"one school of thought, and a few nutters"

Robert Butler describes what sounds like a good essay by the novelist John Lanchester about climate change. The article, from the London Review of Books, is [update 16 March now online here]. From Butler's summary:

"Someone my age," writes John Lanchester..., "is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war"...There was a fact of life that combined "individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe". Then along came climate change. "I suspect we're reluctant to think about it because we're worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else."

"In respect of the science," writes Lanchester,"...there is one school of thought, and a few nutters. There is an urgent requirement in the public arena," he continues, "for the issue to be considered now as one of plain fact."

The mention of nuclear war resonates. See my post from last December, The day before yesterday.

The relations between politics and the arts are complex, especially when it comes to imagining catastrophe. What are the responsibilities of 'cultural workers' in times of crisis, and what to make of, for example, Danny 'Trainspotting' Boyle's Sunshine (Voiceover man: "Every second, somewhere in the Universe a Sun dies. In 2007 it will be ours")? Is it distraction, confusion and bogus science at a time we cannot afford to take our eye off the ball or is it (as I imagine the movie makers would riff) an artistic approach to facing and dealing with massive and inchoate fears?

Are you following this?

"Suddenly we realised, maybe the universe is a string-net liquid," says [Xiao-Gang] Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise". So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge from the deeper structure of the non-empty vacuum of space-time.

-- go here for more on the fabulous rise of Herbertsmithite.

Zegota

This is impressive.

Who guards

Little that's new, perhaps, in Tomdispatch on Seymour Hersch, but maybe this one is hidden in plain sight: that money siphoned off Iraqi oil is being used to fund activities in Iran. Even if it's true, it's unlikely we'll know for sure any time soon. In all events, the US situation still looks accountable in comparison to Britain's Lord Draysons, Trident and the BAe fraud debacle.

"anti-educational and misleading"

Carl Wunsch responds to Channel 4 and WAGTV on RealClimate.

For those in the UK, Sonny Kahn has advice on how to complain to Ofcom at comment 51 of Swindeled!.

"Greatest denial" - excessive alarmism?

Fred Pearce (in New Scientist) quotes Peter Wadhams as saying "the public needs to know that the policy-makers' summary [AR4], presented as the united words of the IPCC, has actually been watered down in subtle but vital ways by governmental agents before the public was allowed to see it" (see Climate report 'was watered down').

David Wadsell is quite extreme in his recent papers Feedback dynamics and the accelertion of climate change and Political Corruption of the IPCC Report?. In the latter he concludes:

The denial of anthropogenic climate change has been the most damaging deception ever perpetrated in the history of human civilisation. The decade and a half of resultant impotence and inactivity has lost us the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change, made it virtually impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change, and brought us face to face with the looming possibility of a major global extinction event of cataclysmic proportions.

Wadsell points a finger of blame at NOAA in particular. Even if this is credible, it is unlikely to be a sufficient explanation. There have been rumours, for example, that both the Chinese and Saudi delegations played key roles in the editing the final version of the text. Of course, as the whole process is closed we may never know.

Calls for "a little more transparency" in the IPCC process are well and good, but bear in mind that (as Steve Rayner , who is based inside an institution that was part funded by a powerful Saudi, pointed out yesterday on Radio 4) the evidence supporting the case for serious action on climate change was clear and compelling fifteen years ago.

[P.S. 22 March: Piers Forster and 20 co-ordinating lead authors publish a letter in 24 March issue of New Scientist saying that the magazine's article and editorial regarding Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment (and cited in this post) contain "several wrong statements and false claims". The full text of the letter is available here]

"The earth hath bubbles..."

Q. In the book, you often talk of selves as "souls", and of their size. What makes a soul larger?

A. It's not just about how much someone reflects other people in their brain, it's about how. It's a question of reflecting them with empathy, with the ability to put yourself in their place, to suffer along with them. I am a very deep believer in trying to see things from the viewpoint of other people, especially people who are suffering, and projecting myself into other people's mindsets as much as I can.

