Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef and poet-philosopher of the ecological movement, Derrick Jensen on Democracy Now!
The dominant culture is killing the planet
Category Archives: Environment
The latest threat to Afghanistan’s existence
Ask a foreigner what Afghans most need and he’s most likely to say: to escape from poverty. Ask an Afghan and he’s more likely to say: to escape from foreign interference.
The latest news from Afghanistan is no cause for celebration. The New York Times reports:
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
After all, who wants fight a holy war when you could instead be risking your life for Rio Tinto or Anglo-American?
Mining is the quintessential parasitic relationship that humans have with this planet. As an exercise in plundering the resources of the earth, it’s natural that the enterprises engaged in this activity have a habit of giving far more attention to what they are in the business of acquiring, than they do to the means by which they acquire it. They have as little respect for their workers as they do for the environment.
The US officials who told the New York Times that Afghanistan is the new Eldorado, probably thought they were sharing “good news” from a place where that particular commodity is in a desperately short supply.
Afghans themselves now have reason to wonder whether after having succeeded for centuries in holding back imperial forces they are now in danger of falling victim to the most destructive possible takeover — by global mining conglomerates.
Some existential threats are imaginary or abstract but Afghanistan now faces a material and cultural threat that could ultimately prove more destructive than decades of war.
The wrong kind of green
Johann Hari writes:
Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, “Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago.” I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, “The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left.”
While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.
Are crippling droughts the next great threat to Iraq?
From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country’s lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20% slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days of civilization — sustaining the lives of up to half a million people who live in and around the area, while providing water for almost two million more.
The waters vanished after the First Gulf War due to a dictator’s wrath; over the next 16 years, they ebbed and flowed, but slowly started to return to their pre-Saddam levels. By 2007, with no more sabotage and average rains, almost 70% of the lost water had been recovered. Now it’s gone again. This time because of a crisis far more endemic: a devastating drought and the water policies of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. These three nations have effectively stopped most of the headwaters of the three rivers — the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon — that feed these marshes.
“Once in a generation was bad enough,” says Awda, a tribal head and local sheikh in the al-Akeryah Marshlands, who also advises the Nasiriyah governorate on water issues. “Twice could well be God’s vengeance.”
In a land where fundamental interpretations of monotheistic scripts often determine the tone of public discourse, particular attention is now being paid to the biblical Book of Revelation, in which the Euphrates River drying up was prophesized as a harbinger for the end of the world. It is not doomsday yet in Iraq, but the water shortage here has not been worse for at least the last two centuries — and possibly for several millennia more. Government estimates suggest close to two million Iraqis face severe drinking water shortages and extremely limited hydropower-generated electricity in a part of the country where most households get by on no more than eight hours of supplied power per day, in the best of times. [continued…]
U.S. firms lag in bids for Iraqi oil
Chinese, Russian and European companies won the right this weekend to develop major oil fields in Iraq, while U.S. firms made a paltry showing at auctions that represent the first major incursion of foreign oil companies into Iraq in four decades.
The companies that secured 10 contracts in auctions held over the weekend and in June stand to profit handsomely, but they are taking a significant gamble.
Iraq has the third-largest proven crude reserves in the world, but the country remains perilous; it suffers from chronic corruption and acrimonious politics that have prevented the passing of new laws to regulate the sector.
Of the seven U.S. companies that registered for the auctions, only one emerged as the leading partner in a consortium that won a contract. Another U.S. company has a minority stake in a contract. [continued…]
Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?
Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?
The leaked emails, Professor van Ypersele said, will fuel scepticism about climate change and may make agreement harder at Copenhagen. So the mutterings have prompted the question: why would Russia have an interest in scuppering the Copenhagen talks?
This time, if it was indeed the FSB behind the leak, it could be part of a ploy to delay negotiations or win further concessions for Moscow. Russia, along with the United States, was accused of delaying Kyoto, and the signals coming from Moscow recently have continued to dismay environmental activists.
When Ed Miliband, the Secreatary of State for Climate Change, visited Moscow this year, he had meetings with high-level Russian officials and pronounced them constructive. But others doubt that Russia has much desire to go green.
Up in the far northern reaches of Russia, there are stretches of hundreds of miles of boggy tundra; human settlements are few and far between. Often, the only inhabitants are indigenous reindeer herders, who in recent years have reported that their cyclical lifestyle is being affected by the climate: they have to wait until later in the year to migrate to winter camps, because the rivers do not freeze as early as they used to. In spring, the snow melts quickly and it becomes harder for reindeer to pull sleds.
