Heat

Take all the power stations in the United States. Together, they produce almost 5000 gigawatts of electricity - enough to boil several billion kettles simultaneously.

Now imagine building another five power stations for every one that already exists in the United States. That is about the amount of electricity generation that the world is on track to add over the next 20 years. And three-quarters of the new stations will use fossil fuels. -- Energy agency warns of 'irreparable' damage

Tear it down

Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.

-- Slavoj Zizek

New nuclear in Britain

UK government fast tracks nuclear power, never mind the extraction footprint, without having worked out what to do with the waste, and reckless of cost.

One path leading to another

Road shining like river uphill after rain.

-- a line found on a slip of paper in Edward Thomas's diary after his death at the battle of Arras. RM

Loose nukes

The Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

-- Seymour Hersch

G_d's work!

Rejoice and thanks be to G_d, I am saved. Lloyd Blankfein has explained that G_dman Sachs is doing G_d's work on Earth. Verily, His beneficence is infinite. Praise be unto His Name!

And here was me thinking that, as Jon Jost put it, there was some kind of racket at work. Cursed be my evil past. I once was blind but now I see.

Blankfein: New Pope, or greater manifestation of a Higher Power?

U.S. unemployment, on a broad measure, is 17.5%

Pinker or Lanier?

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.

-- Steven Pinker

If the new world brought about by digital technologies is to enhance Darwinian effects in human affairs, then digital culture will devour itself, becoming an ouroboros that will tighten into a black hole and evaporate. Unless, that is, the Pirates can become immortal through technology before it is too late, before their numbers are overtaken, for instance, by the high birth rates of retro religious fanatics everywhere. This race for immortality is not so hidden in the literature of digital culture. The digital culture expressed by the Pirates is simultaneously nihilist and maniacal/egocentric.

-- Jaron Lanier

Blockade

The Israeli blockade on Gaza includes a ban on toys,reports Lawrence Wright.

Strange planet

The Tao-Rusyr caldera and Kal'tsevoe Lake on Onekotan, one of the Kuril Islands.

Look no rabbit

Writers are sometimes likened to illusionists, but I'm not sure that's the right analogy – for the illusionist the rabbit is in the hat and the trick is to disguise how it got there. For the writer there is no rabbit, and there is no hat, and there never was and never will be.

-- Samantha Harvey

Waste

The 65th bomb killed Olaf Schmid

Faster

A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes.

-- Reuters

Put quite simply, the life of [the British
 statesman in 1905] was superior [to that of the super-connected California company executive of 2016] because he was
 allowed rest and reflection, his
contemplation could seek its own level, and
 his tranquility was unaccelerated. While he
was in his time a member of a privileged
class unburdened by many practical
necessities, today most Americans have
similar resources and freedoms, and yet
they, like their contemporaries in even the
most exalted positions, have chosen a
different standard, closer to that of the [frenetic company executive].

...Requisite, I believe, for [the good life] are the discipline, values, and
clarity of vision that tend to flourish as we
grapple with necessity and to disappear
when by our ingenuity we float free of it.

-- Mark Helprin (1996)

Death and the contrarians

George Monbiot reflects on link between climate science contrarianism/denial and the psychology of vital lies, entitlement and exceptionalism.

Whether or not there is link between old age and contrarianism/denial is an open question. My guess is that there is a stronger correlation with other factors, including education attainment, pre-existing political and cultural beliefs, and immediate life experience and expectations.

On the question of how to confront the growth of contrarianism/denial in the face of even more compelling scientific evidence, one place to start could be IPPR's recent document Consumer Power: A Communications Guide for Mainstreaming Lower-Carbon Behaviour. Its checklist goes:

1. “Don’t focus on climate change"
2. “Focus on saving money now”
3. “Prevent the rebound effect” (in which people spend money saved through low-carbon behaviours on other, high-carbon practices)
4. “Talk about carbon pollution, not CO2 emissions”
5. “Satirise high-carbon behaviours”
6. “Make lower-carbon options desirable”
7. “Remember that being in control matters” (e.g. with regard to controlling personal energy costs)
8. “Make it fun”
9. “Avoid guilt and the ‘environmental’ label”
10. “Use messengers that ‘keep it real’”

But clearly we need more than that.

Courage

The story of Mahmoud Vahidnia. Via AS.

P.S. 6 Nov: or was it a put-up job?

Debacle

In Afghanistan's disreputable 2009 presidential election, everyone's a loser. Hamid Karzai's "victory", achieved by fraud and now by default, has left him a tarnished, diminished figure. The US administration that orchestrated the whole process still lacks the credible partner in Kabul it says is essential for success.

The UN's reputation for probity lies critically wounded in the gutter, a victim of inaction and bitter infighting among officials. Nato's mission looks even more rudderless and ill-defined than before. The cause of the Afghan people, bemused and terrorised by turns, is no further forward and may in truth have been set back.

