Almost everything

In Surfing the Universe, Benjamin Wallace-Wells surveys the controversy over Garrett Lisi's work. Towards the end Wallace-Wells quotes Betram Kostant of MIT who is "unaffiliated in the string theory wars":

Columbus made mistakes and thought he was in India. [Garrett] Lisi made a few errors, but this pales into insignificance to his possibly opening up a whole new world for exploration...E* is like North America, South America, and the Pacific Ocean all rolled into one. No one in Europe knew anything about it...Lisi's daring possibly creates an agenda for scientists for the next hundred years or more.

How TV works

Like hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who complained about The Great Global Warming Swindle, I received a letter this morning from Ofcom notifying me of the results of their adjudication. It's online here (you have to scroll down; a summary by David Adam is here). But George Monbiot is about right with this:

But while the new ruling exposes some of the channel's practices, it also exposes the limitations of the regulator. The programme was peppered with distortions and misleading claims. But despite being presented with a vast dossier of evidence by climate scientists, Ofcom decided that it could not rule on the matter of accuracy. While news programmes are expected to be accurate, other factual programmes are not, and Ofcom "only regulates misleading material where that material is likely to cause harm or offence."

It decided that The Great Global Warming Swindle had not caused actual harm to members of the public: merely misleading them does not count. In fact, it is precisely because "the discussion about the causes of global warming was to a very great extent settled by the date of broadcast", meaning that climate change was no longer a matter of political controversy, that a programme claiming it is all a pack of lies could slip past the partiality rules. The greater a programme's defiance of scientific fact, the less likely Ofcom is to rule against it. This paradoxical judgment allows Channel 4 to keep getting away with it.

Happy day

A shit is held accountable.

Cold road

Good photos from Greenland and Iceland by Nathan Myrhvold. For example this one of a storm over a fjord (large verion here).

Perspectives on Afghanistan

Rory Stewart on How to save Afghanistan (17 July)

Conor Foley on A counterweight to a failing state (18 July)

Gore's civic republicanism moment

Gore calls for 100% Clean Energy in 10 Years. My first reaction was, it's well done ("borrow money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn in ways the destroys the planet"...the ten year Apollo type challenge...the appeal to [progressive] nationalism); but why does he launch at this particular moment and what is the political purchase? How does he aim to influence the Presidential election? A NYT report is useful, Andy Revkin's commentary much more so. For example:

There’s no reason not to think big, although it might be harder for Mr. Gore to make this kind of statement if already in office, or seeking one, because it would be hard to find experts immersed in the challenges of generating, storing and distributing electricity at large scale who could chart an achievable or affordable 10-year path to doing this. Joe Romm at ClimateProgress.org said a more realistic ambitious goal would be 50-percent renewable electricity sources by 2020. And of course “affordable” is a word dependent entirely on public attitudes, so if the public can be energized sufficiently by leadership or circumstances, theoretically anything is possible.

'Organisation of Denial'

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

-- abstract from The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism by Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman, Environmental Politics Vol. 17, No. 3, June 2008, 349–385

P.S. 18 July: an interesting denialist story from Joe Romm.

Your milkshake

The ties that the Complex -- the term [Nick Turse] gives the old military-industrial complex in his superb book on how our everyday lives have been militarized -- has developed with an allied petro-industrial complex are so taken for granted that mainstream reporters seldom think they add up to a story. It's like being on the science beat and filing stories about how we breathe.

Tom Englehardt

Wait and see

Are the crazies no longer in charge? With the appointment of William Burns to talk to the Iranians, the answer may be yes.

Not walking so tall

If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday...

The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.

-- from US fails to measure up on 'human index'

Cheney's torture doctors

Earlier in [its] current series, All in the Mind heard from a psychology professor who resigned from the American Psychological Association or APA because of their refusal to ban their members from taking part in interrogations at CIA black sites like Guantanamo Bay. A hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmed just a few weeks ago that psychologists had overseen interrogations which included extremes of temperature and waterboarding. Doctors, nurses and psychiatrists’ associations have all banned their members from taking part in interrogations at all, but the APA only prohibits psychologists specifically from torture, not from interrogations. For the seventy members who have resigned and the four hundred with holding their subs, this isn’t enough. Now one member, Professor Steven Reisner has decided the only way to get the organisation to change its mind, is to run for its presidency. All in the Mind [15 July] asked him what more he wants the APA to do.