-- from In the end, we are all part of one another: Douglas Hofstader interviewed by Mike Holderness in New Scientist

It's not all gloom

A near Earth object (NEO) larger than 6km across, which could cause mass extinction, collides with Earth every 100 million years or so. Experts at the Planetary Defense Conference are reported agreeing that we are overdue for a big one.

So, if it's one, two or five million years late there's not too much to worry about then...

Face2Face

A couple of French guys called JR and Marco have a project called Face to Face (the is movie is good; be patient with the first 45 seconds). They are quoted as saying that Palestinians and Israelis are basically the same, "like twin brothers raised in different families".

UK emission targets

George Monbiot just broadcast an effective and engaging presentation of research indicating that the UK goverment is off track to deliver 30% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. This was a target, I think I heard him say, worth achieving. In his recent book Heat he says a cut of at least 90% cut in UK emissions by 2030 is necessary and feasible. That looks like a big jump between 2020 and 2030.

Brown Mouse and Mr. Alligator

Are afterlife beliefs so prevalent because "underlying them is [a human] inability to simulate our nonexistence”? Maybe yes, but maybe there's more to it than that. Darwin's God by Robin Marantz Henig reports some useful explorations, with Scott Atran on "belief in hope beyond reason" and the "tragedy of human cognition" in the article foreground.

Dumb and dumber

What [the chief of the US Air Force's Combat Command] uses the aircraft he does have in Iraq and Afghanistan, he risks ending up, as in central Afghanistan last week, dropping (literally) two tons of bombs on a house containing five women, three children and one man, killing them all, because a U.S. patrol thought it had seen two men carrying Kalashnikovs enter the compound the house was in. Thus are hearts and minds won.

--William Pfaff (IHT, 3 March)

Chávez "is no Castro"

This looks plausible:

"Venezuela is a troubled nation...but hardly a totalitarian one. Neither, however, is it in the throes of Cuban-style social revolution. Say what you like about Castro: in the face of overwhelming odds, he gave Cuba a world-class health service, a thriving biotech industry, and a free and flourishing education system. Under his rule, despite America's misguided economic blockade and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cuba's infant mortality rates fell below those of America; literacy soared. These achievements don't begin to justify Castro's awful human rights record, but they are astonishing feats of social engineering...Chávez, with far greater resources and in the face of far fewer obstacles, has accomplished far less."

-- Ben Whitford.

UNCSW

Solana Larsen writes:

"I am in the United Nations this week (and next) blogging a meeting about women called The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) for openDemocracy.net.

It's an important event because it sets new international standards for government to improve the conditions of women - this year's theme is ending violence and discrimination against girls. Forty-five government are here, and hundreds of women's organizations.

http://statusofwomen.wordpress.com

Of course, that doesn't mean anyone cares about it.

It used to be a big media event, but this year only 10 journalists have registered for credentials.

I've been hearing nothing but horror stories all week about forced sex, forced marriages, AIDS, circumcision, discrimination, violence - the sad thing is that the UN hasn't really committed enough resources to doing anything about it. Neither have governments.

Imagine my surprise to see tons of anti-abortion material lying around the event too. Christian right-wing women's organizations are using the meeting as a platform to campaign against family planning and the rights of women to have a safe, legal abortion."

...engendered is the flower

A gloriously sunny day today where I live, and the promise of spring is finally here. Helping to sustain hope was another nice piece of radio from Open Country, coming today from the far west of Wales. Good to learn, too, of the first new translation into English of the Mabinogion in some years, and an opera based upon one of its stories (with libretto by an Englishman and music by a Scot) to be performed in Cardiff this coming September.

Animal magic

"Animals were the first things that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals. Why?"

not "exclude any particular interaction"

This looks significant. In reaction, speaking to BBC radio a few minutes ago Frank Gaffney expressed horror at Rice's sway being unchecked. Presumably Gates has played a role too.

Sharing the broccoli

Attempts to stitch up Iraq's oil in production-sharing agreements that favour western corporations, as documented by intrepid campaigners (and reported in articles like Iraq Labor vs. ExxonMobil, BP and Shell), may be real enough. But in the present context I wonder if this is missing the point.

