What the McDonald's Corporation Can Do to Fight the Darfur Genocide

Cobbled together by the British Empire with little regard to existing ethnic or tribal divisions, the tribes of Sudan’s western Darfur provinces have been historically marginalized and oppressed by the incumbent regime in Khartoum. The intra-Sudanese conflict was exacerbated by Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s Islamic Front movement, which has attempted to forcibly Arabize and Islamicize his subjects. With the aim of local autonomy the mostly Christian and animist rebels of Darfur responded by forming their own militias, particularly the Sudan Liberation Army led by Zaghawa tribesman Minni Minnawi and Hassani al-Turabi’s Justice and Equality Movement, which have waged raids on regional military installations. In order to “pacify” these territories, the junta in Khartoum has recruited the Janjaweed, a horseback-riding militia of the nomadic Arab Bagarra peoples, to pillage the Fur, Zaghawa and Maasalit tribal villages with Chinese-imported machine guns and the cover of Chinese-imported Sudanese military aircraft. The Janjaweed and the Sudanese Army are not just killing civilians of the same ethnicity as Darfurian rebels, but are using such wanton atrocities as systematic rape, torture, hacking off civilians limbs with machetes, and throwing children into bonfires to burn alive. Now going into its fourth year, the Sudanese government’s campaign of genocide against the tribes of Darfur has already killed approximately 400,000 civilians and displaced another 4.7 million.

The man-made disaster in Darfur is steadily growing, and without foreign intervention has only the potential to claim the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions more innocent civilians. As the traditional world powers dither, a certain business has a unique opportunity to pressure Bashir’s government to end the Darfur genocide. Indeed, the McDonald’s Corporation, as one of the most widespread symbols of American economic might with over 30,000 franchises in over 120 countries, has the opportunity to do what no United States government agency can to exert influence on Khartoum.

Since Sudan is a developing country with few sources of government revenue, the regime in Khartoum is highly dependent upon foreign investment to finance its operations – about 60 percent of all government revenue is allocated towards military expenditures. . The United States has imposed a comprehensive embargo on what it has deemed a state sponsor of terrorism since 1997, and with the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006 strengthened U.S. sanctions by prohibiting entry at American ports to ships carrying Sudanese oil. Upon issuing the executive order to carry out Congress’ mandate, President Bush determined that whereas “the Government of Sudan continues to implement policies and actions that violate human rights”, and also that “the Government of Sudan has a pervasive role in the petroleum and petrochemical industries in Sudan”, he decreed a prohibition of transactions “relating to the petroleum and petrochemical industries in Sudan.” Since then, the Bush administration has continued to act within its legal authority to tighten the noose around Khartoum’s revenue flow, such as barring more companies controlled by the Sudanese government from the American financial system. Yet given that the United States already has comprehensive sanctions against Sudanese firms, there is little more that it can do with soft power. The notable exception is for Congress to impose secondary sanctions on multinational companies conducting business in Sudan like Sinopec and PetroChina, but the prospect of a United States government issuing de facto sanctions against the People’s Republic of China to which it is indebted more than $1 trillion – and specifically against Chinese oil companies during a period of spiking gas prices – is slim to none.

And so the American private sector may be able to influence Khartoum in ways that the federal government cannot. Though it is not directly involved in any of the events on the ground in Darfur, through its business partnerships the McDonald’s Corporation has a unique opportunity to put economic pressure on the Sudanese regime. And even though McDonald’s is not actually operating within Sudanese territory due to current sanctions, it still has considerable influence over the petroleum economy and state apparatus, namely through its recent agreement with the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation; also known as Sinopec.