-- Simon Tisdall

P.S. 2 Nov: Andrew Sullivan:

The surge has failed in Iraq to create the national unity it was designed to achieve; and its security achievements are just not replicable in Afghanistan. Expecting Karzai to reform now when he is in a civil war and just defeated his opponent makes no sense at all. Enormous pressure on him for years made no discernible difference.

Many

This is perplexing but fascinating:

If observers are an integral part of the cosmic formula, then it may not matter how many universes exist - just how many a single observer can tell apart. If the observer is a person, that depends on how many bits of information the brain can process. "Based on the number of synapses in a typical brain, a human observer can register 10 ^16," says Linde. That means humans can differentiate 10^10^16 universes, which is much more manageable than the 10^10^10,000,000 Linde and Vanchurin found to start with.

See also a report on Quantum to Cosmos.

Life explained

Jessica Hagy via Andrew Sullivan

350

Two of 143 photos and counting

New Zealand:


The DRC:

Science, imagination, art

I wrote here that "scientific and technological possibilites...lay the path and...by and large human imagination and politics follow."

Some writers and artists appear to be sensitive to the very frontiers of scientific understanding in their time. Walter Benjamin wrote of Franz Kafka that he was a contemporary of modern physics. "When you read a passage from Eddington's Nature of the Physical World, it's almost as if you're listening to Kafka."

A photo by Eddington of the 1919 eclipse

Footnote

[1] Letter to Gershom Scholem (1938). "Kafka lives in a complementary world," writes Benjamin, alluding to Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. Kafka also anticipated political trends. Benjamin continues:

...the reality that now presents itself as ours -- theoretically in modern physics and in practice by military technology --...is now almost beyond the individual's capacity to experience, and...Kafka's world, often so serene and pervaded by angels, is the exact complement of his age, which is preparing to do away with considerable segments of this planet's population. In all likelihood, the public experience corresponding to this private one of Kafka's will be available to the masses only on the occasion of their extermination.

Nooks

Nuclear power is the lazy option. Stick up a few more reactors, don't say too much about costs per kilowatt hour (let alone costs for each tonne of CO2 abated), dump the responsibility of dealing with the waste on future generations, and don't worry too much about the state of the grid or the impact on renewable energy.

-- Jonathon Porritt

When France embarked on an aggressive program of building nuclear capacity — a 40- fold increase in 25 years from the late 1970s — annual emissions from the electricity and heat sector fell by 6 per cent, but total fossil emissions declined by only 0.6 per cent annually.

-- Clive Hamilton

Oops

Clive Hamilton thinks it may be too late to prevent catastrophic climate change:

under the most optimistic assumptions about the timing and extent of global greenhouse gas emission reductions, cumulative emissions over the next few decades will result in atmospheric concentrations reaching 650 ppm of CO2-e, associated with warming of 4°C or more before the end of the century, a temperature not seen on Earth for 15 million years. It now seems almost certain that, if it has not occurred already, within the next several years enough warming will be locked into the system to set in train positive feedback processes that will overwhelm any attempts to cut back on carbon emissions. Humans will be powerless to stop the shift to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life.

Graph from David Archer via John Schellnhuber (slides here, page 11)

We moderns have become accustomed to the idea that we can modify our environment to suit our needs, and have acted accordingly for some three hundred years. We are now discovering that our intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself. We are discovering that humans cannot regulate the climate; the climate regulates us. The prospect of runaway climate change challenges our technological hubris and our Enlightenment faith in reason. The Earth may soon demonstrate that, ultimately, it cannot be tamed and that the human urge to master nature has only roused a slumbering beast.

Influenza A

While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading [Swine Flu], I'm worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague.

-- Robin Cook. HPAI A(H5N1) + HINI, and no happy ending

Superfreakocontrarians

A useful addition at Real Climate on why Levitt and Dubner are so far off beam.

The trap

For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.

-- David Bromwich

Six insights on Congo

Martin Shaw summarizes Gérard Prunier:

* the Rwandan genocide was a decisive moment in modern African history;

* most of the states that became involved did so because of limited, local interests;

* the partial nature of most states' interests, combined with their restricted mobilising capacities..., explain why this was not really "Africa's great war", but rather a messy, episodic conflict across but some areas of the vast DRC;

* the Hutu Power forces in Rwanda in 1994 were unique in organising a large-scale, nationwide campaign of genocide. But genocidal violence (massacres, rape, expulsions) has remained intermittent throughout the conflicts in the DRC in the subsequent decade and a half, and been employed by many of the parties;

* the Rwandan...government of Paul Kagame was unique in having a sustained interest in continuing the Congo wars, and determined to use the west's guilt at failing to stop the 1994 genocide to produce impunity for itself;

* many western governments and NGOs were (most of the time) duly blinded by their guilt to acknowledge the hardship Rwanda's campaign was inflicting on the DR Congo's population, or to raise their voices against it.

Complex conflicts across northeastern Africa, centred on Sudan "still cast a long shadow that reaches into the DRC."

1688 and all that

British press banned from reporting Parliament by Private Firm

Afplex

[LBJ] was a member of a minority group, defined not in racial or ethnic terms but in terms of "alienat[ion] from the self by a double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands action and more action to define the most rudimentary borders of identity."