The ICC and Sudan

Gideon Rachman highlights an interesting debate on the ICC indictment of Omar al-Bashir.

Alex de Waal's guide appears on openDemocracy. de Waal himself thinks al-Bashir's actions "will be driven by calculations of internal threat more than by his assessment of how threatening the ICC or the UN troops in Sudan might be."

So it's not just me

I am swallowed up. I live for an income of £250 & work all day & often from 9am until 1am. It takes me so long because I fret & fret . . . My self criticism or rather my studied self contempt is now nearly a disease.

-- Edward Thomas in an early letter, quoted by Edna Longley in a reappraisal of his poetry that makes the case that, among other things, he was an ecological poet.

The base

I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea. -- says Barack Obama, not wishing to repeat Bush pere's error in building bases in Saudi. But how would Centcom wish to position U.S. forces to 'protect' Iraqi oil supplies?

But in all the op ed looks like a pretty good response to George Packer's comments (7 July) on Obama's Iraq problem.

P.S. 15 July: Obama speaks on U.S grand strategy here.

The teacher

His own awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: “Go out and read other things to try to get the truth.”

“The teacher probably doesn’t even remember,” Mr. Batebi said. “But he changed the course of my life.”

-- from a profile of Ahmad Betebi.

A few rotten apples

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.”

-- Frank Rich

Captain America

T. Boone Pickens outlines a plan to save America. He starts with a stark definition of how he sees the challenge:

Today, [the U.S.] imports almost 70% of [its] oil.

This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world's oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world's reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.

In fact, if we don't do anything about this problem, over the next 10 years we will spend around $10 trillion importing foreign oil. That is $10 trillion leaving the U.S. and going to foreign nations, making it what I certainly believe will be the single largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Pickens sees no need for 'new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation', but thinks the government must 'renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development'.

I used to confuse T. Boone Pickens with Slim Pickens of Dr Strangelove and Blazing Saddles fame. What a pity they are not the same person.

Elsewhere, Peter R. Orszag of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office gives his take on Climate Change Economics.

Ministry of Food

Felicity Lawrence:

there is an underlying tension throughout [Food Matters] that may explain why the Downing Street soundbites threw the food crisis back to individuals and their waste. It recognises that the agribusiness model of food production based on global competition has failed to deliver, but the government remains wedded to the idea that food markets, like all other markets, are best left to regulate themselves. It wants the food chain reshaped but does not want to edit our choices. It wants to run with the free market, yet trade in food has never been truly free.

Concentrations of corporate power in the global food system distort competition. The government has no plan to address them. The US and EU have retained trade barriers and agricultural protections as they urge poorer countries to liberalise food markets. Britain can't wean the US off its farm bills, nor a biofuels policy that diverts a third of the corn crop to petrol tanks at the expense of global food prices. Nor can it persuade the French to reform the common agricultural policy faster. Moreover, the market has no effective mechanisms for putting a price on the things that matter most: the nutritional, environmental and social costs of production.

Soundtrack

Here is the text of the poem sung on the hit Where the hell is Matt? (2008)

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Stream of Life by Rabindranath Tagore

The Icon

Robert Kaplan says George Bush thinks Israel is

an icon to be both supported and worshipped.

Arnaud de Borchgravew notes U.S. Congressional Resolution 362 and Senate Resolution 580, but concludes that

with three former U.S. CENTCOM commanders on record against the military option, it was hard to see how Israel could strike on its own -- without shutting the Persian Gulf down.

P.S. Simon Tisdall reports on internal divisions in Iran.

Are they with Stupid?

Home to only 4 percent of the world’s population, the [U.S.] slurps up about a quarter of the planet’s oil — and Americans’ daily use is nearly twice the combined consumption of the Chinese and Indians.