The reason why Sinopec is implicated in the ongoing holocaust is that as the second-largest driller of Sudan’s oil exports, mainland China’s second-largest oil company is all but bankrolling the regime in Khartoum. About half of all Sudanese government revenue is derived from oil exports, and the majority of that revenue is allocated towards military expenditures. Since China imports between 70 and 80 percent of Sudanese oil through semi-privatized firms like Sinopec, the People’s Republic of China acts as Sudan’s patron state. As quid pro quo for petroleum concessions, China is now supplying Khartoum with munitions including T-59 tanks, howitzers, fighter aircraft and landmines which are invariably being used to carry out the atrocities in Darfur. And as the United Nations Security Council debates whether to impose no-fly zones, deploy peacekeeping forces to the Darfur region or even strike Sudan with global sanctions and restrict oil exports through an Oil-for-Food program, Chinese delegates protect their genocidal clients from intervention with veto power.

For these reasons, Sinopec has been among the companies singled out by nearly every investing institution which has adopted a divestment policy towards those firms complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Darfur, including universities such as Harvard and Yale, the cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and eighteen states including California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. Though successful with changing the policy of some firms, shareholder activism has not yet proved to be effectual with Sinopec; this can largely be explained by the fact that an overwhelming majority of 68 percent of all shares in the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation are owned by the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, the revolving-door culture between government officials and the leadership of private corporations in China’s regime of state capitalism make it very difficult for shareholders of to influence corporate policy. This does not mean that socially responsible investors must give up hope on engaging Sinopec to reform its human rights policies, but merely alternative means must be found to achieve these ends.

Thus McDonald’s enters into the equation. In June, 2006 the McDonald’s Corporation and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation signed a 20-year “strategic alliance” agreement to construct McDonald’s Drive-Thru restaurants at some of Sinopec’s more than 30,000 gas stations throughout China. With all the projected additional sales of McDonald’s hamburgers and Sinopec gasoline, it is expected that this lucrative deal is potentially worth multiple billions of dollars for both sides (exact figures have not been released to the public). In addition, according to this contract McDonald’s is given the first right of refusal of co-developed Drive-Thru restaurants at already-existing and newly-constructed Sinopec stations; in other words, since the bulk of the business involved in this partnership will involve McDonald’s resources, employees, etc., they have the final say as to whether each and any of these Drive-Thrus are indeed constructed.

Though tracing the supply chain from McDonald’s to Sinopec to the Government of Sudan to the Janjaweed might at first seem to be too distant to identify any substantive culpability, one does not have to use tortuous logic to see that the more hamburgers McDonald’s sells at its new Chinese Drive Thrus, the more revenue the Sudanese government accumulates through its exports through Sinopec. Indeed, by intertwining its business operations so deeply with Sinopec, the McDonald’s Corporation must assume the political risks that come with having a controversial business partner.

Hence McDonald’s could possibly serve as the “soft underbelly” of the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation as well as Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s regime in Khartoum, that being if Darfur activists could adopt a strategy of engagement with the McDonald’s Corporation to similarly engage Sinopec. The appeal of using McDonald’s as a vehicle to reforming Sinopec instead of going through Sinopec is that whereas the Chinese oil conglomerate is virtually impenetrable to shareholder activism, McDonald’s is a relatively accessible public corporation. Effecting change with the practices of the McDonald’s Corporation is by comparison much easier. As it is a fully public company with shares owned by such a plethora of diverse investors, no single shareholder or clique of shareholders has the overwhelming power to quash reform. Moreover, the management of McDonald’s has a history of responding to shareholders’ concerns, having ceased the use of polystyrene packaging, asked their major United States supplier of potatoes to stop using genetically-engineered crops, and banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things, as a result of shareholder pressure. Given this track record, there is no reason to think that McDonald’s would be unwilling to adopt some modest measures which would require no change to their production process.

Furthermore, shareholder activists often have had greater successes effecting change in the policies of companies that sell widely-recognized consumer goods in their own markets than those of companies which provide industrial goods and services overseas, because the negative publicity which is accrued by the former can actually have a significant effect on revenues. Sinopec does not sell gasoline in the United States, so they naturally have less reason to be concerned with their image in an irrelevant market. Though McDonald’s, on the other hand, has everything to lose if its image is tarnished in the eyes of American consumers. If anything, there is good reason to believe that since all of the corporate sponsors of the 2008 Beijing Games are already coming under fire for underwriting the “Genocide Olympics”, McDonald’s management could gain much positive PR as a result of distancing itself from Khartoum.