"To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

-- William Astore cites an unlikely pair: Norman Mailer and Sun Tzu.

But a central reason for the continuation of the war is that it is good business.

Dreaming wakes

Giulio Tononi...is particularly concerned by the possibility that parts of our brain might be going offline without us even realising it. "In many respects, it would be like having a temporary mental disorder without anybody, including yourself, being aware of it," he says.

-- from Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone?

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

-- George Santayana

'Scary'

[Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide] similar to those now commonly regarded as adequate to tackle climate change were associated with sea levels 25-40m (80-130 ft) higher than today.

-- BBC report

Afghanistan

Tom Englehardt compares the US and Nato in Afghanistan to the Martians in H G Wells's War of the Worlds.

It's a striking comparison, but I wonder if Ahmed Rashid is right: this is a war of necessity, it just needs to be fought smarter.

Almighty God's Banana

via Next Nature:

Home™

A good article on Maya Lin's What is Missing? (Hat tip BM)

Lin's Vietnam memorial is the greatest monument relating to industrialized warfare that I know of. How it got approval an imperial city like DC escapes me. Perhaps a Strong America Emergency Executive for the Protection of the Constitution under president Sarah Palin will relocate it.

The article on What is Missing? is nearly overwhelmed by obtrusive advertisements -- an odd effect, if not quite as odd as the start of Yann Arhus-Betrand's Home, where the opening title is constructed from brand names in the Gucci group.

Communicating the emergency

The Safe Climate Australia campaign is more than three months in. Their video Run for a safe climate remains one of the best bits of communication around.

Hat tip Climate safety.

Sympathy without the devil

"Attacking [religious fundementalists] is easier than understanding [them]," says Simon Donner. "It also does more harm than good."

Consider the Otin-taii declaration.

Condemned to repeat it

The beauty-contest analogy helps explain why real-estate developers, condo flippers, and financial investors continued to invest in the real-estate market and in the mortgage-securities market, even though many of them may have believed that home prices had risen too far. Alan Greenspan and other free-market economists failed to recognize that, during a speculative mania, attempting to “surf” the bubble can be a perfectly rational strategy. According to orthodox economics, professional speculators play a stabilizing role in the financial markets: whenever prices rise above fundamentals, they step in and sell; whenever prices fall too far, they step in and buy. But history has demonstrated that much of the so-called “smart money” aims at getting in ahead of the crowd, and that only adds to the mispricing...

...During the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed in order to separate the essential utility aspects of the financial system—customer deposits, check clearing, and other payment systems—from the casino aspects, such as investment banking and proprietary trading. That key provision was repealed in 1999. The [Obama] Administration has shown no interest in reinstating it, which means that “too big to fail” financial supermarkets, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, will continue to dominate the financial system. And, since the federal government has now demonstrated that it will do whatever is necessary to prevent the collapse of the largest financial firms, their top executives will have an even greater incentive to enter perilous lines of business. If things turn out well, they will receive big bonuses and the value of their stock options will increase. If things go wrong, the taxpayer will be left to pick up some of the tab.

-- from Rational Irrationality by John Cassidy

Towards a Green Stoic philosophy

The philosopher John Gray recently wrote:

stoicism will be needed if civilised life is to survive an environmental crisis that cannot now be avoided. Walking on lava requires a cool head, not one filled with fiery dreams.[1]

As I’ve written previously, I find this view quite compelling. But what would this kind of stoicism look like? How would it work?

When someone is described as stoical the adjective is usually coupled with ‘grimly’: the caricature would be a guy in a toga who falls on his sword without complaint. But the human animal needs more than sang froid and an extremely practical cast of mind, essential as those qualities are in current circumstances. [2] We need some form of hope, albeit a toughened one that is ready to take many more punches, and we need some sort of vision. We need, I suggest, ‘green stoicism’. [3]

The ‘green’ in this coupling refers to a kind of environmentalism that is as undeceived and unsentimental as we can achieve. It recognizes (among other things) that evolutionary processes and earth systems are indifferent. [4] It sees grandeur in life as well as pain and tragedy. But it also seeks for space where intelligent decisions are sometimes possible, particularly as processes, systems and emergent properties in physics, biology, ecology, neuroscience and so on become better understood.

And the ‘stoicism’ is informed by more than grim determination to do the right thing even when defeat seems the most likely outcome (important though that is). While it is deeply concerned with understanding destructive aspects of human nature such as our susceptibility to fear and anger and to appetites that run out of control, it also celebrates a tradition of exploring and cultivating the virtues and human flourishing. [5] It holds that to some extent we can manage and channel our drives and those of others to beneficial ends. Our ability to do so may be limited and often destined for defeat but it is better than nothing.

