Category Archives: Issues

The elephant in the room at Paris climate talks: Why food production must change

By Tim Lang, City University London and Rebecca Wells, City University London

The grand political narratives around the COP21 conference in Paris will barely touch on one crucial aspect – food. The Paris talks are of vital importance, not just for climate change itself but for framing what kind of food economy follows. And why does food matter for climate change? Well, it’s a major factor driving it yet barely gets a mention.

From growing food to processing and packaging it, from transporting to selling it, cooking it, eating it and throwing it away – the whole chain contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock alone makes up 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. And agriculture emissions have increased rapidly in the last decade, as global diets and tastes change. Deforestation and forest degradation (often because of agricultural expansion) cause an estimated 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

People used to argue that this was a regrettable cost of progress. But most analysts now think differently, reminding us that the current food system is failing many. Almost 800m people in the world are hungry, at least two billion are not getting enough nutrients, and 1.9 billon adults are overweight or obese (39% of all adults over 18 years of age). Meanwhile, a third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted.

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World’s richest 10 per cent produce 50% of CO2

AFP reports: The richest 10 per cent of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10 per cent, British charity Oxfam said in a study released Wednesday.

Oxfam published the numbers as negotiators from 195 countries met in Paris to wrangle over a climate rescue pact.

Disputes over how to share responsibility for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions and aiding climate-vulnerable countries are among the thorniest and longest-running issues in the 25-year-old UN climate process.

“Rich, high emitters should be held accountable for their emissions, no matter where they live,” Oxfam climate policy head Tim Gore said in a statement.

“But it’s easy to forget that rapidly developing economies are also home to the majority of the world’s very poorest people and while they have to do their fair share, it is rich countries that should still lead the way.”

The report said that an average person among the richest one percent emits 175 times more carbon than his or her counterpart among the bottom 10 per cent.[Continue reading…]

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How solar and wind got so cheap, so fast

The Atlantic reports: A funny change has happened this year: People have become tepidly optimistic about climate change.

That’s not because the UN climate negotiations currently underway in Paris look like they might succeed, or because the United States is finally getting serious about a clean-energy policy. And it’s not because humanity is any less likely to overshoot the 2-degree Celsius target that spells dangerous levels of global warming.

No, it’s because the two renewable-electricity-generating technologies that advocates hope will one day power much of human society—solar and wind—have both plunged in price in recent years. According to a recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, on-shore wind is competitive with fossil-fuel-burning plants in many parts of the world. And if you factor in coal’s devastating public-health costs, it’s already much more expensive than solar or wind. [Continue reading…]

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We need to talk about how ISIS interprets Islam

By Balsam Mustafa, University of Birmingham

Since capturing swathes of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State has embarked on a cyber-offensive to spread its message through social media. A great effort has been made to block and remove the content, to understand how this information spreads – and to understand why some find it so convincing.

But it is also important to look at the message itself. Islamic State’s claims are not plucked out of the sky. As unpalatable as they may be, they are framed by religious narratives and debates about Islam that have spanned centuries.

A look at Islamic State’s online magazine, Dabiq, reveals arguments built on Wahabbism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. There are invocations of the founder Ibn Taimaya, “Sheik al Islam”, and references to Ibn Abbas, Ibn Masood, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Hajar, Muhammad Ibn Abdil-Wahhab, Bukhari, and Sahih Muslim – Muslim scholars either collecting, interpreting, or narrating Hadith (the words of the prophet). The broader message is blunt: “Kill whoever changes his religion [Sahīh al-Bukhārī]“.

To claim that Islamic State is not related to Islam is therefore naive, even wilfully dismissive. It ignores the interpretations of Islam that IS presents in its videos, statements and other communication.

Arguing that IS is comprehensively Islamic, on the other hand, is simplistic, too. That is to see the group as representing all Muslims and the different and competing readings and interpretations of Islam around the world. Clearly, they do not.

Grabbing either of these easy, polar explanations for what IS represents will not provide a solution to the problem. We need to consider some controversial issues upon which most of the varying sects of Islam agree in order to understand IS, and subvert its narratives.

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MSF hospital in Syria hit by ‘double-tap’ barrel bombing

The Guardian reports: A hospital supported by Médecins Sans Frontières in Homs has been partially destroyed in a “double-tap” barrel bombing, a signature tactic of the Syrian air force.