...Indeed, low-priced gasoline has long been part of the American social contract, according to Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican leader. While in office, Mr. Gingrich battled efforts to modulate demand through tools like increased gas taxes and tighter fuel standards, and he argues that voters won’t support such measures even now.

-- from American energy policy: asleep at the spigot.

Gee, thanks, Mr Gingrich!

Bacevich demolishes Kagan

in a review of The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

Funny weather

Results for a cartoon competition on climate change. But the winner is not exactly a barrel of laughs.

Fasten your seatbelt

Thomas Powers makes a compelling case that a U.S. attack on Iran would be folly. The day after his article was finished, Israel 'rehearsed an attack on Iran'. Mike Mullen has warned of a 'third front' for US, but is ambiguous about Israel's posture.

It may be that, despite the best efforts of some in the Pentagon and elsewhere, the U.S. administration remains inextricably linked to unhinged and vindictive folly on the part of its key ally and will, as Robert Gates has reportedly predicted, "create generations of jihadists [so that] and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America."

P.S. update 17:02 - an analysis here.

A new Last Supper

He was forced to drop plans to show the apostles' cups overflowing with blood and to project Christ's genitals on the refectory walls. But he said his goal was never to shock, but to help people look again at a work of art that has been devalued by superficial familiarity "on chocolate boxes and on T-shirts".

-- from Greenaway's hi-tech gadgetry highlights da Vinci for the laptop generation

'Believe Me, It’s Torture'

Watch the video here.

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Ian Buruma recently wrote:

the photographs [of torture and abuse from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib that we do see] embarrassed the United States, to be sure. But for the US government, this embarrassment might have actually helped to keep far greater embarrassments from emerging into public view. Preoccupied by the pornography of Abu Ghraib, we have been distracted from the torturing and the killing that was never recorded on film and from finding out who the actual killers were. Moral condemnation of the bad apples turned out to be a highly useful alibi. By looking like a bunch of gloating thugs, "Chuck" Graner, Ivan Frederick, et al. made the lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians who made, or rather unmade, the rules—William J. Haynes, Alberto Gonzales, David S. Addington, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Douglas J. Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney—look almost respectable.

Our 'friends' in the East

The tale of Mohammed Omer and Shin Bet.

Kyoto2

George Monbiot reviews Kyoto 2 by Oliver Tickell. I am on record praising the book too (e.g. here), and stand by this.

I have also said that one needs to think hard about the challenges that setting up a system like Kyoto2 presents. How, for example, would producers of fossil fuels (from, say, Saudi Aramco and PDVSA to Gazprom and those seeking to exploit the Athabasca tar sands), plus the governments who control or tax them be convinced that it is their least bad option? What if they cannot be? What if they engage in world-class delaying tactics? How to win round those who are already heavily invested in, for example, a continuation of the current emissions capping and trading regime(s)?

As Nick Stern makes clear in a recent interview, he still buys the case for cap-and-trade, and believes it should be a key part of the Copenhagen agreement in 2009. I wonder if he dismisses an idea like Kyoto2 (if he does) on the grounds of expediency -- "We have to make an agreement with the institutions we have got now" -- or others? And I wonder what a champion of auctions such as Paul Klemperer thinks of the idea.

It looks likely that, rightly or wrongly, Tickell's proposal will continue to run into (and where policies are decided be defeated by) the 'standard' argument which in outline goes roughly, 'it's taken at least fifteen years to get to the current arrangement. There are significant flaws in, for example, the ETS and CDM, but the good news is that we can now learn lessons from what has gone wrong, catch the cheats, fix the flaws and move forward. What *really* matters is to get political agreement on emission reductions, and on that hard challenge Kyoto2 offers no more of a solution than anyone else'.

I'd like to see a stronger riposte to this standard argument than I have seen to date.

[Stern is most conspicuously challenged from the 'right' by people who think he wants to spend more money now to protect present and future lives from the impacts of climate change than the economics warrants, but he is also attacked from the 'left' by, for example, George Monbiot here. See also No polar bear left behind, Tax not Trade and To cap or to tax .]