Ancient stoicism, broadly speaking, said that we must live in accordance with nature. Four or five hundred years of modern science have given us much more sophisticated models of nature to work with: progress in science is real. [6] 'Green stoicism' would build on this real knowledge for an approach to human affairs that is neither Hobbesian nor Panglossian. [7]


Footnotes

[1] A review of Uncivilisation: Dark Mountain Manifesto. The metaphor doesn’t quite work: it is impossible to walk on lava. Closer, perhaps, to envisage a walk on a thin crust of cooled rock above a magma chamber. If it erupts beneath our feet then, stoic or not, we're toast. But if eruption is not imminent then we may have some room, albeit temporary and limited, to make choices. We may be able to move to another part of the landscape where we are less likely to be in the path of lava flows or noxious gasses. There may even be things we can do to reduce the likelihood of an eruption.

[2] See for example, the proceedings of the 4 Degree Conference, and much else including Michael Klare on Energy Xtremism

[3] Michael Benedikt has used the phrase 'environmental stoicism' to denote "the ability to endure or tune out places that are cheap or neglected, depressing or demeaning, banal, uncomfortable, or controlling." An interesting idea but not what I have in mind.

[4] Lao Tzu: "Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs." Charles Darwin: “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult -- or at least I have found it so -- than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.” James Lovelock: “Nature is not fragile; we are.”

[5] Eudaimonia does not require hedonism in the sense we use that term today. As Epicurus put it, "it is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly."

[6] A beautiful example here. But (added 8 Oct) Gray, presumably, would not agree. "We imagine that the theories we frame about the world are not only useful, but also true." This is, he says, "a highly questionable assumption". On the other hand, he has just referred to the possibility of a multiverse, an idea that derives from the contemporary cosmology.

[7] See The human frame.

Four

Two degrees is important politically but in terms of what is going to happen, I think a lot of people think it is a lost cause already. Four degrees is highly plausible given the evidence and it is different enough from two degrees that we can start exploring the difficulties and what the world will look like.

-- Mark New

A few details on Nature's climate blog.

Deep unease

Perhaps I'm overreacting and in reality there's little to worry about, but with the increase in the number and distribution of noctilucent clouds possibly linked to anthropogenic warming I have to wonder: beauty or sign of trouble come?

"Pwwwuuuagharrgh!"

Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds Of Secret Arctic Lairs, reports the Onion.

Also, Nadir of Western Civilisation reached.

'Obama's JFK moment?'

The White House is obviously beginning to have doubts about its policy, just six months after it was announced. There are good reasons for skepticism. The fraud-ridden Afghan election of August 20th made it clear that the government we’re trying to support in Kabul is even less reliable and legitimate than most people thought. That could be a deal-breaker all by itself in a counterinsurgency, which is premised on the notion that the government wants outside help in improving governance. As Major General Burt Field, Holbrooke’s military adviser, told me, “What if the premise is false?”

-- George Packer, reading the McCrystal report

Andrew Sullivan picks up on Packer's suggestion that Obama may be more like J.F.K than Johnson: "rational, coldly objective in the heat of events, unlikely to allow his advisers and his ego to destroy his Presidency by getting the country deeper into a war he never felt fully committed to."

But Packer himself is not sure:

the alternatives [outlined by McCrystal] were already rejected by Obama’s strategy review, and since then no one has made a persuasive case why they would work any better.

Slush puppies

As it's reported that thinning glaciers are driving polar ice loss, Alex Hartley wants you to become a citizen of nowhereisland. And you won't even have to move there as he may be bringing the rocks to a town near you.

Reason and the almighty dollar

Rand's funeral was attended by some of her prominent followers, including Alan Greenspan. A six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket

-- from the Wiki entry on Ayn Rand, which also notes that she felt she could only recommend three great philosophers in world history: Aristotle, Aquinas and herself.

We send our waste, they send their people

When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland. According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste. People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages. The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost "something like $1,000 a tonne." On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe's picture of Dorian Gray: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.

-- George Monbiot on toxic dumping.

Gangsters

While unfurling the tape in front of a "too big to fail" bank, he became aware of a group of New York's finest approaching him. Moore has a long history of dealing with policemen and security guards trying to shut him down, but in this case he knew he was, however temporarily, defacing private property. And his shooting schedule didn't leave room for a detour to the local jail. So, as the lead officer came closer, Moore tried to deflect him, saying: "Just doing a little comedy here, officer. I'll be gone in a minute, and will clean up before I go."

The officer looked at him for a moment, then leaned in: "Take all the time you need." He nodded to the bank and said, "These guys wiped out a lot of our Police Pension Funds." The officer turned and slowly headed back to his squad car. Moore wanted to put the moment in his film, but realized it could cost the cop his job, and decided to leave it out. "When they've lost the police," he told me, "you know they're in trouble."

- Arianna Huffington on a scene that didn't make it into Capitalism: A Love Story.

Frank Rich notes the WSJ's report that not a single C.E.O. from a top bank attended Obama's speech on Wall St. last week. "The speech sank with scant notice because there has been so little action to back it up and because its conciliatory stance was tone-deaf to the anger beyond the financial district."