The strikes on the hospital in Zafarana, a besieged town in northern Homs, killed seven people including a young girl, MSF said in a statement, and prompted the movement to nearby field hospitals of many wounded, some of whom died on the way.

Saturday’s strikes were the latest in an apparent pattern of escalating attacks on medical facilities and doctors in the Syrian civil war, according to human rights organisations.

MSF, which operates and supports a number of health centres and field hospitals in Syria, said the attack bore the hallmark of a double-tap strike, whereby the first bombing is followed by a second one after paramedics have arrived to help the victims. “This double-tap tactic shows a level of calculated destruction that can scarcely be imagined,” said MSF’s director of operations, Brice de le Vingne. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. official says use of chemical weapons is ‘routine’ in Syria

Reuters reports: Recent attacks with chlorine and mustard gas on the battlefield in Syria show that the use chemical weapons in the civil war is becoming routine, a U.S. official said on Monday.

A confidential report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Oct. 29 provided the first official confirmation of use of sulphur mustard, commonly known as mustard gas, in Syria since it agreed to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile, two years ago.

While the OPCW did not specifically say which of the many sides in the war used the chemical, diplomatic sources said it had been used in clashes between Islamic State and rebel fighters in the town of Marea in August, as well as in rebel-held areas under attack by Syrian government forces.

That raised the possibility, diplomatic sources said, that Islamic State had gained the ability to make it themselves, or that it may have come from an undeclared stockpile.

“The sad reality is that chemical weapons use is becoming routine in the Syrian civil war,” Rafael Foley, representing the United States, told a special session of the OPCW’s Executive Council, in remarks sent to Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Passenger rants about ISIS before shooting Muslim taxi driver in back

The Washington Post reports: It began as an ordinary cab ride.

But by the time it was over, the Pittsburgh taxi driver — a 38-year-old Muslim man from Morocco — had a bullet wound in his upper back and was lucky to be alive, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Pittsburgh police are investigating the Thanksgiving Day shooting, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is asking for more help: CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has called on the Justice Department to investigate the incident as a hate crime — which, it said, was “similar to a growing number of attacks targeting the nation’s Muslim community following the recent terror attacks in Paris.”

The passenger, according to CAIR, “reportedly began asking the driver about his background, including asking whether he was a ‘Pakistani guy.’” CAIR says the passenger also asked the driver “about the terror group ISIS” and mocked the prophet Muhammad.

The driver, who moved to Pittsburgh from Morocco five years ago, told the Post-Gazette that he is three months away from becoming a U.S. citizen. His plan is to bring his wife to the United States and start a family in the country he considers home.

“This [incident] is due to the person, not the city,” he told the paper. “Pittsburgh is my style, it is like my home town [of Safi] in Morocco. My dream is to be an American.” [Continue reading…]

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A powerful antidote to ISIS

Gordon Brown writes: In Beirut — the troubled capital of a country with one of the worst histories of sectarian violence in the world — a unique experiment is underway.

Born out of a National Charter for Education on Living Together in Lebanon — which leaders of all major religions have signed — a common school curriculum on shared values is being taught in primary and secondary schools to Shiite, Sunni and Christian pupils.

The curriculum focuses on “the promotion of coexistence” by embracing “inclusive citizenship” and “religious diversity” and aims to ensure what the instigators call “liberation from the risks of . . . sectarianism.” But the new curriculum is more than an optimistic plea to love thy neighbor and an assertion of a golden rule common to all religions. It teaches pupils that they can celebrate differences without threatening coexistence.

The curriculum is designed for children starting at age 9 and includes four modules. The first tells the story of the global human family, asserting that all are equal in dignity. The second focuses on the rights and duties of citizenship, irrespective of religious or ethnic background. The third covers religious diversity, including the “refusal of any radicalism and religious or sectarian seclusion.” In the fourth, the emphasis shifts from the local to the need for global cultural diversity.

Of course, there is a long way to go before this experiment bears fruit, but the fact that it is happening today in Lebanon is of global significance because of the country’s decision to offer schooling to all Syrian refugee children.

Operating under a double-shift system — Lebanese children are taught in the morning, Syrian refugees in the afternoon — the public schools now house more refugee pupils — nearly 200,000 Syrian boys and girls — than local ones. [Continue reading…]

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Where is the outrage on David Cameron’s scandal in the Gulf?

