Author Archives: NormanCombs79

The United States Just Canceled an Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia

by NormanCombs79 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has canceled an arms deal with Saudi Arabia amid growing concerns about the high civilian death toll from the kingdom’s air campaign in Yemen. “We continue to have concerns about the conflict in Yemen and how it has been waged, most especially the air campaign,” a State Department official told Mother Jones in an email. The blocked sale reportedly involves precision-guided munitions built by the American defense contractor Raytheon.

Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly criticized for committing potential war crimes in its war against the Houthi rebels who ousted the Saudi-backed government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi in January 2015. Throughout the nearly two-year-long conflict, the Saudis have used American and British weapons, including banned cluster bombs. The United States has also provided refueling missions and intelligence. Saudi airstrikes have hit weddings, funerals, hospitals, schools, markets, and places of worship, killing hundreds of civilians.

Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration inked more than $100 billion worth of arms deals with Riyadh. Just last week, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced the approval of yet another deal, worth $3.5 billion, for Chinook helicopters and related equipment, training, and support.

Yet today’s announcement may be a sign of the Obama administration’s growing discomfort with the war. In May, it canceled the sale of US-made cluster bombs. In September, the Senate held its first debate to question the decision to continue supplying the Saudis. “There is a US imprint on every civilian death inside Yemen, which is radicalizing the people of Yemen against the United States,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said at the time. “There really is no way this bombing campaign could happen without United States participation.”

The State Department official, who asked not to be named, said the United States is exploring how to refocus training the Saudi air force to address its targeting practices. The official also stated that the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies are reviewing current policy “to ensure that our limited support for the Saudi-led Coalition is consistent with our foreign policy goals and values.” A senior administration official told AFP that “US security cooperation is not a blank check.”

President-elect Donald Trump has not outlined his policy on Yemen. However, during a January campaign rally with Sarah Palin, he suggested that Iran is destabilizing Yemen and seeks to take over Saudi Arabia:

Now they’re going into Yemen. And if you look at Yemen, take a look, they’re going to get Syria, they’re going to get Yemen, unless—trust me, a lot of good things are going to happen if I get in, but let’s leave it the way it is. They get Syria. They get Yemen. Now, they didn’t want Yemen, but did you ever see the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia? They want Saudi Arabia.

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The United States Just Canceled an Arms Deal With Saudi Arabia

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China Is Absolutely Destroying the US on Clean Energy

by NormanCombs79 Posted on November 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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When world leaders convene on Monday in Paris for two weeks of high-stakes climate negotiations, one of the top items on the agenda will be how developing nations should prepare for and help to slow global warming. Opponents to President Barack Obama’s climate agenda, such as GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio, like to argue that anything the United States does to curb greenhouse gas emissions will be pointless because countries like India and China aren’t doing the same.

But new data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that this argument is just hot air: For the first time ever, over the last year the majority of global investment in clean energy projects was spent in developing countries. In fact, clean energy investment in China alone outpaced that in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France combined, BNEF found. Across 55 major non-OECD countries, including India, Brazil, China, and Kenya, clean energy investment reached $126 billion in 2014, a record high and 39 percent higher than 2013 levels.

The chart below shows how that level of investment is opening up a market for wind, solar, and other clean energy projects in non-OECD countries that is now larger than the market in the traditional strongholds of the United States and Europe. In other words, the very countries Rubio likes to malign as laggards are actually leading the charge.

BNEF

That trend is likely to continue for decades to come, BNEF found. Check out their projection for growth through 2040:

BNEF

These numbers add up to a big deal for the climate, because they show that countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that still lack reliable electricity for millions of people are solving that problem, and growing their economies, without relying on dirty fossil fuels. China, to be clear, is still the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and it doesn’t plan to peak its emissions until 2030. But its early commitment to clean energy means it can continue its rapid rate of growth with far less pollution than it would produce otherwise.

The BNEF report is just the most recent good sign for the clean energy business. Big corporations in the United States are signing contracts for a record amount of clean energy for their data centers, warehouses, and other facilities. And the Paris talks are likely to send a jolt through the industry, as countries around the world redouble their commitments to get more of their power from renewable sources.

Stay tuned for more news on this front as the talks unfold over the coming weeks.

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China Is Absolutely Destroying the US on Clean Energy

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