Firstly, much of the oil in southern Iraq is reportedly beyond central government control, and funding local players instead.

Secondly, for deals favouring big foreign corporations to prevail, the American coalition would have to win the war. This looks unlikley. In Foreign Policy (Who wins in Iraq?), contributors argue with varying degrees of plausibility that one or more of Iran, Moqtada al Sadr, Al Qaeda, China, Arab Dictators, United Nations, Old Europe or Israel is/are the winners. (David Frum washes his hands of democracy promotion and retreats into Manichaeism that presumably will justify more bombing in his mind. Bill Emmott argues that the price of oil won - but for him this appears to mean principally the Gulf States and other big producers, not the Western multinationals)

Of course the show ain't over yet. In his most recent article, Seymour Hersch reports Martin Indyk as saying “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq. It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated.”

It could get a little more lumpy, then, before Exxon & co can get their oil from what Sir Arthur Harris used to call "Mespot".

"24", Fox and democracy

Many prominent conservatives speak of “24” [the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox] as if it were real. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped frame the Bush Administration’s “torture memo”—which, in 2002, authorized the abusive treatment of detainees—invokes the show in his book “War by Other Means.” He asks, “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show’s popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. “They love Jack Bauer,” she noted on Fox News. “In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.” [Joel] Surnow [the co-creator and executive producer of “24,” once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better.” Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists—it’s good for you!”

-- from Whatever it takes by Jane Meyer

Mai Ghoussoub

Obituaries by Neil Belton and Malu Halasa.

Through a glass, darkly

Mental life [is] something we [know] very little about, and when something [is] imprefectly understood it [is] quite likely we [will] define its structure imperfectly too. It [is] only rarely that, in science, you [start] with a perfectly delimited thing and set out to investigate it; more often, your definition of what it [is] you are looking for [changes] as you [discover] more about. "Consider the medieval physicists who wondered what fire could be...They identified a range of things they thought were instances of fire: burning wood, the sun, comets, lightning, fireflies, the northern lights. They couldn't give a definition, but they could give examples that they agreed upon. [But] the category fire, as defined by what seemed to be intuitively obvious members of the category, has come completely unstuck. Turns out that burning wood is actually oxidation; what happens in the sun has nothing to do with that, it's nuclear fusion; lightning is thermal emission; fireflies are biophosphorescence; northern lights are spectral emission".

-- from Patricia Churchland quoted in "Two Heads - a marriage devoted to the mind-body problem", by Larissa MacFarquhar.

Dances with Dubya

Writing about George W. Bush's State of the Union address a few weeks ago (No polar bear left behind), I noted in passing that in 1862 Abraham Lincoln used the same word -- "insurgents" -- to describe the uncooperative locals that has often been used in Iraq by the US-led coalition since 2003 to describe...whoever. I didn't think much further about it, considering the differences. But Sam Hurst makes a case that the two situations are more alike than one might think (The New Iraq sounds an awful lot like the Old Pine Ridge, Rapid City Journal).

Say yes to road pricing

"Much has been made of the fact that one million people signed a petition on the Downing St website calling for road-pricing plans to be scrapped. Now, a rival petition is calling for people to sign their names under a motion requesting road-pricing, and calling for the Government to 'channel the money into improving public transport and conditions for walking and cycling.' Sign up now by visiting http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/yes2roadpricing"

Left behind

[The] lie is up. What is now blindingly clear to the naked eye, for anyone who cares to look, is that the neocon agenda vis-a-vis Iran has never been about democracy or human rights. What the neocons want in Tehran is a pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli regime; whether it’s a democratic one or not is an entirely secondary matter to them. And Iranian dissidents know this, which is why they want nothing to do with the neocons. Note that the funds the State Department earmarked last year for democracy promotion in Iran met with a resounding thud among dissidents, who see right through the neocons and their agenda.