Nicholas McGeehan writes: Whether it’s ‘cash for questions’ or ‘homes for votes’, there is often a tawdry quid pro quo at the heart of a good British political scandal. So it’s worth asking why there has not been more public outrage about explosive revelations that David Cameron was offered lucrative arms and oil deals for British businesses if he helped reign in the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in the UK.

Leaked emails obtained by The Guardian revealed that in June 2012 the United Arab Emirates tried to influence the UK to take steps against the Muslim Brotherhood in return for keeping or getting lucrative contracts. The emails suggest that the UAE government is supremely confident of its ability to influence British policy, which in turn begs the wider question as to what the UK’s priorities are in the UAE, and the rest of the Gulf.

In 2013, during a Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry into the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, MP Rory Stewart quite reasonably asked whether there is any proof that the UK can exert a positive influence over its foreign allies, where governance and the rule of law are concerned. Increasingly, the behaviour of the UK suggests that a more pertinent question is whether the UK’s Gulf policy is actually strengthening repression and emboldening authoritarian rulers in the region. [Continue reading…]

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Humans become different kinds of people when wrestling with deep problems

Jedediah Purdy discusses his new book, After Nature: Ross Andersen: For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship — about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future. How long have you been thinking about this?

Jedediah Purdy: I started thinking about this project seven or eight years ago, when I was co-teaching a course at Duke on the law, science, and politics of climate change. What struck me then was how much of the scholarship involved very sophisticated analyses of futility. There were all these studies about why we should expect to do nothing: because climate change overruns our national borders, the timelines of our political decision-making, the scope of our moral concern, and even our cognition.

So I began thinking: This sounds familiar. Many of the ideas we take for granted now, at least as widely shared goals — democracy, gender equality, diversity, economic life without any form of slavery, overcoming the legacy of racism and even overcoming the myth of race itself — would have seemed impossible at many earlier times. In fact, they would have seemed unnatural. Not so long ago, the best minds believed they had seen the limits of human possibility, and those limits did not extend very far. And in a sense they were right. In fighting out these questions, humans became different kinds of people. They came to care about new and different things. The scope and shape of their moral communities changed.

So, I thought, maybe climate change — and, really, the whole global environmental crisis — is like that. Maybe it’s one of these deep problems that, if we engage it in a serious way, changes us. Maybe we need to become different people in relation to the natural world. And maybe that isn’t such a wildly utopian thought: that becoming different people is something that humans do, in wrestling with deep problems. [Continue reading…]

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Why the Paris climate talks are doomed to failure, like all the others

By Steffen Böhm, University of Essex

Even if the world celebrates a Paris climate deal on December 11, the process will still have to be regarded as failure. Let me explain why.

The basic reason is that the unequal distribution of carbon emissions is not even on its agenda. The historical responsibility of the West is not on the table, nor is a method of national carbon accounting that looks at how the emissions a country consumes rather than produces. Instead, what is on the table are expanded and new mechanisms that will allow the rich, Western countries to outsource their emission cuts so they can paint themselves green.

When the figures are in, 2015 is likely to be the warmest year on record and we’ve just reached 1℃ temperature rise since the industrial revolution, halfway to the 2℃ widely agreed to be the upper safe limit of global warming. It’s the fastest surface temperature increase in the world’s known geological history. We are now entering “uncharted territory”.

The dangers of global warming have been known – even to oil company executives – since at least the early 1980s. Yet, despite 25 years of UN-led climate talks, the world is burning more fossil fuels than ever.

This is not simply the fault of big emerging economies such as China, India or Brazil. Instead, what we are dealing with is the fundamental failure of neoliberal capitalism, the world’s dominant economic system, to confront its hunger for exponential growth that is only made possible by the unique energy density of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

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Explainer: How scientists know climate change is happening

By Mark Maslin, UCL

The Paris climate conference will set nations against each other, and kick off huge arguments over economic policies, green regulations and even personal lifestyle choices. But one thing isn’t up for debate: the evidence for climate change is unequivocal.

We still control the future, however, as the magnitude of shifting weather patterns and the frequency of extreme climate events depends on how much more greenhouse gas we emit. We aren’t facing the end of the world as envisaged by many environmentalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but if we do nothing to mitigate climate change then billions of people will suffer.

Causes of climate change

Greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit some of the heat radiation given off by the Earth’s surface and warm the lower atmosphere. The most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, followed by carbon dioxide and methane, and without their warming presence in the atmosphere the Earth’s average surface temperature would be approximately -20°C. While many of these gases occur naturally in the atmosphere, humans are responsible for increasing their concentration through burning fossil fuels, deforestation and other land use changes. Records of air bubbles in ancient Antarctic ice show us that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are now at their highest concentrations for more than 800,000 years.