Operación Arbusto-Triunfo

Today, the question hanging over Iraq is whether its natural endowment will be used to help create a sustainable new state, or will instead be managed in ways that reward the cronies and allies of the country whose army toppled Mr. Hussein. Or perhaps both at the same time.

-- says Peter S. Goodman.

Reports and analysis from Platform here.

Discounting rhetoric

In a recent interview, Nicholas Stern turns a criticism of his team's use of discount rates in their report on the economics of climate change on its head:

Applying a 2 per cent pure time discount...means that you assign half the value to somebody born today to someone who is 35 years old. I would not discriminate against future generations like that.

It probably shows just how out of touch I am, but I hadn't seen the issue framed like this before. I'd be interested to know: would some serious thinkers see it as just a rhetorical trick? If they do, would they think it could still be useful?

P.S. 2 July: The comments to this post by Clive Bates, Ian Christie and Roger Levett are well worth reading. But the second of the three is an uncorrected duplicate of Clive Bates's first comment, and should be ignored. Read comments 1, 3 and 4.

Paying for it

A comment posted in a thread occasioned by Jonathon Porritt on Green prudence :

Alex Lockwood makes a useful addition to this thread. He and some others will be aware that stabilisation at 450ppmv, never mind 550 may pose very large risks -- risks that may come to seem unacceptably high once they are better understood. James Hansen and some colleagues recommend 350 (see also the campaign group 350.org). It may be that the only 'safe' concentration is even lower - close to pre-industrial levels!

It's hard to see how this can be achieved without a vast array of policies and technologies including, even, scrubbers of the kind championed by Wally Broeker.

Broeker suggests the scrubbers could remove CO2 for around $10 to $20 per tonne. On top of that you have sequestration cost, assuming sequestration is feasible. And as Broeker states, this would only be a part of a solution -- that is, we'd to have a wholesale green energy revolution, massively increase efficiency and much else besides as well.

Maybe the costs are close to impossible to characterize beyond arm waving at this stage. They might be on the order of defense budgets as a percentage of GDP - tat is something like twice the 2% of GDP I understand Stern is now talking about. How many election cycles, economic downturns and other events of a bumpy nature before that becomes an acceptable idea for journalists, politicians and others, if it ever does?

Fun in the sun

...according to Seymour Hersh in Preparing the Battlefield.

Blink

From books I would quite like to be reading. One:

Every time you blink there are ten flashes of lightning in the earth's atmosphere.

Two:

Happiness depends on being free, and being free depends on being courageous...But the man who can most truly be accounted courageous is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet and what is terrible, and then goes out to meet what is to come.

The first quote is from The Atlantic by Andrew O'Hagan, the second is from Thucydides, as quoted by Philip Bobbit in Terror and Consent.

Peaking into the future

Ian Sample does a good job reporting on pinch points and crisis scenarios for the global oil supply (Oil: The final warning). But he is overstating it to say all viable alternatives for transport fuels have hit the skids.

'All' that's needed are bold policies to: 1) ratchet up fuel efficiency standards -- the opposite, if you like, of the Bush administration's attempts to water them down and obstruct other actors such as the state of California; and 2) serious investment in low emission alternatives of which an early example may be the Tesla Motors roadster that 'can go 250km between charges at a running cost of less than 1 US cent per kilometre'.

These are big asks, but far from politically infeasible. A nasty, but not too large shock to the global system of the kind that Sample describes might be just the job to concentrate minds towards these necessary changes.

Failing that, further pressures on oil supply may have additional adverse consequences such as stimulating a boom in synfuels from coal, which is abundant but hugely polluting without CCS.

Broken young lives in Britain

Lynsey Hanley on the young soldiers who survive, and a report that a 12 year old boy had terrorist murder videos on his mobile.

Debts, past and future

Greg Palast (Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Oil Spill) gives his account of a broken promise in the first world:

[The] Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

Mike Davis (Welcome to the next epoch) piles on the pessimism regarding prospects for global equity:

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.

Elsewhere, Simon Donner takes a dispassionate look at emissions scenarios.