China chokes

Ian Katz has a useful overview of how thinking and action on climate change goes in China - and how, not least, the immediate effects of local air and water pollution are near the top of people's concerns.

What will make it possible for the Chinese people to achieve on localized pollution as much as Western, especially U.S. campaigners did in the 1960s and 1970s? And how can they help the world not to miss the opportunities that -- if the film Earth Days is to be believed -- Westerners missed in the 1970s and beyond?

A stoic walks on lava

Both [Conrad and Ballard] were unsparing critics of civilisation, but they never imagined there was a superior alternative.

-- from John Gray's review of the Dark Mountain manifesto.

My published comments on the manifesto are here and here. Gray is probably right in this:

[Today], the belief that a global collapse could lead to a better world is ever more far-fetched. Human numbers have multiplied, industrialisation has spread worldwide and the technologies of war are far more highly developed. In these circumstances, ecological catas­trophe will not trigger a return to a more sustainable way of life, but will intensify the existing competition among nation states for the planet's remaining reserves of oil, gas, fresh water and arable land. Waged with hi-tech weapons, the resulting war could destroy not only large numbers of human beings but also much of what is left of the biosphere.

A scenario of this kind is not remotely apocalyptic. It is no more than history as usual, together with new technologies and ongoing climate change.

...stoicism will be needed if civilised life is to survive an environmental crisis that cannot now be avoided. Walking on lava requires a cool head, not one filled with fiery dreams.

P.S. Dougald Hine replies to Gray here.

Dreams

Zurich is if nothing else, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Banhoffstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.

But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion to dreams, are the Jungians...

-- Sara Corbett explores the Red Book

10:10 in Tibet

Andrew Dobson criticizes 10:10 for lacking political focus. I was more dyspeptic.

Dobson's suggestions for a real politics of climate change include:

join and campaign for the party with the most progressive and coherent socio-environmental policies in the next general election (even if it's a small party).

P.S. 17 Sep: Susan Kramer, reviewing Zac Goldsmith's book, makes the case that her party is at least making a serious attempt in the U.K.

P.P.S. Anthony Barnett has a good piece on what's wrong with the LibDems

The rage of stupid

A couple of examples yesterday, as if more were needed, of how anger, lack of education and plain stupidity make a strange brew.

A BBC reporter interviewed some BNP activists in Liverpool not far from where the British Trades Unions were holding their annual national conference. He asked them what they thought of the unions. One of the activists replied that the unions were communist internationalists, and wanted to keep them poor.

In London far right supporters of the English Defence League confronted pro-Palestinian protestors holding up banners saying "Justice for the murdered children of Gaza."

A light in winter

Only months after that March day in the hospital, I sat in my study preparing for a class on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and heard Una in another room gurgle and coo and then cry. I thought about how she would soon grow too old to play with me and then become too jaded to care about me and then leave home for somewhere else and only very seldom come back. I suddenly felt sadder than I ever had before. I felt the pain of losing her and the wonder of loving her. I adored her more for her imminent going. This wasn’t happiness, and it wasn’t pleasure. It was a more profound and durable experience, a moment encompassing both tragedy and euphoria, a child lost and a child found.

-- Eric G. Wilson

Interesting Canadian initiative

Without the tar sands, Canada's economy is toast. With them, Canada's per capita contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, will be so big that it could draw serious international sanctions, assuming that the rest of world agrees to start bringing emissions down soon. Barack Obama doesn't appear interested in enforcing U.S. law that would bar imports of dirty sources of energy, but sooner or later, that kind of pressure is likely to be expressed.

-- James Hrynyshyn

Heart of oak

Three days ago I read how rising sea levels are likely to affect at least twenty million people in Bangladesh. The challenge will be enormous, and perhaps there is much more to come.

I am concerned, but it doesn't hit me on an emotional level in the same way as the relatively minor possibility (here via here) that oak trees in Britain are likely to be severely affected by mid century.

My reaction may be morally indefensible: shouldn't I care about people more, however remote from own temporarily privileged position?

If there is a rationale, then perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we may lose trees that have thrived on these islands since the last Ice Age, whereas the vast numbers of people now living in the lowest lying parts of Bangladesh have only come there in the last few decades as a result of a population explosion and land shortage elsewhere. The oak trees have resonance in the mind of those who know and love these lands in part because as living forms they express slow change over long periods of time.

Dark times

There is some scepticism about the chances of a deal being reached at the NPT review conference in May, says Ms Tomero. Suspicion that the US and other nuclear powers are setting the rules to suit their own ends remains high. The last NPT review attempt in 2005 ended in a flop. Four years on, the stakes have been raised. If the 2010 conference goes the same way, the consequences will be grim – for the world’s security, prosperity and climate.

-- from Ed Crook and James Blitz in the FT on new nuclear

New models (2)

If science can take on God, it should not fear the market. Both are, after all, creations of man.

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth was not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents were met with less than a welcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination.

The economic model has broken, for good. It's time to stop pretending it describes our world.