This is not only a critique of the neocons, though; it’s also a challenge to those on the Left who have bought into the neocons’ Big Lie about being the bosom buddies of Iran’s dissidents. Due to intellectual laziness, a preference for moral simplicity, existential bad faith, or some combination thereof, lots of leftists have opted out of even expressing moral support, let alone standing in active solidarity with, Iranian dissidents, often on the specious grounds that the latter are on the CIA’s payroll or are cozy with the neocons. Utter and complete tripe.

-- Danny Postel, talking about Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran

How to destroy a planet

From the drainage of its peatlands alone Indonesia is producing 632 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. But from its annual forest fires, it produces another 1,400 million tonnes. That's a total of 2,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The Netherlands emits 80 million.

-- Marcel Silvius, a senior programme manager for Wetlands International, speaking to Lucy Williamson (Smoking out the world's lungs).

If these figures are accurate it means that per capita emissions for Indonesia (220 million people), not including combustion of fossil fuels, are nearly twice those of the Netherlands (15 million), including fossil fuels and all other sources.

A road already taken

With two US battle groups in position, another (or even two) possibly on the way, plus one expeditionary strike group standing ready and another getting ready, the US and Israel are increasing the pressure on Iran (see Paul Rogers, 8 February). It looks like a case of never mind the veracity or otherwise allegations regarding Iranian weapons and training in Iraq (see The New York Times returns to pre-war "journalism" - a contrast to that paper's thumping editorial The Build-a-war workshop); the struggle for strategic dominance across the whole region is edging into a new phase, with the rest of us, apparently, helpless bystanders.

A 21st century greenhouse gas budget?

How much greenhouse gas can the world safely emit? Is this a useful question to ask?

One working assumption for some (footnote 1) is that a global average temperature rise of more than 2 Centigrade during the 21st century may be “dangerous” – i.e. have severe adverse impacts on human development and the ecosystems on which it depends. (It is noted, however, that even if the rise is less than 2C there may still be adverse impacts.)

It is uncertain how much greenhouse gas may be emitted consistent with a politically acceptable risk of a temperature rise of no more than 2C. One line of reasoning might appear to suggest stabilisation of atmospheric concentrations at no more than 450 ppmvCO2e (or is it 475?) by 2030 to 2050 followed by a reduction, fits the bill (2).

First question: to what extent is this line of reasoning on the right track? What caveats should be attached? If you think this is the wrong track what would you recommend instead?

Second question: if this line of reasoning is on the right track (and even if it's not), what if anything can one glean from the IPPC Fourth Assessment Report summary (AR4), published on 2 Feb 07, regarding a 21st century greenhouse gas budget?

AR4 indicates that the only emissions scenario which, by best estimate, results in a rise of less than 2C is B1 (although it should be noted that “if radiative forcing were to be stabilised in 2100 at B1...levels, a further increase in global mean temperature of about 0.5C would still be expected, mostly by 2200”).

So how many gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) are emitted under B1? The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios prepared in relation to the Third Assessment Report (see here and here -- B1 is bottom left hand box) show emissions peaking at something over 10GtC per year between about 2015 and 2055 or 2060 (black line), declining to approx half present levels by end of this century.

The AR4 notes : “The climate-carbon cycle is expected to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as the climate system warms, but the magnitude of this feedback is uncertain. This increases the uncertainty in the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions required to achieve a particular stabilisation level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Based on current understanding of climate carbon cycle feedback, models suggest that to stabilise at 450ppm CO2 could require that cumulative emissions over the 21st be reduced from approximately 607 [630 to 710] GtC to approx 490 [375 to 600] GtC” (3).

490 GtC is at the bottom end of the cumulative emissions range envisaged under B1 in SRES (see here). An emission trajectory consistent with this bottom end would – I assume – be one in the area shaded green below the black line for B1 indicated here. That is, emissions peaking at no more than about 10GtC/yr by about 2020 (growing more slowly between now and that date than on the black line trajectory) and beginning to fall quite soon after 2030 to well under half (perhaps under a third) of current levels by the end of the century (4).