For the McDonald’s Corporation to take action against the Darfur genocide requires neither the 2006 contract with the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation to be rescinded, nor that any fewer Drive-Thrus must be built. Indeed, corporate engagement does not necessarily entail any losses in productivity. All that McDonald’s needs to do is to vocally express its ethical concerns about Sinopec’s business activities in Sudan and to request that they do any of the following; cease their co-ventures with Sudapet (which as a Sudanese corporation puts McDonald’s in a questionable position of violating the spirit of United States sanctions), reduce their oil extraction activities in Sudan so as to reduce Sudanese government revenue (which is all but unthinkable as Chinese energy demands continue to grow), offset the catastrophic conditions in Darfur by funding or conducting some sort of humanitarian relief program, and what is most important: urge the government of Sudan to halt their campaign of ethnic cleansing. McDonald’s could even take an especially strong stand and freeze construction of new Drive-Thru restaurants until either Sinopec has demonstrated that they have taken constructive steps to engage the Sudanese government or the Darfur genocide has ceased.

No matter how modest McDonald’s measures may be, any action at all that they take could potentially effect change in Sinopec’s policies. In the best-case scenario, the Ralph Alvarez and Wang Tianpu, the respective Presidents of the McDonald’s and China Petroleum and Chemical Corporations, might simultaneously negotiate a plan to engage the Sudanese government as President George W. Bush and Chinese Premier Hu Jintao agree to a join front on diplomacy towards Khartoum. Then the political and economic emissaries of American and Chinese might would have to communicate to the genocidal regime that their patronage is put into a precarious position so long as they are engaged in the systematic annihilation of their own subjects. Of course, for the McDonald’s Corporation to take a stand on Darfur would not necessarily translate into substantive progress on the ground – even if their position is identical to that of the current administration. But as there are no foreseeable costs, there is no economic reason as to why McDonald’s should stand silently as innocent people needlessly perish.

Global Warming: A Threat to Human Rights

Global warming caused by human activity is not just a danger to the environment or to endangered species of plants and animals, but it is also a threat to human rights. Indeed, the process of climate change has already begun to alter the environment of human populations and so dramatically reconfiguring their way of life that this trend is leading towards widespread, systematic human rights abuses in a variety of avenues. At this time most of the world’s human population have not yet directly experienced adverse environmental, economic or political changes produced by the planetary rise in temperatures. Though some societies are already suffering unprecedented resource shortages and increases in conflict and violence that individuals are seeing their universally-recognized natural and civil rights being violated, and this disturbing trend is expected to become much worse as global temperatures rise ever more rapidly.

Among the people who are already bearing the brunt of climate change are those whose environment is being heated into oblivion, namely the Inuit of northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland. With only a rise of 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 30 years,[i] the waters of the Arctic Ocean have warmed so much that 38,000 square miles of sea ice are lost every year, with sea ice expected to completely disappear by 2040.[ii] As a result polar bears are not the only mammals on the road to extinction[iii] – the thawing of the Arctic is all but devastating populations of humans, namely Inuit society.

Indeed, Inuit culture is all but predicated on the extreme cold, and the northernmost regions of the planet have become so much more temperate that not only is ice and permafrost melting but many Inuit can no longer find enough hard-packed snow to build their traditional igloos.[iv] And such adjustments are more than just a question of style. Arctic snow is thinning to the extent that Inuit are oftentimes unable to run which makes meat harder to come by as hunting traditional game becomes especially difficult.[v] And as ice is becoming thinner than usual, Inuit hunters are falling through and the risk of broken legs and ankles is becoming progressively more common[vi] – a serious threat to the survival of those who find themselves immobile and exposed to the unforgiving elements of Arctic weather.

