problems inside the Palestinian communities caused by decades of conflict.
Build sound economic, educational, judiciary, religious and healthcare systems for a well-functioning society.
We are dedicated to a democratic Palestine and to an accelerated process leading to true democracy.

We are gathering the hearts and minds of Palestinians towards a common goal and shared values: To build Palestine and make it succeed in the 21 st century

We know that as Palestinians we have a unique opportunity to build bridges, cross over divides, create common purpose and take the leadership role, not just in Palestine but in the entire Middle East, and not just here, but around the world. We want to stand tall, accept the challenge, point the way, challenge others and frame a new Palestine.

WE come from Ramallah, Nablus, al khalil, Bethlehem, Jenin, Gaza, Jerusalem, Jericho, Beit Sahour, Qalquiliya ….WE ARE PALESTINE

It is Our Future After All …. It is the time to give us a chance.

Sincerely,

Young Integral Palestinian Leaders
July 1, 2007

http://www.humanemergencemiddleeast.org/open-letter-to-Tony-Blair.php

How uncharacteristically thoughtful of them! I suppose Brown needs as much help as he can get to upstage Blair. And if it’s a media-led thing – keeping Blair out of the news for a bit – well, I think he’s happy to be out of the spotlight for the time being. BUT, I can guarantee it won’t be long before we are aware of Blair again on the world stage.