Third question: Is the best working assumption we can make for now that total global emissions of 490GtC are likely to be consistent with a probable temperature rise of less than a 2C? And can we characterise the range of this probability with any confidence? (5) Should we be looking at another approach altogether, and if so why? (6) If so, what is or are the best alternatives?

Notes

(1) 2C has been the EU target. Mastrandrea and Schneider identify 2.85C as their median threshold for dangerous anthropogenic influence (Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, chapter 27).
(2) at least, according to one reading of Meinhausen (Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, chapter 28)
(3) apparently this is CO2 only, not CO2e, and it’s not clear to me when AR4 is suggesting stabilisation at this level would occur.
(4) obviously [?] they could rise more quickly so long as they then fell more quickly, consistent with total 21st century emissions of 490GtC
(5) This question has political and operational implications. For example, Doniger et al suggest a total carbon budget for the United States of 84GtC on reasoning which I take to be along these lines. (An ambitious, centrist approach to global warming, Science, 3 November 2006)
(6) For example, that it is unrealistic. The Stern review on the economics of climate change says: 'To stabilize at 450 ppm Co2e without overshooting, global emissions would need to peak in the next ten years and then fall at more than 5% per year, reaching 70% below current levels by 2050. This is likely to be unachievable with current and foreseeable technologies.' (p 218). Writing in The Observer today, the UK government's chief scientific adviser does not indicate what a "realistic" stabilisation level might be.

Jimbo lives the "be good" ethic, it seems

Q. Will Wikipedia ever be sold to big media?

A. Two years after founding Wikipedia, I donated it to the WikiMedia foundation. I think this is both the dumbest and the smartest thing I ever did. The dumbest because it's probably worth $3 billion - and I don't have $3 billion! It's also the smartest thing I did because it wouldn't have been anywhere near so successful had I not built it this way. So the chances of it being bought are quite low.

Q. What happened with Wikipedia and China?

A. My understanding is that we are completely blocked there. We have no idea why. We can guess, but we don't know. Our position is that censorship is fundamentally at odds with everything our mission is about. Access to all knowledge is a human right, period. We won't ever compromise on censorship with filtered versions. It became all the more impossible for us once Google compromised last year, with its Chinese service weeding out pages critical of the government. I felt it incumbent on me to say: "No, we will not compromise on this issue." The deeper question we can't answer is: did they block us because they objected to our pages on politically sensitive issues, such as Falun Gong, or is there something fundamental about the idea of consumer-generated, open knowledge that is threatening to the Chinese system?

...Q. What else do you want Wikipedia to develop?

A. I read that one company is importing all of Wikipedia into its artificial intelligence projects. This means when the killer robots come, you'll have me to thank. At least they'll have a fine knowledge of Elizabethan poetry.

-- Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, responding to questions from Paul Marks in New Scientist ( Knowledge to the people)

Untidy

"The reality on the ground [in Iraq] is, we’ve made major progress.” -- US Vice President Dick Cheney, late January 2007.

“The intelligence community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence" -- US National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a consensus document of the 16 agencies that make up the intelligence community, published 2 February 2007.

Two amazing, angry people

Molly Ivins, unbowdlerised here, remembered by another notable Texan here. And Henry Grouès (“Abbé Pierre”): "His anger surprised even himself; it did not seem in character. But it made him a giant."

The long run

Another perspective on the end that may or may not be nigh was provided by Jürgen Moltmann, an octogenarian theologian from Tübingen, Germany, who sat in a wing chair in the rector’s parlor, glass of wine in hand, and dismissed current anxieties about environmental apocalypse—widely held among secularists who dismiss the Rapture as nothing more than a song by Blondie—as misplaced. 'One should not speak about the end of the world if what one means is the end of our culture,' Professor Moltmann said, pointing out that the dinosaurs may have been extinguished but life on earth went on. 'If you are mankind-centered, it’s a catastrophe; but if you are life-centered it is that while one life ends, another begins.'

-- from Apocalypse Not by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker

It's all good

This [IPCC 4th Assessment] report is a comprehensive and accurate reflection of the current state of climate change science. [President George W. Bush] has put in place a comprehensive set of policies to address what he has called the "serious challenge" of climate change... the current set of policies are working.