“These are issues of life and death”, says Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, “We go out to hunt on the seas ice to put food on the table. You go to the supermarket.”[vii] This is the basis of the Nobel Prize nominee’s case which she and has brought before the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; that global warming is destroying the traditional Inuit way of life that it is a violation of their basic human rights.

Martin Wagner, the Earthjustice attorney arguing Watt-Cloutier’s case before the OAS, maintained that, “The effects of global warming interfere with the realization of the right of life, physical integrity and security. It is destroying lands and ecosystems to which indigenous cultures throughout the hemisphere are tied. In order to survive, (they) are thus forced to assimilate with other cultures in ways and on a schedule that they have not chosen.”[viii]

stresses the region’s need for sustainable economic development which both provides the Inuit population with sources of income while still minimizing the destruction of the Arctic environment. “A number of Inuit want to live in Western houses and find jobs in the oil or shipping industries, and they have every right to do so,” he explains, “but in addition to promoting economic modernization, governments and corporations must protect the rights of those who want to preserve their traditional lifestyle.”[ix] Economic growth is indeed needed among the Canadian as well as American and Greenlandic Inuit particularly because these populations all suffer extremely high unemployment and poverty rates, not to mention the rampant depression, alcoholism and drug abuse which ensues.[x]

The problematic aspect of much of the Arctic’s current fossil fuel-based industrialization is that so far it has not only capitalized on destructive climate change but has also reinforced it further in an autocatalytic loop. Indeed, the ever more common use of electricity, airplanes and trucks powered by oil and gasoline emits particulate matter into the air, and when it settles the particulate makes ice and snow much darker and conducive to the absorption of solar radiation, which only intensifies the melting process even more.[xi] And though the loss of sea ice is seen by a boon to some – namely the shipping companies that are preparing to make ready use of the Northwest Passage which is expected to completely thaw within the near future,[xii] the frozen environment of the Inuit is even more imperiled. As the Doug Struck writes in The Washington Post, “More ships will bring the risk -- the certainty, some say -- of accidents and black oil spills smeared on the white Arctic.”[xiii]

However, the economic development of the Arctic and the advent of additional prosperity need not destroy the frigid environment which is so crucial to traditional Inuit life. Even without utilizing alternative fuel technologies, Wagner suggests that businesses operating in the region can become more Inuit-friendly by becoming more energy-efficient or by installing scrubbers in the smokestacks of their ships and in the tailpipes of their trucks in order to minimize air pollution.[xiv] Though the effects of global warming are being felt the hardest by the people of the Arctic region, its causes are truly derived by worldwide trends – and so for the human rights of the Inuit to be secure there must be a concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the people of every country on the globe.

In addition to the inhabitants of the coldest environments on Earth, people who live in the climatic antipode are also suffering widespread human rights violations as a result of global warming. Due to shifts in weather patterns the declining precipitation levels of North and Central Africa has led to the rapid expansion of the Sahara Desert. The ways by which human rights are going to suffer as a consequences are not merely subjects for future speculation, for the ramifications on water rights for drinking, sanitation and irrigation purposes are already abysmal.
For example, 40 years ago Lake Chad was the sixth-largest lake in the world, straddling the borders of Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria and providing ample water supplies to the human population throughout the region. But since global warming caused by human activity has desiccated the region, the lake has shrunk to only one-twentieth of its original size – and the humanitarian consequences have been devastating.[xv] Not only have the vast majority farmers and ranchers who once depended on Lake Chad’s water for their livelihoods given up their lands and emigrated moved to already-overcrowded cities, but those who have kept their farms are in such cutthroat competition for scarce water resources that low-level conflict has broken out for the fertile lands of the former lakebed. Internecine firefights erupted when fishermen from Nigeria followed the retreating shore lines into Cameroon, and violence has been precipitated by farmers over property rights in the bottom of what was once Lake Chad.[xvi]