Standard Operating Procedure

A terrorist outrage shortly before the election—or, more cost-effectively, a terrorist video attacking McCain and/or praising Obama—would be powerful evidence that Al Qaeda wants McCain to win, in hopes that he would continue such policies as bleeding American military strength into the Iraqi desert, facilitating the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, promoting Islamist extremism by vowing to occupy Iraq permanently, and confirming “blood for oil” suspicions by arranging no-bid petroleum contracts for American energy corporations. In 2004, remember, an Al Qaeda video of this type put Bush over the top.

-- from Black Ops by Hendrik Hertzberg

Learning not to hate

Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good. -- Nicholas Kristof.

Oil be damned

Put the oil chiefs on trial says Hansen.

Meanwhile, Obama 'in bed' with ethanol crowd.

Angst frisst seele auf

Just because the fear exists, it doesn't necessarily follow that what is feared does too.

- writes Seth Freedman.

Naked lies

Finally, the Oil, notes TomDispatch

But it's not quite right that oil hasn't been acknowledged by the mainstream. As Gideon Rachman recently reminded us, both John McCain and Alan Greenspan have basically said Iraq was about oil.

Gone walkabout

No more grains of sand will wash across this site for a little while.

bad and dangerous

MPs should vote down 42 days detention without charge. The innocent will suffer, the basis of law will be threatened and terrorism aided - says Anthony Barnett.

The Clintstones

Realclearpolitics links to a good summary in The Economist of why Hillary Clinton went down.

Judith Warner is acute on sexism and the zeitgeist, but Chrystia Freeland is still right (Hillary Clinton's real lesson for women):

feminists need not be too heartbroken at their heroine's loss. The truth – and it is one worth remembering this week as paeans to Mrs Clinton's stalwart campaigning come pouring in – is that the New York senator was always an imperfect standard-bearer for the cause of female advancement in the US. Even her harshest critics admit she is smart, tough, disciplined and incredibly hard-working – but none of those sterling qualities negates the biographical fact that the US's first credible female contender for the White House owes her national political career to marrying the right guy.

In using her marriage – notably her eight years as first lady, which was often invoked as evidence that she would be "ready on day one" – as her launch pad, Mrs Clinton has more in common with the wives and daughters who inherited high office in dynasty-friendly regimes in south-east Asia and Latin America. It contrasts with leaders such as Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher, who were elected to run Group of Seven high-income countries under their own steam.

Struggles

To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed. The best hope for both their countries now is for the voters of Zimbabwe to be allowed to show their courage on June 27th and liberate themselves.

-- from Struggles by Philip Gourevitch.

'Climate Change and the Fate of the Amazon'

Timmons Roberts circulates a note that the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B has recently released online for free download the full special issue on Climate Change and the Fate of the Amazon.

To coincide with publication, Royal Society Publishing has also set up an online forum, dedicated to the same subject.

Articles here. Forum here.

[In Papua New Guinea, a study finds that he countries forests were being cleared or degraded at a rate of 1.4% per year in 2002, increasing to 1.7% per year in 2007. If clearing and degradation continues unchecked, over half of the forest that existed when PNG became independent from Australia in 1975 will have been destroyed by 2021, according to the report. The Brazilian Amazon is losing forest at the rate of 0.9% per year (New Scientist).]

Carbon bizarre

in one case a company is earning truly staggering sums of money from the carbon credits it is receiving - perhaps as much as $500m (£250m) over a period of 10 years - for a project it says it would have carried out without the incentive of the CDM.

-- from a report by Mark Gregory, BBC World Service.

Chinadialogue's first video podcast

Sun Zhe's public transport adventure.

Fantastic

'War, please'

Ehud Olmert says Iran's nuclear programme must be stopped by "all possible means".

Martyrdom init

With an alleged plot to blow up airliners featuring in the news, one impression I get from looking at videos of some of the accused (here, here and here) is that these guys are not the sharpest tools in the box. If that's correct, then it may be a hopeful sign - although not for the English educational system, which seems to be failing to promote 'intergroup contact'.