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Kurdish fighters say U.S. special forces have been fighting ISIS for months

The Guardian reports: On a damp afternoon in Iraqi Kurdistan, a 29-year-old peshmerga fighter named Peshawa pulls out his Samsung Galaxy mobile phone, flicks hurriedly through his library until he finds the video he wants, and presses play.

The clip, filmed just after dawn on 11 September, shows four tall and western-looking men in the heat of a battle against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq. “These are the Americans,” says Peshawa in a secretive tone.

One is crouched behind a machine gun firing round after round from the top of a fortified mound; another lies on his front a few feet away, legs outstretched and taking aim at the enemy with a long rifle. A third wields a long-lens camera taking photo after photo, and the last stands back, apparently overseeing the others during the combat south-west of the city of Kirkuk.

The footage, Peshawa says, is evidence that US special forces have been waging a covert war on the frontline in Iraq for months. Such a claim could alter the feverish debate over whether Barack Obama should move farther and faster against Isis in the wake of the Paris attacks.

A string of terrorist atrocities in France, Lebanon and elsewhere has intensified pressure on Obama to take a more aggressive stand against Isis in Iraq and Syria. Having won election promising to end the Iraq war, however, the president has repeatedly insisted that he will not send back ground troops. In June last year he announced the redeployment of up to 300 military advisers there but pledged: “American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again.”

The US military denies any special operations forces involvement in combat on 11 September or in three other other incidents listed by the peshmerga. Yet in interviews with the Guardian, a dozen Kurdish fighters and commanders said that US special forces troops have been participating in operations against Isis for months.

In another video, dated 11 June, an American soldier wearing the fatigues and insignia of a Kurdish counter-terrorism unit can be seen walking alongside two dozen peshmerga in the aftermath of a seven-hour firefight with Isis militants in the village of Wastana and Saddam settlement, according to the peshmerga who filmed the video.

“Initially, the Americans rained fire on Wastana,” said Major Loqman Mohammed, pointing to the hamlet which remains under Isis control.

None of the peshmerga were willing to publish their photos or video footage for fear of dismissal, but they allowed the Guardian to watch the video and see the images on their mobile phones.

Karwan Hama Tata, a peshmerga volunteer, showed a Guardian reporter a video which appeared to show two Americans in the midst of the battle accompanied by three peshmerga fighters. He said: “They fight and they even fight ahead of the peshmerga. They won’t allow anyone to take photos of them, but they take photos of everyone.” [Continue reading…]

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Want to help ISIS recruit? Treat all Muslims as potential terrorists

Richard Maass writes: Since the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris, many U.S. leaders have unleashed discriminatory rhetoric in the name of counterterrorism. Thirty-one governors said that Syrian refugees were not welcome in their states. Jeb Bush suggested that refugees should be allowed into the United States if “you can prove you’re a Christian.” Donald Trump said that he would “strongly consider” shutting down American mosques and that he wants “surveillance of certain mosques if that’s okay.” Claiming “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Ted Cruz criticized the Obama administration “because they pretend as if there is no religious aspect to this.”

Of course, most religions — including Christianity — have been manipulated to inspire or excuse terrorism. And people of most nationalities — including Americans — have committed terrorist acts. So the critical question is not whether the Islamic State has a national or religious aspect; a great deal of terrorism does. The question is: Will policies that discriminate against people on the basis of nationality or religion help or hurt efforts to counter the Islamic State’s terrorist threat?

Many excellent scholars — both before and since 9/11 — have produced research that tells us about the relationship between discrimination and counterterrorism.

Here’s what we know. To be most effective, counterterrorism policies need to make an explicit distinction between the individuals who genuinely threaten others with terrorism, on the one hand, and on the other, the broader populations those terrorists claim to represent. Counterterrorism efforts — especially using force — should narrowly target only the former, as much as possible. [Continue reading…]

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There have been 334 days and 351 mass shootings so far this year

The Washington Post reports: The nation was once again gripped by gun violence on Friday after a gunman identified by authorities as Robert Lewis Dear Jr. stormed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing two civilians and one police officer and injuring nine others.