Following the link between desertification and resource conflict, some observers have concluded that global warming is causally related to one of the world’s worst ongoing violations of human rights, the Sudanese government’s campaign of genocide in Darfur. No less an influential figure than United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote in a Washington Post editorial that “the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”[xvii]
Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.[xviii]
Indeed, there is little doubt that global warming is one of the leading causes of rapid desertification, and particularly the expansion of the Sahara Desert. But Moon’s conclusion that there is causation and not merely correlation between global warming, desertification and the Darfur genocide is significantly more controversial.
It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought. Until then, Arab nomadic herders had lived amicably with settled farmers. A recent Atlantic Monthly article by Stephan Faris describes how black farmers would welcome herders as they crisscrossed the land, grazing their camels and sharing wells. But once the rains stopped, farmers fenced their land for fear it would be ruined by the passing herds. For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fight broke out. By 2003, it evolved into the full-fledged tragedy we witness today.[xix]

The Secretary General’s understanding of the genocide’s origins in global warming-induced desertification, however, do not come without controversy. Some critics, most notably Sudan scholar Eric Reeves, argue instead that “decades of severe political and economic marginalization, along with the NIF regime’s politically expedient targeting of the African tribal groups of Darfur, are the real cause of conflict in Darfur.”[xx]
Regardless, many experts fear that the conflicts like that unfolding among farmers and herders in Darfur could be replicated throughout the Middle East and North Africa, because the growing human populations in these regions and their demand for food and water are straining among the most limited water supplies in the world. The average annual rainfall in Darfur has dropped by almost 50 percent over 86 years to 7.48 inches when the conflict began in 2003, while over the past 40 years Darfur’s population has increased sixfold to 6.5 million.[xxi]

Indeed, potable water sources will only become increasingly scarce as rainfall is declining steadily in these areas, and there is the strong possibility that the change in precipitation patterns is related to global warming. “The consciousness of the world on the issue of climate change has to change fast,” said Muawia Shaddad of the Sudan Environment Conservation Society. “Darfur is just an early warning.”[xxii] But as paltry steps are being taken – the Sudanese government has planned a pilot project to spend $10 to construct dams and plant trees, Ismail al-Gizouli of the High Council for Environment and Natural Resources demands, “We need the richer countries to realize desertification is the emergency and help us.”[xxiii]

The expansion of the Sahara Desert is a complicated issue in regards to corporate responsibility, for in addition to global warming there are numerous other artificial causes which contribute to desertification, including overcultivation, overgrazing, and inadequate irrigation.[xxiv] Unlike the shippers poised to take advantage of the thawing Northwest Passage, however, there are no means by which it can be foreseen that any particular corporation might actually reap windfalls from the existence of more uninhabitable, unusable land; so the problem in this case is not necessarily that companies should refrain from capitalizing on environmental degradation which contributes to the violation of human rights, but that in their operations in North and Central Africa they should conduct business with their eye fixed on long-run rather than short-run interests. The most significant measure which business firms could take would be to promote techniques of land and water conservation so that sustainable agricultural methods become more prevalent – benefiting both the companies themselves as well as the individual farmers on the cusp of being overwhelmed by the Sahara sand. But for the international markets for farm goods to shift from the raising of livestock to crops would kill the two proverbial birds with one stone by both reducing water consumption as well as greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to desertification in the grander scale of environmental human rights concerns.

With these civilizational crises already playing out with the modest temperature change that have already been incurred, one can only imagine what humanitarian disasters await as the atmosphere becomes even warmer. With only modest warming of the oceans, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are becoming stronger and more destructive, indicating that the rare intense storms which can wreck havoc on densely-populated urban settings like Hurricane Katrina might soon become more and more common.[xxv] And even if global warming is mitigated so that sea levels rise by only a few feet, by bringing shorelines even slightly further inland residential corridors which were once thought to be safe will become susceptible to extreme flooding.[xxvi] And in places where water levels are already a concern, of course, the risk of flooding is only going to become even worse.