Much of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves lie in difficult-to-access areas of the far North. One school of thought is that Russia, unlike most countries, would have little to fear from global warming, because these deposits would suddenly become much easier and cheaper to access. [continued…]
The stolen e-mails: has ‘climategate’ been overblown?
The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.
Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as “Climategate,” with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it “Swifthack,” a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change. [continued…]
The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it’s working
The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.
Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.
No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the Earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for man-made global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to Aids. [continued…]
Why Copenhagen may be a disaster
Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.
And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble — because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late. [continued…]
Europeans say U.S. lacks will on climate
Europeans say U.S. lacks will on climate
As world leaders gather in New York for the highest-level conference yet on climate change, European leaders are expressing growing unease about the United States’ stance in international talks aimed at reaching a global agreement in Copenhagen in December.
Officials of several European countries have cited what they see as a lack of political will on the part of the United States to adequately address climate change. The American reluctance to accept any agreement that would require legally binding and internationally enforceable targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could doom the Copenhagen session, they said.
Ahead of this week’s climate talks at the United Nations, the Europeans also expressed little hope that the United States Senate would act on a climate bill before the Copenhagen talks begin. They said the lack of domestic consensus sows doubt about whether the United States can keep any pledges it makes at Copenhagen, either on the level of reductions in global warming emissions or on financial commitments to help developing nations adapt to a changing climate. [continued…]
Climate disobedience
I
n the early morning of October 8, 2007, a small group of British Greenpeace activists slipped inside a hulking smokestack that towers more than 600 feet above a coal-fired power plant in Kent, England. While other activists cut electricity on the plant’s grounds, they prepared to climb the interior of the structure to its top, rappel down its outside, and paint in block letters a demand that Prime Minister Gordon Brown put an end to plants like the Kingsnorth facility, which releases nearly 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day.
The activists, most of them in their thirties and forties, expected the climb to the top of the smokestack would take less than three hours. Instead, scaling a narrow metal ladder inside took nine. “It was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done,” 35-year-old Ben Stewart said later. “It was like climbing through a huge radiator — the hottest, dirtiest place you could imagine.”
In the end, the fatigued, soot-covered climbers were only able to paint the word “Gordon” on the chimney before, facing dizzying heights, police helicopters, and a high court injunction, they were compelled to abandon the attempt and submit to arrest. They could hardly have known then that their botched attempt at signage would help transform British debate about fossil-fuel power plants — and that it would send tremors through an emerging global movement determined to use direct action to combat the depredations of climate change.
The case took on historic weight only after the Kingsnorth Six went to court, where they presented to a jury what is known in the United States as a “necessity” defense. This defense applies to situations in which a person violates a law to prevent a greater, imminent harm from occurring: for example, when someone breaks down a door to put out a fire in a burning building.
In the Kingsnorth case, world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, flew to England to testify. According to the Guardian, he presented evidence that the Kingsnorth plant alone could be expected to cause sufficient global warming to prompt “the extinction of 400 species over its lifetime.” Citing a British government study showing that each ton of released carbon dioxide incurs $85 in future climate-change costs, the activists contended that shutting the plant down for the day had prevented $1.6 million in damages — a far greater harm to society than any rendered by their paint — and that their transgressions should therefore be excused.
What surprised both Greenpeace and the prosecution was that 12 ordinary Britons agreed. The jury returned with an acquittal, and the freed defendants made the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. The tumult also produced political results. In April, British energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband announced a reversal in governmental policy on power stations, declaring, “The era of new unabated coal has come to an end.” Discussing Kingsnorth, Daniel Mittler, a long-time environmental activist in Germany, told me recently, “it was probably one of the most impactful civil disobedience cases the world has ever seen, because it was the right action at the right time.” [continued…]
NEWS, VIEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: A president who believes in science
Obama science picks hailed as signal of policy shift
President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to name two of the nation’s most prominent scientists to crucial roles in his administration was being heralded in the scientific community as a signal that the new president is serious about taking on the challenges of climate change and creating a new energy policy for the nation.
Obama is expected today to name John P. Holdren, 64, a former professor of energy and natural resources at UC Berkeley who is now at Harvard, as his science adviser and executive director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
He also reportedly has settled on Jane Lubchenco, 61, a world-renowned marine biologist and expert on the ocean environment at Oregon State University, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The influential agency measures the pace of global warming, tracks hurricanes, predicts the weather and monitors the health of the world’s seas.