-- Sharon Hayes of the White House office of Science and Technology Policy.

See also Richard Black on The semantics of climate change

Kyoto 2

Oliver Tickell outlines Kyoto 2 today on BBC online. He puts the case well. Early last month he asked me for a soundbite view. I had not given one to date, having had a number of questions. But here it is now:

Kyoto2 is the boldest idea I have seen for a new international approach to meet the challenge of climate change. If properly implemented -- and the political and operational obstacles are likely to be formidable -- it could be a radical improvement on the current approach. This proposal is worth everyone's serious attention.

7 billion shoes

Good to hear that chinadialogue has achieved some its highest readership figures so far. This seems to be partly down to this article in Salon. Well done the team who do the *real* work! A high point also marked with this excelllent piece from Ma Jun.

(I did a little to help get chinadialogue going, having suggested environment as the focus, and continue to contribute a little).

Wolf, wolf!

Since the inception of this blog, a US-Israel attack on Iran has seemed close (noted, for example, here, here and here), and this blog has been among those reporting speculation about likely actual dates for an attack (e.g. here), which so far have proved wrong of course. Now comes another warning, claiming to have evidence from voices inside the Pentagon that an attack could come as early as this month.

"We're an Empire now"

Chris Hedges is extremely pessimistic in his view of the future of the US in Religion of Despair and Chalmers Johnson in Empire v Democracy: why nemisis is at our door is no less so.

The work of both writers is usually worth scrutiny ("War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" is a must read in my view), but are they misguided in the extent of their concern about the direction of the United States?

Observations published in the last few days by two other writers -- different from each other in important respects but both perhaps more dispassionate than Hedges and Johnson -- suggest not.

At ease Mr President by Gary Wills is exhibit one. William Pfaff's Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America is exhibit two.

Drawing on Kennan, Schumpeter and others, Pfaff goes very deep indeed to reach disturbing conclusions. Essential reading.

This may sign of the times: the BBC reports that Germany has issued CIA arrest orders. "The US government", notes the BBC reporter, "is not assisting the German authorities with the case".

James Bamford takes comfort (Bush Is Not Above the Law) from Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's observation: “There are no hereditary kings in America.”

Critiques of Stern

An edition of The Investigation broadcast on Radio 4 on 25 Jan (and archived here) raises what sound like some useful questions about the Stern Review on the economics of climate change. Why, for example, did Stern use the IPCC A2 scenario rather than A1B (as William Connolly of BAAS and Realclimate.org points out)?

I still need to think about this more carefully; but my impression is that notwithstanding the fact that many of the criticisms have been regarding economic methodology and the uses to which it has been put by Stern, a if not the most important difference of opinion is not actually about economics but a meta-economic question concerning ethics -- especially what Stern and some others take to be a non-negligible chance that the costs of climate change on business as usual will be literally uncontainable: a 5% chance, say, of virtually infinite costs within a two or so human generations.

It would be great to hear a clearer view on this.

Sharing the joy

This message has gone to Channel 4 and WAG TV, broadcaster and production company behind "The Great Global Warming Swindle":

It is fantastic news that Channel Four and WAG TV are collaborating to tell the British public about the fraud that is the so-called scientific case for anthropogenic climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the national science academies of Canada, China, Brazil, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, India, Japan, Russia and the United States can finally be consigned to the dustbin of history -- along with those who claim that millions of Jews and other human vermin were exterminated by the Nazis and those who say that smoking is addictive and bad for your health.

Please do confirm that Channel 4 is going ahead with this broadcast, and will not be daunted by any controversy.

May I suggest that Channel 4, whose chief executive was the genius behind the "I can't believe it's not butter" campaign, continue to demonstrate signal courage and foresight by broadcasting O J Simpson's interview in which he talks about "If I did it"?