If the Antarctic or the Greenland ice sheets were to melt completely – an event which would raise sea levels by 20 feet due to the added volume of additional liquid water in Earth’s oceans. In such a scenario which is indeed projected if the production of greenhouse gas emissions continues to grow at their current rate, entire neighborhoods of New York, London and Tokyo would become submerged, with those high points which could escape permanent engulfment at least vulnerable to extreme flooding.[xxvii] Low-lying cities like New Orleans and Miami would be completely underwater.[xxviii] Granted, this would be a relatively gradual process playing out over the course of many decades, but preempting a failure of imagination, this should nevertheless develop into an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.

The problem of rising sea levels is going to do much more than force people to abandon their coastal homes and villages; a number of low-lying nations will be rendered into uninhabitable. Indeed, even if the Greenland ice sheet were to only partially melt, sea levels will rise so much that countries such as the Maldives – an archipelago of small islands where the highest elevation is only 8 feet, will literally have to be wiped off the map. Though unintentional, the complete and utter destruction of the sine non qua landmass of a nation-state effectively translates into creating a nation in diaspora with no hope of restitution and – depending on how liberally one is willing to interpret the word – tantamount to genocide.

Considering the difficulties that the United States government has faced over the past two years providing for the more than 200,000 persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina,[xxix] it is quite foreseeable that the number of displaced persons in this country alone would completely overwhelm the capacity of our existing social welfare services. The problems which global warming would pose for countries in the industrial West, however, are almost negligible when compared to the results of an additional 20 feet of seawater in the overcrowded cities of the developing world. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would ultimately turn more than 20 million people from Beijing and the surrounding areas into refugees, 40 million from Shanghai and its environs would have to be evacuated, and 60 million would have to be evacuated from Calcutta and Bangladesh (which are already susceptible to massive flooding even with the Greenland ice sheet in a solid state). The Christian Aid agency likewise predicts that there will be 1 billion people displaced by global warming by the year 2050;[xxx] to say the least, a crisis without even the remotest analogy in the annals of history.

The human rights violations which are projected to be caused by global warming are essentially in two layers, for not only are the people of Florida, Louisiana, China, Bangladesh as well as the entire nations of Vanuatu, Tonga and the Maldives going to be deprived of their ancestral homeland, but the hundreds of millions if not a billion internally-displaced persons and refugees are going to become among the most vulnerable groups to further victimization. In comparison, the United States – which accepts by far more refugees than any other country, has drafted its budget for the Fiscal Year 2008 to accept a maximum of 70,000 refugees in that year.[xxxi]

Even in periods of global economic expansion, exiles can usually be expected to be greeted in their adopted countries by exploitative job markets and xenophobic political climates (look no further than the treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States). In a study issued by the United Kingdom, the socioeconomic destruction produced by climate change is expected to result in a contraction of annual worldwide GDP between 5 and 20 percent,[xxxii] a depression which is all but assured to create environments of vast overcrowding, unemployment and shortages of water and food commodities in which no government is going to be willing to accommodate such a massive influx of refugees. The exact means by which the rights of hundreds of millions of unwanted persons are going to be repressed has of course yet to be determined, but it is all but certain that those displaced by global warming will have a future of war, poverty and outright persecution.

Of course, the best thing which corporations could begin to do now in foresight of this dismal outlook would be to find ways of reducing their carbon footprint; reducing consumption and promoting the conservation of energy, obtaining what energy is necessary to run a profitable business from renewable sources, etc. so that perhaps the process of global warming can be mitigated if not halted altogether. Unfortunately, the business community should take into account that some if not all of the aforementioned consequences of global warming will probably become reality within the 21st century and adopt their operations accordingly so as not to contribute to or take advantage of the human rights violations which will inevitably ensue.