Their impending selection, along with the naming last week of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, is seen as the surest sign yet that Obama will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming. [continued…]
Obama’s strongest message on climate yet
John Holdren’s selection] is an even stronger signal than the terrific choice of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary that Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming. After all, the science adviser works out of the White House and oversees science and technology funding, analysis, and messaging for all federal agencies. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — With all due respect to everyone who was offended by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to serve God’s middleman on Inauguration Day, it’s important to highlight the difference between those choices that Obama makes that matter and those that don’t. I doubt that even among those who found the Warren pick offensive that many imagined that this ominously marked top of a slippery slope.
What Obama did was toss a symbolic bone to evangelicals who can now savor it and feel respected. It has no policy implications and it also pays the dividend of making it clear that Obama is not afraid of offending progressives (again).
Contrast this with his choice of John Holdren. Most Americans have never heard of him, but to put his voice in a pivotal position in policymaking is of vital importance for the future of the planet.
Note that Obama made the announcement through his YouTube address on the weekend that most Americans are out lost in shopping psychosis.
Perhaps this will be the signature of his presidency: that he makes his most important moves with the least amount of noise.
NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: US energy policy
Nobel physicist chosen to be energy secretary
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.
Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for eight years under President Bill Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama’s transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group.
Obama has also settled on Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to head the EPA. Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Last year, Steven Chu said that energy research and development needs a massive infusion of public investment: “We need money on the magnitude of what the U.S. invested in the Apollo program,” he said.
Since he is now about to become the leading advocate for this amount of investment, he needs to be well-armed if he’s going to have any chance of winning the public debate during a period of deep economic recession.
Unemployment won’t be slashed by putting scientists back to work. In fact, Chu might be able to better plead his case if he argued that the mission he’s pushing is so important that it will require a few scientists being forced to sacrifice their pet projects.
That possibility might be what has pushed the NASA chief, Mike Griffin, into a bunker mentality as he apparently now views members of the Obama transition team as the enemy.
But if Chu wants to make a powerful pitch for an Apollo mission that America needs far more than it needed the actual Apollo mission, part of his argument could be that in order to save the planet we need to stop wasting money on catapulting human beings into space.
Last year, Steven Weinberg, a particle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics, said: “The International Space Station is an orbital turkey. No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value.”
Let’s repeat that: THE WHOLE MANNED SPACEFLIGHT PROGRAM, WHICH IS SO ENORMOUSLY EXPENSIVE, HAS PRODUCED NOTHING OF SCIENTIFIC VALUE.
As the idiot-in-chief is about to leave office, maybe now is the time to draw up a list of some of the most wasteful and ill-conceived projects he has cherished and say, enough is enough. Now is the time to invest in what matters.
No more big budget, high-tech Viagra projects: Goodbye mission to Mars; goodbye the Vision for Space Exploration; goodbye missile defense.
Let’s stop acting like we’re dying to be part of the biggest suicide cult in human history and instead start doing whatever it takes to develop a sustainable way of living.
NEWS, OPINION & ANALYSIS: Global food crisis
A ‘revolutionary’ moment in Egypt?
The idea of the starving masses driven onto the streets to demand bread, and then being forced by the violent response of the state to seek its overthrow, had seemed impossibly quaint for decades — the stuff of a distant epoch, kept alive in Broadway musicals and Warren Beatty vehicles in a world where the masses were acquiring cell phones. Bread? Who needs bread? Let them eat arugula at globalization’s ever-expanding buffet table.
But a cursory look at the headlines of the past month — a general strike and mass protests in Egypt, the storming of the presidential palace in Haiti, violent protests in Cote D’Ivoire and Cameroon, demonstrations in Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia, among others, suggests that the proverbial “wretched of the Earth” are arising, all over again, this time in response to skyrocketing food prices.
Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous. The patterns are uneven, but basic laws of scarcity still prevail. Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat. The fact that it takes some eight calories of grain to produce a single calorie of beef means that the expansion of meat protein in the diet of previously poor Chinese workers also creates a massive increase in global demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is unable to keep pace. [complete article]
Food price rises threaten global security – UN
Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN’s top humanitarian official warned yesterday after two days of rioting in Egypt over the doubling of prices of basic foods in a year and protests in other parts of the world.
Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, told a conference in Dubai that escalating prices would trigger protests and riots in vulnerable nations. He said food scarcity and soaring fuel prices would compound the damaging effects of global warming. Prices have risen 40% on average globally since last summer.
“The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,” Holmes said. “Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity.” [complete article]
United Nations peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and used tear gas to control mobs rioting over rising food prices in Haiti yesterday.
Angry protesters tried to break into the presidential palace in the capital, Port au Prince, and demanded that President Rene Preval step down.
Preval was inside the palace at the time, aides said. The president has made no public statements since riots broke out on the island last week. Five people have died in a week of protests, Reuters reported. [complete article]
Map of food riots
Where food riots have taken place around the world since January 2007. Map compiled by Allegra Stratton, The Guardian. Click on blue pointers for information on locality. Click on “minus” button for wider view.
IDEAS: Developing a sustained capacity for realistic thinking
Only science can save us from climate catastrophe
If there was ever an example of humankind being unable to bear too much reality, it is the current debate on climate change. No reasonable person any longer doubts that the world is heating up or that this change has been triggered by human activity. Aside from a dwindling band that rejects the clear findings of science, everyone accepts that we face an unprecedented challenge. At the same time, there is a pervasive belief that this is a crisis that can be solved by feelgood gestures such as eating organic foods and refusing to fly or installing a wind turbine on the roof
When it comes to deciding what should be done, most people, including the majority of environmentalists, shrink from the discomfort that goes with realistic thinking. George W Bush seems to have been persuaded that climate science is not a left-wing conspiracy to destroy the American economy. Along with the rest of our political leaders, however, he continues to insist there are no limits to growth. As long as we adopt new technologies that are supposedly environment-friendly, such as biofuels, economic expansion can go on as before.
At the other end of the spectrum, greens put their faith in sustainable growth and renewable energy. The root of the environmental crisis, they say – and here they agree with Bush – is our addiction to fossil fuels. If only we switch to wind, wave and solar power, all will be well.
In political terms, Bush and the greens could not be further apart, but they are as one in resisting the most fundamental fact about the environmental crisis, which is that it cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth. This means curbing the production of greenhouse gases, but here fashionable policies can be self-defeating. The shift to biofuels, led by Bush but which is also underway in other parts of the world involves further destruction of rainforest, a key natural regulator of the climate. Reducing emissions while destroying the planet’s natural mechanisms for soaking them up is not a solution. It is a recipe for disaster.
Yet standard green prescriptions are not much better. Many renewables are not as efficient or as eco-friendly as they are made out to be. Unsightly and inefficient wind farms will not enable us to give up fossil fuels, while large-scale hydroelectric power has major environmental costs. Moving over to organic methods of food production can have significant benefits in terms of animal welfare and reducing fuel costs, but it does nothing to stop the devastation of wilderness that goes with expanding farming to feed a swelling human population. [complete article]
OPINION: Turning east
On both Wednesday and Thursday, the price of oil briefly hit $100 a barrel. The new record made headlines, as well it should have. But what does it mean, aside from the obvious point that the economy is under extra pressure?
Well, one thing it means is that we’re having the wrong discussion about foreign policy.
Almost all the foreign policy talk in this presidential campaign has been motivated, one way or another, by 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Yet it’s a very good bet that the biggest foreign policy issues for the next president will involve the Far East rather than the Middle East. In particular, the crucial questions are likely to involve the consequences of China’s economic growth. [complete article]
NEWS & OPINION: Suicidal stupidity
The Bush administration’s decision to deny California permission to regulate and reduce global warming emissions from cars and trucks is an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.
The decision, announced Wednesday by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, overrode the advice of his legal and technical staffs, misconstrued the law and defied both Congress and the federal courts. It also stuck a thumb in the eyes of 17 other state governors who have grown impatient with the federal government’s failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and wanted to move aggressively on their own. [complete article]
Schwarzenegger: California will sue federal government
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to sue the federal government over its decision not to allow a California plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he announced Thursday.
[…]
“It’s another example of the administration’s failure to treat global warming with the seriousness that it actually demands,” the governor said at a news conference Thursday.
