Subject: [Homestead] Prescience, Acid Rain and Jihad
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 13:07:48 -0700
October 17, 2004
IN 1984, when he was still lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, John
Kerry became interested in the emerging problem of acid rain. Some
people mocked the idea of poisonous rain from the skies, but Kerry
embarked on a fact-finding mission across Europe, where he saw the
devastation of industrial pollution on the Black Forest in Germany and
many historic buildings.
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He took the issue to a meeting of the six New England governors and the
eastern Canadian premiers, resulting in the first international
agreement on acid rain controls. The pact became a blueprint for the
reauthorized Clean Air Act in 1990.
In 1997, four years before Sept. 11, Kerry published "The New War,"
which was derived from his years leading the Senate Subcommittee on
Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations. In the book, Kerry
described a changed global landscape after the end of the Cold War, with
security threats coming less from nation-states than from shadowy
criminal groups. Although it dwelled mostly on drug cartels and the
Russian mafia, "The New War" also addressed the threat of Islamic
terrorism and called for international cooperation to fight it.
"We should be the natural leaders of a world coalition against crime,"
Kerry wrote, "but we have yet to recognize the `new crime's' scale and
sophistication."
This year as a presidential candidate, Kerry has offered a plan for
energy independence that is notable not just for its sweep and technical
detail but because it recognizes the destabilizing effect of resource
shortages in the struggle for world security
[Homestead] Prescience, Acid Rain and Jihad,
Tvoivozhd, 10/17/2004