Current crisis will halve US economy - Russian analyst.

VIENNA, November 21 (Itar-Tass) -- The current world financial and
economic crisis will last long and eventually cause the US economy to
shrink by half, and the world one, by a quarter, a leading Russian
economist, Mikhail Khazin, told Itar-Tass in an interview after the
just-ended international conference devoted to the opportunities of
settling critical situations in the modern world.


The conference, to which
Russian experts were invited, was organized by Austria's Freedom Party.
"The causes of the ongoing financial and economic crisis are
well-known and clear," he said. "The slump of overall demand, in the first
place, that in the United States, and the world over. The mechanism of
maintaining and fuelling this demand with credits has exhausted itself.
The price of credits has plummeted. In the United States the interest rate
is equal to zero."
Khazin believes that the current crisis is quite comparable in scale
to the Great Depression. In the United States it has even surpassed it in
scale.
"The reason is the role of the financial sector in the modern
structure of the US economy is blown out of proportion. In the 1930s of
last century the share of industries in the United States was
approximately 70 percent. Now it is under 20 percent, and the financial
bubbles that have been inflated there are doomed to burst."
The greatest problem humanity has encountered is this - the model of
development, of scientific and technological progress that there emerged
in the 17th century has outlived itself.
"That model implies indefinite growth of the market. As long as there
existed alternative systems, such as Britain and Germany in the early 20th
century, or the United States and the USSR in the middle of the 20th
century, one could hope for beating the competitor and taking over its
sphere of influence. This expansion explains pretty well "the golden age"
of the Clinton presidencies in the United States in the 1990s.
These days there is no more room where to expand. That means that
Europe has approached a third revolution over the past two thousand years.
The development mechanisms are to be changed. The first such revolution
occurred in the 4th-6th centuries, when the Late Antiquity gave way to
Feudalism. The second one was in the 16th-17th centuries, when Feudalism
was replaced by Capitalism.
"Now there is to happen a third revolution - transition to some new
model of development," Khazin said. "What that model will be like is
anyone's guess - and this is the greatest problem and the main challenge
humanity is faced with today."

.RF must not hurry to cut greenhouse gas emissions - academician.

MOSCOW, November 21 (Itar-Tass) -- A high-ranking Russian ecologic and
geographic authority has called for a calmer attitude to the European
Union's attempts to persuade Russia to assume greater greenhouse gas
emission reduction liabilities. Vladimir Kotlyakov, the director of the
Geography Institute under the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that
international obligations in this field do have a certain positive effect,
of course. The less hazardous emissions there are, the better for the
environment. On the other hand, the Russian Academy of Sciences has
maintained all the way that there are no solid scientific grounds for the
Kyoto Protocol to rely on, so for that reason the emission rates it
establishes are all rather fishy.
"Cutting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere - and this is
the focus of attention first and foremost - will be very useful,"
Kotlyakov told Itar-Tass in an interview. "But a plethora of factors must
be taken into account, including Russia's interests."
Firstly, says the eminent Russian scientist - a glaciologist and
participant in many expeditions to the Arctic and the Antarctic, Russia is
a northern country.
"It is forced to heat large spaces, both housing and industrial ones,
for rather long periods of time - six months, and in some places, much
longer. For this it has to consume energy resources. By virtue of this
factor alone one cannot expect Russia will be able to afford to reduce
greenhouse emissions as significantly as some countries lying father to
the South."
Secondly, Kotlyakov went on to say, the factor of Russian forests is
very important.
"These vast expanses are 'the lungs of the world', if you wish. They
work for the whole of humanity. In exchange Russia might expect for some
sort of compensations.
The reaction of Russia's science quarters followed shortly after the
head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, on the eve of the
Russia-EU summit in Stockholm declared that Russia had agreed to lower
carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere by 25 percent. The European
Union earlier volunteered to cut greenhouse emissions by 20 percent by the
year 2020. At a certain point Europe was pressing for Russia's consent to
lower carbon dioxide emissions by the same year more significantly than it
originally promised (by 10-15 percent by 2020).
No confirmation of what the chief of the European commission had said
followed from the Russian participants in the Stockholm summit, though. In
their opinion, the point at issue was plain recalculation of parameters.
The Russian president at the summit declared the intention of increasing
the energy effectiveness of industrial production in Russia by 40 percent,
which would automatically mean a decline in greenhouse gas emissions not
by the originally declared 10-15 percent, but by 25 percent.
The debate over different countries' pledges to lower their
contribution to global warming went into high gear on the eve of the
December UN summit in Copenhagen, where discussions will revolve around
measures to prevent climate change, for which the anthropogenic effects
are to blame - such as carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. These
grew to the greatest-ever amounts in the history of humanity of late.
Also, the Copenhagen-2009 forum is expected to devise practical steps
against carbon leaks and thereby build up from the first phase of the
Kyoto Protocol, due to expire at the end of 2012.
The Kyoto protocol was adopted in 1997 on the basis of the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 - the first-ever
international agreement on joint work against global climate warming and
its effects. At present 191 countries are signatories to the convention.
However, compliance with the Kyoto Protocol has run into quite a few
obstructions. The United States has refused to ratify it, arguing that
losses for its economy would be unacceptable. On the other hand, the
booming Chinese economy keeps increasing emissions. These two countries
alone are injecting into the atmosphere two-thirds of the overall amount
of greenhouse pollutants.
United Nations experts argue that the global emissions must be cut at
least by 50 percent from what they are today by 2050. The Copenhagen talks
are to determine the role of each country in this activity.
In a situation like this Russia may be regarded as sort of a safe
haven, Kotlyakov said. He believes that Russia must demand a revision of
the agreements about to be concluded in Copenhagen in a way that would
accommodate its objective role and subjective interests.
"The documents that there are being coordinated at the moment ignore
many things that would be of interest and of great benefit to Russia. So
it makes sense to stand up and fight," he believes.

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