[…]
… Schwarzenegger said he would like to set a higher standard for California. “Anything less than aggressive action on the greatest environmental threat of all time is inexcusable,” he said. [complete article]
Cheney repeatedly met with auto execs before White House killed California’s emissions law
Before EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson “answered the pleas of industry executives” by announcing his “decision to deny California the right to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles,” auto executives directly appealed to Vice President Cheney. EPA staffers told the LA Times that Johnson “made his decision” only after Cheney met with the executives.
On multiple occasions in October and November, Cheney and White House staff members met with industry executives, including the CEOs of Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler. At the meetings, the executives objected to California’s proposed fuel economy standards [complete article]
OPINION: A bridge to the world; democratic renewal; world sick of Bush
Consider this hypothetical scenario. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man – Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image America’s soft power has been ratcheted up exponentially. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonisation of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can.
The other obvious advantage that Obama has is his record on the Iraq war. He is the only significant candidate to have opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, engaging America’s estranged allies and damping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives towards Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.
It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war: “I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” [complete article]
See also, For the Democrats: Barack Obama (Boston Globe editorial).
America’s constitution produces a pure democracy Britain will never have
The late Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, would lecture Americans on the power of their democracy “to take the world to the brink of disaster” and at the last minute haul it back. The subject might be the Depression, wartime isolationism, McCarthyism, nuclear confrontation and now a concocted “war on terror”. Whatever it was, said Schlesinger, “the great strength of democracy is its capacity for self-correction”. America reaches the right answer only after trying all the wrong ones.
At a time when America is the acknowledged world superpower, such a rollercoaster beneath its leadership can easily be misunderstood. In its paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.
It has fought indecisive and incompetent wars against weak countries that America cannot help and can only plunge into poverty and misery. To the wider world, it seems to crave enemies not friends, losing sight of Kennedy’s inaugural admonition that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.
The neoconservative denizens of Washington have been reduced to polluting their intelligence, suspending habeas corpus and debating the uses of torture. They seem unable to engage with other world powers on such matters as trade reform, international law and the future of the United Nations.
This is why America’s friends abroad have felt more despair this past five years than in the previous 50. To turn a phrase once applied to Britain by the American diplomatist Dean Acheson, America has acquired an empire but not found a role.
Yet there is to be an election. As those friends also know, there are as many Americas as there are Americans. Any visitor to that country can sense a yearning for a change, as can any reader of its polls or consumer of its media. This is represented by a sign over Phoenix, Arizona, counting down the days to the end of the Bush presidency. It is represented by the continued buoyancy of the Barack Obama campaign. America seems desperate to give itself at least the option of a black president, of the idealism of a born-again Kennedy.
That Obama’s candidature can be contemplated in a land that has twice voted for Bush and Dick Cheney is the measure of how drastically America’s constitution allows it to cleanse its politics and grasp at something new. [complete article]
The world gets the better of Bush
Last week was the week, and yesterday was the day, when the world finally showed that it was terminally fed up with the simple-minded, short-sighted and self-serving outlook of George Bush. The moment came not, as it well might have done, amid the dust and bloody debris of Iraq or the torture and state terrorism of Guantanamo Bay, but in Indonesia’s lush and lovely Island of the Gods. And, appropriately, it came over climate change – the issue on which the “toxic Texan” first showed that he was going to put his ideological instincts and oil-soaked obstinacy over the interests of the rest of the world and of future generations.
The mood had been building all week at the negotiations in Bali on a replacement to the present arrangements under the Kyoto Protocol which run out in 2012. For months the United States, and President Bush himself, had been insisting that it would not block progress. Spin-doctors were dispatched to assert, ludicrously, not only that the President was as committed as anyone to avoiding catastrophic global warming, but that the man who had spent years trying to destroy any attempt to tackle it had always really been on the side of the environmental angels. But once his hard-faced negotiators took their seats in the steamy conference centre at the Nusa Dua resort the pretence slipped away. They blocked virtually every constructive proposal put on the table, refusing any suggestion of concrete action by the US, while insisting that other countries do more and more. Ever since Bush first rejected – and set out to kill – the Kyoto Protocol, he had cited as his main objection its exclusion of big developing nations such as China and India. More recently he has indicated that the US would move if they took the first step. Sure enough, they came to Bali ready to take action on their own emissions – and still the US refused to budge.