The hard question

Paul Krugman identifies the key issue here:

Can anything be done to promote good [US] energy policy? Public education is a necessary first step, which is why Al Gore deserves all the praise he’s getting. It would also help to have a president who gets scientific advice from scientists, not oil company executives and novelists.

But there’s still a huge gap between what obviously should be done and what seems politically possible. And I don’t know how to close that gap.

By "good energy policy" Krugman means, correctly, one that focuses on incentivising efficiency first -- rather than, for example, delivering additional subsidies for the farm lobby (see comment at bottom this post for the full article). For context see also my recent post No polar bear left behind.

Remembering Ryszard

First I learned of Kapuściński's death was this from Ethan Zuckerman. Victoria Brittan remembers him here.

No polar bear left behind

openDemocracy asked me to write something about the President's address to Congress focussing on his energy and environment policy, and it was published yesterday here.

One of the most useful "go read" pieces when assessing Bush's "twenty in ten" initiative (linked in the oD piece) is The Ethanol Illusion by Michael McElroy (and the best image I have seen is this from Steve Bell).

As John Elkington reminded on BBC Radio 4 this morning, already by 2008 around half the US corn crop will go to ethanol (and as Ken Silverstein noted in The Birth of a Washington Machine, Archer Daniels Midland has been a substantial supporter of Barack Obama - whose other enthusiasm is for so-called clean coal).

[The New York Times reporters quote Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, noting that Bush was “completely silent” on energy efficiency and reduction of carbon dioxide from electric power plants, which contribute 40 percent emissions, and Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust estimating that the proposals would contribute a 1.5 percent cut in carbon emissions a decade hence, and that “they will still go up by 14 percent over the next decade.”]

It should also be noted that It should also be noted that changing the Renewable Fuel Standard to the Alternative Fuel Standard, opens the door for coal-to-liquid fuels, which are extremely likely to *increase* carbon emissions.

Written quickly, my article leaves open the question of what measures will work to deliver the emissions reductions that are likely to be necessary.

It would of course take a whole other article to begin to address that. In my view, the ideal course would be close to the kinds of actions advocated by Amory Lovins (See Elizabeth Kolbert's 22 Jan New Yorker profile for a reminder of what that involves), obviating the need to increase power energy production from nuclear and coal which even some terming themselves environmentalists have supported.

But Amory Lovins will most likely continue to be largely ignored on the grounds that what he recommends is a bit impractical, actually.

It remains to be seen how much cap-and-trade systems can deliver (see, for example, Matthew Lockwood's A rough guide to carbon trading). The game is not over for other signals and incentives.  Taxes may have a role to play (a radical proposal like Oliver Tickell's Kyoto2 auction is, I think, essentially a tax).  But in the US even a moderate tax on gasoline looks unlikely.

Indeed, climate change may be at least as great a challenge to the foundations of the republic as slavery.  Both slavery and current energy use are based on exploitation and injustice -- in the case of slavery the abuse of people right in front of you, in the case of energy use the abuse of an earth system on which future generations depend.

At its founding, the writers of the US constitution made an uneasy peace with slavery under the three fifths compromise.  It took more than 80 years to work through the problem, and then, of course, at the price of enormous bloodshed with an ambiguous conclusion.  And it took the moral vision of the civil rights generation another hundred years later, including Bobby Kennedy (perhaps one of the greatest presidents the US never had), to develop and understand the links to respect for the earth itself.  It would be nice if we could learn from this history.

Reading back through previous SOUs in preparation for the oD article was an interesting experience.  Leave aside its civil war heroics, Lincoln's 1862 oration also contains a passage that is very cruel to modern ears about the "insurgents" -- that is, those we would now call Native Americans fighting desperately to protect the last vestiges of their way of life.

But it was words from an earlier George W that particularly struck home because of the gap between the political culture they express, or at least aspire to, and the world of Inhofe, Rove, Fox News, Guantanamo and The Decider, which manufactures ignorance, hate and fear.

George Washington (who was no angel: you can make a case (see William Hogeland) that his support for US independence in the first place was as a cover for a vast grab of Indian land West of the Appalachians that he had illegally squated) told members of Congress in the first State of Union:

"there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness...To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways - by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful
authority; [and] between [burdens] proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society."