-- Douglas Rushkoff

New models (1)

Sadly, the game-theory cynics may get the last laugh: we may be stuck in a suboptimal equilibrium—stuck because we are incapable of rising above our immediate, narrowly defined self-interest. But there is a wild-card escape possibility. It requires leadership. Players high up in the political system—who really do want the best-possible forecasts—could decide that it is worth investing a nontrivial share of their intelligence agencies’ budgets into a series of long-term forecasting tournaments designed to distinguish the more from the less promising forecasting approaches across policy problems. Strictly speaking, this would not be a rational choice for these leaders to make—because the budgetary reallocations will evoke howls of protest, and those responsible will be out of office long before the forecasting tournaments start yielding practically useful results. But building a robust capacity for learning—and learning how to learn—is not a bad legacy.

-- Philip Tetlock

Looking up

As an antidote to a previous gloomy post, here is Lewis Thomas:

I believe fervently in our species and have no patience with the current fashion for running down the human being as a useful part of nature. On the contrary, we are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language and can build metaphors as skillfully and precisely as ribosomes make proteins. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" for all of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music. Any species capable of producing, at this early, juvenile stage of its development -- almost instantly after emerging on earth by any evolutionary standard -- the music of Johann Sebasian Bach, cannot be all bad. We would to be able to feel more secure for our future, with Julian of Norwich at our elbow: "But all shall be well and shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." For our times have guilt we have Montaigne to turn to: "If it did not seem crazy to talk to oneself, there is not a day when I would not be heard growling at myself, 'Confounded fool. ' "

-- from The Youngest and Brightest Thing Around, republished in The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Acts of astonishing generosity

He’s jostled awake, a day later, by a Hutu woman about his mother’s age. She pulls Deo from the brush, discovers he’s a Tutsi and then, at extraordinary risk, saves him from beheading by telling Hutu guards that he’s her son. The scene suggests how, in the face of nightmares born of surface distinctions — of power exercising all of its destructive prerogatives — the seeds of mankind’s survival lie in the unexpected acts of kinship and kindness.

-- from Ron Suskind's review of Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Global weirding and the English summer

The dog days of August have slipped their leash and scarpered. The light, the weather and the feel of the landscape belong to early autumn now. Just as the huge combine harvesters roared across fields to suck up all the grain before rain flattened the crop, so we seem to have crashed into autumn without pausing to celebrate what little summer we've had. Like the apple windfalls being pecked smaller and smaller by blackbirds, summer memories are fading in the grass. Many trees are showing signs of colour change or, as in the case of horse chestnuts and poplars, a browning and shrivelling of leaves. The weather blows hot and cold, humid and breezy, bright and dull. A shower seems imminent but the sun comes out and it's really hot, then a lid of cloud gets screwed back on and it's dull and sticky again.

-- Paul Evans

Why we are fxxxed

George Monbiot does a good job in explaining the implications of work by Susan Solomon et al, Myles Allen et al, and Malte Meinhausen, although his 'rough sum' showing that we cannot afford to burn already known reserves was, I think, already old news when the Stern report articulated it some years ago, and the optimism at the end of his piece seems a bit strained.

As he rightly says, the 10:10 campaign will be on the wrong track if it allows business the get-out clause of reduced emissions intensity.

In the event that Britain does achieve an absolute reduction of 10% in its emissions within a year the impact on the global emissions trajectory will be very modest, and in any case few rapidly growing, up-and-coming countries will see Britain as a model.

Within Britain, if one were being hugely optimistic, he might imagine 20% of households and major players in the economy 'taking a [temperance] pledge' to reduce their carbon footprint by 10%: a 2% reduction in UK emissions that has no guarantee of being sustainable. Only a massive investment programme, most probably led by government, would do the job...or an economic meltdown on the scale of the old German Democratic Republic.

In 2007 I spent some time helping to convince the editor of the UN Human Development Report (for which I was contributing a background paper and some advice) that the 2007 report should endorse a 450ppm ceiling. At the time such the number was considered to be the very edge of what the mainstream would accept as rhetoric. My own view was that the sensible -- although obviously unachievable -- target should be way below 350 (something that Pachauri recently endorsed, but only as a human being).

I'm finding it increasingly hard to be optimistic these days. Over a game of chess I recently told Paul Kingsnorth that I was more sympathetic to the position outlined by George Monbiot in their recent exchange than I was to his: the consequences of giving up on 'civilisation' just seem too horrible to contemplate.

But whatever one's rhetoric of choice, the actual behaviour of industrial civilisation is more like the character Harry Angel played by Mickey Rourke in the movie Angel Heart. Or as it goes elsewhere, "I weep for you", the Walrus said, "I deeply sympathise."

Of course, it would be nice if, as is the case in so many predictions about the future, I were plain wrong. Perhaps the future isn't as bad as it used to be!

A cunning stunt

Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

-- from What's wrong with eco-stunts by Elizabeth Kolbert

Why there is no hope for the human race

There is, of course, but these make it harder:

status quo anxiety

inferred justification

Field notes from the Anthropocene

Henry Fountain notes estimates that some 25 billion tons of valuable agricultural soil is eroded every year, making human activity is as erosive as glaciers or the fastest rivers.