It is just the latest in a year of more-than-daily mass shootings in America. In fact, there had already been one mass shooting on Friday — in the early morning hours, two people were killed and two injured in a shooting at a restaurant in Sacramento, California. Another mass shooting incident in Boston in the early hours of Thanksgiving Day took the life of an MBTA rail conductor.

There have been at least 351 mass shootings so far this year, according to news reports collected by a reddit community that tracks these incidents. The reddit tracker defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire. The Mass Shooting Tracker is different from other shooting databases in that it uses a broader definition of mass shooting — the old FBI definition focused on four or more people murdered as part of a single shooting. [Continue reading…]

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The world’s failure to help Syria change for the better, means Syria is now changing the world for the worse

At yesterday’s Stop the War rally in London, Tariq Ali challenged the Cameron government by saying: “If the aim is to destroy ISIS, … then you should be fighting side by side with Assad and the Russians.”

The contradiction between this proposition and the rally’s slogan — “Don’t bomb Syria” — seemed to elude much of Ali’s audience.

Yesterday, on just one city — Darayya — the regime dropped 50 barrel bombs.

For the last four years, barrel bombs have been the principle tools of destruction used in a bloody campaign to crush opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the leading cause of death of a quarter of a million Syrians, and the driving force resulting in the exodus of half the population from their homes.

Since Russia started bombing Syria, an estimated 1,300 people have been killed, a third of them civilians.

Today, airstrikes, believed to have been carried out by Russian jets, killed 44 people and wounded scores of others in a marketplace in Idlib province.

There are legitimate reasons for doubting the efficacy or wisdom in Britain joining the U.S.-led air campaign against ISIS in Syria, but those currently shouting “don’t bomb Syria” seem to be more concerned about who is dropping the bombs than who is being killed by them.

The Syria Solidarity Movement UK issued a statement yesterday explaining why they did not support the Stop the War demonstration.

Syria Solidarity UK and Stop the War have very different concerns regarding Syria: Syria Solidarity is concerned with ending the suffering of Syrians under the Assad dictatorship; Stop the War with opposing any UK military involvement regardless of consequences for Syrians.

We oppose the British government’s proposal to merely mimic the American ISIS-only counter-terrorism war; not only do we believe it is immoral to fly missions in Syria against ISIS while leaving the even greater killer, Assad, free to bomb civilians en masse, we also believe that any war against ISIS that doesn’t put the needs of the Syrian people first will be a failure that can only prolong their suffering.

The Syrian writer and leftwing political dissident, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, points out that our collective failure to act in the interests of the Syrian people has now turned Syria into a global issue.

“[B]ecause the world did not help Syria change for better, I think that Syria is changing the whole world for worse.”

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Killing of prominent pro-Kurdish lawyer sparks protests in Turkey

Al Jazeera reports: A prominent lawyer and human rights defender, who faced a criminal charge for speaking in defense of Kurdish rebels, was killed Saturday in an attack in southeast Turkey in which a police officer also died, officials said.

Tahir Elci was shot while he and other lawyers were making a press statement. Two policemen and a journalist were also injured.

It wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the attack, and there were conflicting reports about what led to it. [Continue reading…]

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Now is the worst time to be a journalist in Turkey

Borzou Daragahi reports: Can Dundar knew he was a marked man.

It was shortly before Turkish authorities summoned the editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey’s largest newspapers, and one of his most senior editors, to court and locked up in a jail cell on Thursday. The energetic 52-year-old intellectual, with a full head of messy grey hair, lounged in his office in central Istanbul and rifled through the nation’s newspapers, pointing out all those taken over by the government in recent years. In crisp English, the journalist — whose first name is pronounced “jan” — explained why he believed the government under the country’s increasingly powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had continued to crack down on the press even after its decisive election victory earlier this month.

“He views every kind of criticism as a threat or as an insult,” Dundar told BuzzFeed News in an exclusive interview. “He hates criticism. Politically, his background is as an Islamist guy. He’s much more used to having people obeying without criticism. This is their tradition. Criticism is almost forbidden. It’s considered shameful.”

Dundar was jailed on Thursday and faces a possible sentence of life in prison on espionage and terrorism charges for publishing a report in May that included photos and videos alleging Turkish intelligence officials were smuggling weapons to Syrian rebel fighters described as jihadis in January 2014. The report, yet to be refuted or denied, shone an uncomfortable spotlight on allegations that Turkey has supported, or at least turned a blind eye, to the growth of extremist groups in Syria, including ISIS. [Continue reading…]

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