It is simply not done in international negotiations for one country to single out another for criticism; it’s the equivalent of calling someone a liar in the House of Commons. But from early last week other delegations were publicly, unprecedentedly and explicitly blaming the US for the lack of progress. Worse, they were beginning to point the finger at President Bush himself, suggesting that things would improve once he was gone. That is the kind of humiliation reserved for such international pariahs as Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. But even they were never subjected to the treatment that America received yesterday morning. When it tried, yet again, to sabotage agreement the representatives of the other 187 governments broke into boos and hisses. When Papua New Guinea told the US to “get out of the way”, they cheered. [complete article]
NEWS: Dragging the world into hell
‘Crunch time’ for climate change
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has opened high-level talks at the climate change conference in Bali with a call to action.
He said that if no action were taken, the world would face impacts such as drought, famine and rising sea levels.
Delegates are hoping to agree a “Bali roadmap” leading to further cuts in greenhouse gas emissions when the Kyoto Protocol targets expire in 2012. [complete article]
Hard choices on climate can wait for next president, aides indicate
U.S. officials at U.N. climate negotiations here said Tuesday that they would not embrace any overall binding goals for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions before President Bush leaves office, essentially putting off specific U.S. commitments until a new administration assumes power in 2009, according to several participants.
In closed-door meetings, senior U.S. climate negotiator Harlan L. Watson said the administration considers several aspects of a draft resolution circulated by U.N. officials unacceptable, according to an administration official and other negotiators. Watson specifically objected to language calling for a halt in the growth of worldwide emissions within 10 to 15 years, to be followed by measures that by 2050 would drive emissions down to less than half the 2000 levels. [complete article]
NEWS: Report describes systematic White House effort to manipulate climate change science
For the past 16 months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations of political interference with government climate change science under the Bush Administration. During the course of this investigation, the Committee obtained over 27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Commerce Department, held two investigative hearings, and deposed or interviewed key officials. Much of the information made available to the Committee has never been publicly disclosed.
This report presents the findings of the Committee’s investigation. The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.
In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy. [complete article]
OPINION: From Bandung to Davos — and back?
Global warming as white man’s burden
Readers of a certain age and inclination might remember a sometimes-incendiary, often-provocative, most-always-interesting television show on the UK’s Channel Four called Bandung File. Channel Four came to prominence in that brief hundred-flowers spring moment in the Britain of the 70s and early 80s, when Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, was still ‘Red’ Ken, and the Greater London Council had money to spend on any number of beautiful community-driven efforts, from the Southall Black Sisters to water resources planning for the next century. Bandung File, produced by Tariq Ali and Darcus Howe, labelled itself an African-Asian news and current affairs programme. What made it quite unique was that its stated purpose was to canvas opinion from the public and policy-makers in those continents: Its topics were not just what was being done to people of color in the UK, nor even the history of colonial injustice. Instead, it focused on the current concerns of Africans and Asians — its issues ranged from apartheid to street crime in Jamaica and corruption in a Kenyan hospital. With a muckraking exuberance and flair, Bandung File drove the blade in to the hilt. And what made it such refreshing television was it was never dominated by experts from the North; instead it gave free rein to the eloquence of its Southern subjects, whether corrupt politicians or enraged citizens or passionate radicals.
It’s an odd place to begin talking about the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, as Tony asked me to do for Rootless Cosmopolitan, but bear with me. Bandung File was named for a now rather obscure mountain town in Java: a favoured “hill station” to which British, and later brown, sahibs would retire to escape Indonesian summers. This little resort town once took centre stage in world history, in 1955, when it was the seat of an extraordinary conference, when representatives of one half of humanity met to proclaim an end to the colonial era. Some of the countries respresented were newly independent, others not yet quite so; but it was clear that the end of direct colonial rule was near, and this conference of African and Asian people met to ask, what sort of world would follow. We now call this, in an inaccurate Nothern-Hemisphere-centric worldview, the ‘Global South’… but here was born the ‘third world’ — “l’ensemble des peuples d’Asie et d’Afrique qui, n’appartenant ni à la « noblesse » européenne ni au « clergé » américain” (all the peoples of Africa and Asia who belong neither to the European aristocracy nor to the American clergy) — beautiful! The term was thus a direct extrapolation from the ‘Third Estate’ of the French Revolution, and had not acquired its current distorted meaning of distended bellies, child soldiers, and retired dictators living in splendid majesty in the homes of their former paymasters in Hawaii or on the Riviera. [complete article]
FEATURE: Rising oceans on a drying planet
At the poles, melting occurring at alarming rate
For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it’s not fiction.
The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw “a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely” from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans. [complete article]
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. [complete article]