The appropriate response of the political and corporate leadership is best articulated by Maldivean President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who might eventually be left without a country to govern if current trends in greenhouse gas emissions continue. “My message is a simple one – take global warming and climate change more seriously. Act now, before it becomes too late to save not only the low-lying islands but the entire planet.”[xxxiii]

[i] Struck, Doug. “Melting Arctic Makes Way for Man.” The Washington Post. 11/12/2006
[ii] Sample, Ian. “Arctic Ice May Lose All its Ice by 2040, Disrupting Global Weather.” The Guardian. 3/16/07
[iii] Eilperin, Juliet. “Study Says Polar Bears Could Face Extinction.” The Washington Post. 12/19/04
[iv] Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. “Global Warming and Human Rights.” Testimony Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 3/1/2007
[v] Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. “Global Warming and Human Rights.” Testimony Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 3/1/2007
[vi] Watt-Cloutier, Sheila. “Global Warming and Human Rights.” Testimony Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 3/1/2007
[vii] Gelbspan, Ross. “Slow Death By Global Warming.” Amnesty Magazine. Summer 2007
[viii] BBC News. “US CO2 Emissions ‘Violate Rights.” http://www.bbcnews.com/ 3/1/2007
[ix] Wagner, Martin. Interview: 8/16/2007
[x] Williams, Sandra. “The Forgotten Inuit Culture.” Suite 201. 2/8/2007. http://poverty.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_forgotten_inuit_culture
[xi] Wagner, Martin. Interview: 8/16/2007
[xii] Krauss, Clifford, Steven Lee Myers, Andrew C. Revkin and Simon Romero. “As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound.” The New York Times. 10/10/05
[xiii] Struck, Doug. “Melting Arctic Makes Way for Man.” The Washington Post. 11/12/2006
[xiv] Wagner, Martin. Interview: 8/16/2007
[xv] Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth.
[xvi] Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth.
[xvii] Moon, Ban Ki. “A Climate Culprit in Darfur.” The Washington Post. 6/16/07
[xviii] Moon, Ban Ki. “A Climate Culprit in Darfur.” The Washington Post. 6/16/07
[xix] Moon, Ban Ki. “A Climate Culprit in Darfur.” The Washington Post. 6/16/07
[xx] Reeves, Eric. “On Ban Ki-moon, Darfur, and Global Warming.” The Guardian. 6/20/2007
[xxi] De Montesquiou, Alfred. “Experts: Darfur Faces Environmental Crisis.” The Associated Press. 6/22/07
[xxii] De Montesquiou, Alfred. “Experts: Darfur Faces Environmental Crisis.” The Associated Press. 6/22/07
[xxiii] De Montesquiou, Alfred. “Experts: Darfur Faces Environmental Crisis.” The Associated Press. 6/22/07
[xxiv] Helldén, Ulf. “Desertification Modification: Is the Desert Encroaching?” Desertification Control Bulletin. 1988
[xxv] Roach, John. “Is Global Warming Making Hurricanes Worse?” National Geographic News. 8/4/05
[xxvi] Natural Resources Defense Council. “The Consequences of Global Warming.” http://www.ndrc.org/ 1/9/06
[xxvii] Randerson, James and Ian Sample. “World’s Sea Levels Rising at Accelerating Rate.” The Guardian. 2/2/07
[xxviii] CBS News. “Miami, New Orleans Face Warming Threat.” http://www.cbsnews.com/ 3/23/06
[xxix] Christie, Les. "Growth states: Arizona overtakes Nevada: Texas adds most people overall; Louisiana population declines nearly 5%." CNN. December 22, 2006.
[xxx] Lyon, Alistair. “Global Warming to Multiply World’s Refugee Burden.” Reuters. 6/18/07
[xxxi] Submitted on Behalf of the President of the United States to the Committees on the Judiciary; United States Senate and United States House of Representatives. “Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2008.” United States Department of State, United States Department of Homeland Security, United States Department of Health and Human Services.
[xxxii] Eilperin, Juliet. “Warming Called Threat to Global Economy.” The Washington Post. 10/31/06
[xxxiii] Gardner, Simon. “Sea May Swallow Maldives if Global Warming Unchecked.” Reuters. 2/3/07