Oliver Morton (2007) mentions an estimate that the overall rate of sediment loss from the continents due to human activity is about three times the long term average due to geology alone.

An NYT editorial mentions that the potentially toxic effects of plastic in the ocean are only beginning to be appreciated.

Meanwhile,observes Cornelia Dean, the consequences of the release of large numbers of artificial nanoparticles into the environment is almost totally unknown.

Tavab TV

Laura Secor comments on show trials that only Seamus Milne and Hugo Chavez could love:

The nefarious plotters engaged in “exposing cases of violations of human rights,” training reporters in “gathering information,” and “presenting full information on the 2009 electoral candidates.” Apparently, the Iranian citizen is meant to consider it self-evident that the country’s national interest depends on concealing human-rights abuses, censoring the news, and obfuscating the electoral process.

Recalling echoes of the 1980s:

Ervand Abrahamian, the author of “Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran,” quotes a witness who said of the night a major leftist recanted, “Something snapped inside all of us. We never expected someone of his reputation to get down on his knees. Some commented it was as revolting as watching a human being cannibalize himself.”

But Secor concludes optimistically:

Iran was a radical place in the eighties. Both the regime and much of its opposition were absolutist, utopian, messianic, apocalyptic. Forced confessions, so effective in that climate, convey little more than illegitimacy when they are used against an opposition that is asking for the counting of votes and the rule of law. Today’s show trials are a sign of how much Iran has changed in the past thirty years, and how poorly its regime has kept pace.

Gandhi's children

They want to destroy our movement because it is nonviolent....We need our land.It is how we make our living. Our message to the world is that this wall is destroying our lives, and the occupation wants to kill our struggle.

-- Abdullah Abu Rahma, a village teacher, quoted in Bilin Journal

There will be peak

or maybe not, according to Michael Lynch at MIT. He says:

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota.

Perspectives on our time

Alex Foti on Climate Anarchists vs Green Capitalists (hat tip DP)

And (via Andy Revkin) Chris Jordan on running the numbers:

Compounding [the] challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.

Reflections on the hate mongers in North America (and Europe)

Top marks Tim Harford & co for their scrutiny of 'Muslim Immigration', and to Pankaj Mishra for taking to pieces Christopher Caldwell's recent book, 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.'

Mishra concludes:

Writing in 1937 about the minority then most despised in Europe, Joseph Roth predicted that "Jews will only attain complete equality, and the dignity of external freedom, once their 'host nations' have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others". This proved to be too much to ask of Europe in 1937. But the moral challenge has not gone away - civilisation remains an ideal rather than an irreversible achievement - and the dangers of leaving it unmet are incalculable.

So it goes

...All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

-- a report from Dresden

Fiddling with geoengineering

More Lomborgism: Realclimate on a biased economic analysis of geoengineering.

Eat it

Solving the other problem – the advertising that feeds our desire to acquire – might be more tricky. In an ideal world, it would be a counter-advertising campaign to make conspicuous consumption shameful.

"Advertising is an instrument for construction of people's everyday reality, so we could use the same media to construct a cultural paradigm in which conspicuous consumption is despised," [says William Rees of UBC]. "We've got to make people ashamed to be seen as a 'future eater'."

-- from Consumerism is eating the future (see also Hungry Ghosts).

Beyond blindness

Violence and blindness: the case of Uchuraccay is a remarkable piece by James R Mensch.

On the day I viewed, openDemocracy had as its 'thought for the day' this from Alan Ginsburg:

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.

Anything but emissions cuts for the rich

says Bjorn Lomborg:

He is concerned that the United Nations-led consensus that a climate treaty must focus on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries is mistaken.

“It’s a costly way to achieve very little,” he said.

Instead, Mr Lomborg argues, there are cheaper ways of halting temperature rises.

These include tackling sources of climate change other than carbon dioxide, such as methane and soot; investing in new tech­nologies; adapting to the effects of climate change; planting more forests; and weighing up whether emissions cuts are cheaper to do now or later.

Photo from Curse of the Black Gold by Ed Kashi (via Prix Pictet)

P.S. 9 August: Richard Littlemore is not impressed

You couldn't make it up

but they could, and did.

A short conversation about an old photo

can be found here.

Rilke wrote:

...Both hands stay
folded [...], going nowhere, calm
and now almost invisible, as if they
were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve...

John Berger wrote:

...The flower in the heart's
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

You must read this

Adam Hochschild on the rape of the Congo.

System failure (2)

Neither the administration, nor [the U.S.] political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.

-- Paul Krugman on rewarding bad actors

Sand

Deep-Sea News defends so-called niche blogs such as Through the Sandglass.

David Cameron's new friends

It has now been disclosed, as Kaminski should have done to the Conservative Party when nominated for Vice-President, that he has had fascist links – he was a member of Poland's notorious fascist National Revival (NOP) – and he tried, as its MP, to cover up one of the worst anti-Jewish atrocities in wartime Europe.

On July 10, 1941, Poles rounded up hundreds of Jews and put them in a barn on the outskirts of the village of Jedwabne. Egged on by the SS, the barn was set on fire. In 2001, the then president of Poland organised a national apology, but Kaminski opposed it.

Kaminski was pictured on Polish TV in 2000 using a homophobic term which even the interviewer says is offensive: Kaminski repeats it. He caused a storm at that time by using the pre-war anti-semitic slogan, "Poland for the Poles". He denies it.

Last week, Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's quality daily, said: "Kaminski isn't officially and completely anti-Semitic or homophobic, but at some point he recognised that these things could help him politically."

-- Edward Macmillan-Scott on the rise of "respectable fascism".

Traders

It is perhaps not surprising...that so many carbon traders used to work at Enron.

-- Financial Times

The 'best' solution to reducing emissions is (largely) higher taxes on carbon-intensive fuels. But that would take away revenue streams captured by special interests so it makes for harder politics. See system failure.

A downer on CCS

The Royal Society here in the UK and others (including independent analysts such as David MacKay) [1] support accelerated work and investment on CCS. In the light of experience at Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, Joe Romm revisits what he sees as four fundamental problems with the technology:

• expense
• scale
• permanence and transparency
• timing

Note

[1] see this post, and correction in the appended comment by Prof MacKay

Radovan's excellent adventure

'Dabic' [that is, Karadzic] also sought out a Belgrade clairvoyant, Dusan Janjic. Dabic expressed profound admiration for Janjic’s talents — specifically, his prowess in reading energy grids with something called a Multi-Zap Zapper.

"I had the intention of developing a method in which Dabic could heal our patients, holding one hand under the testicles and one on top of the testicles," explains Bojovic [nnother partner in alternative healing]. Unfortunately for infertile Serbs, Dabic's arrest ended the testicle experiments.

-- from Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure by Jack Hitt

Macht keine Dummheiten

When Shmuel Goldfein — it means something like Sam the Moneygrubber — made aliyah from Plotsk, he changed his last name to Barak (Lightning), and named his son Ehud, which means something like ‘popular.’ Sam the Moneygrubber begat Popular Lightning.

-- Tony Horowitz quotes Rich Cohen in a review of Israel is Real.

Plus ca change

The parallel with the failure to properly reform the banking system is striking. Self-regulation is still the watchword. Any threat of serious sanction for lying and corruption has been carefully and deliberately avoided. Like the bankers they so obediently service, politicians will return to business as usual at the earliest possible opportunity.

-- Guy Aitchison, OurKingdom

War music

Why is the American military using music [to break down prisoners]? After all, it could as easily use white noise, or ‘sonic booms’, Israel’s weapon of choice whenever it has wanted to frighten Lebanon without going to war. Moustafa Bayoumi, in an article in the Nation in 2005, suggested that music is used to project ‘American culture as an offensive weapon’. But if the use of American music is a blunt assertion of imperial power, why are metal and gangsta rap the genres favoured by interrogators at Gitmo? One reason [suggests Jonathan Pieslak, author of Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War] is that metal is uniquely harsh, with its ‘multiple, high-frequency harmonics in the guitar distortion’, and vocals that alternate between ‘pitched screaming’ and ‘guttural, unpitched yelling’. ‘If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a row, I’d go insane, too,’ James Hetfield of Metallica says. ‘I’d tell you anything you’d want to know.’ (One interrogator told Pieslak that he tried Michael Jackson on Iraqi detainees, but ‘it doesn’t do anything for them.’)

One can imagine other dissonant forms of music – serial music, or free jazz – being equally effective. But not many military interrogators listen to Schoenberg or Stockhausen – or, for that matter, to Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. The use of metal and rap, it turns out, mainly reflects the soldiers’ taste. As Pieslak shows, it’s the music many of them listen to when they’re ‘getting crunked’ – pumped up for combat missions. Songs like Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’ put them ‘in the mood’ to fight because their pounding, syncopated rhythms sound very like a volley of bullets being fired from an automatic gun, but the same songs are also deployed in interrogation, and in combat, to terrify people and break them down. It all depends on where you’re listening, and who controls the loudspeakers.

-- Adam Schatz, LRB

How to win

It is clear that the cautious language of science is now inadequate to inspire concerted change, even among scientists. We need a fundamentally different approach. Only then will scientists be in a position to throw down the ultimate challenge to the public: "We've done the work, we believe the results, now when the hell will you wake up?"

-- writes George Marshall in an article worth attention.

The noted climate scientist James Hansen, for one, has been far from cautious in his language for many years. Recently he even put his body on the line for arrest. Bring Hansen together with people who look more 'ordinary', as Greenpeace did in the film about their Kingsnorth action, and you may be on to a winner.

Without Hansen type figures on board it may be harder to persuade more people -- or so would seem to be the lesson from the Drax trial. You need both a scientific authority and 'someone like me'/'someone I like'.