To tackle climate change we need to distinguish between burdens proceeding from a disregard to our convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of avoiding planetary meltdown.

A charmer

"[Vojislav] Seselj has the unusual distinction of being accused of unacceptable brutality by one Slobodan Milosevic, who said he was 'the personification of violence and primitivism.' " -- from Mark Mardell's Europe Diary.

Do not keep a-hold of nurse

Timothy Garton-Ash outlines the key arguments as to why a blanket ban on holocaust denial would be a serious mistake. There are dangers from allowing hate speech, but Garton-Ash catches identifies dangers, including this:

"The approach advocated by the German justice minister [Brigitte Zypries] ... reeks of the nanny state. It speaks in the name of freedom but does not trust people to exercise freedom responsibly. Citizens are to be treated as children, guided and guarded at every turn. Indeed, the more I look at what Zypries does and says, the more she seems to me the personification of the contemporary European nanny state. It's no accident that she has also been closely involved in extending German law to allow more bugging of private homes. Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser (trust is good, control is better). Isn't that another mistake Germany made in the past?"

This issue is vital to any debate on a vision for Europe's future. In a section of "Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century" titled "Towards a Robust and Connected Moral Identity", Jonathan Glover writes:

"The evidence suggests that those who rescued victims of the Nazis had not been given a rigidly disciplined upbringing. When they were children, parents had shown them respect, giving them reasons rather than orders. Respect may create a climate where moral identity can grow. Evidence from Nazi-occupied countries suggests that cultures may have climates which vary in their support for the growth of moral identity".

Glass houses

It's unkind and tasteless, but that might not stop the use of the death of Richard Heard as an icon of climate change come home to roost. The managing director of Birmingham airport was killed by a branch crashing through the window of his giant four by four. The branch fell in the exceptionally heavy winds that have hit NW Europe.

"quite a degree of conjecture"

I shouldn't be writing this. I have little time for anything but real work this month, and should put the intellecutal crack cocaine of blogging to one side, especially when it is little more than an exercise in venting spleen and dismay.

But two things I read propel me on a day when 65 people are reported killed by bombs in Baghdad and the UN estimates that 34,452 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2006 (last week the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced an emergency appeal for what it said were an estimated 3.7 million Iraqis displaced internally or fled abroad as a result of the fighting. The agency said that about 1 in 8 Iraqis had left their homes, in what it called "the largest population movement in the Middle East since Palestinians were displaced following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948".)

First, what looks like further confirmation in a Guardian report that Tony Blair and his government lied, yet again, in support of the claim that the rule of law should be "balanced" by concerns of national security. It would be nice to be funny like Al Franken in Lies and the Lying Liers Who Tell Them, but somehow the joke just doesn't come. Does Blair already have directorships with BAE and the Carlyle Group lined up for when he steps down?

Second, Paul Rogers's December briefing for the Oxford Research Group. This digs deeper than the significance of the dispatching of Saddam Hussein on which it focuses at first, and is worth reading in its entirety. But it is unpleasant, and timely, to be reminded that if Saddam's role in the Anfal campaign had been tried in open court, "there is little doubt that much evidence would have been presented on the nature of the relationship of the regime to western states, especially the United States". The guy just had to go. [Rogers is scrupulous, reminding readers that France and the Soviet Union were key arms suppliers to Saddam]

Suspended animation

Little will appear on this blog in January. I working on other projects.

River colours

"The river changes colour a lot depending on what’s going on in the mountains. So you can have a spring day when you’ve got a blue sky and the river takes on this blue sheen. In the summer, when the light’s right... particularly over a rocky ledge, you’ll see this red brindle colour almost like the peat coming through the water. In autumn time, or in the summer when you have heavy rains up in the mountains and you get a lot of silt runoff, the river will just thunder down like a stream of hot chocolate. It’s quite amazing. And then in the winter if you have a quick snowmelt it’s quite deceptive. You don’t think the river’s in spate but actually you’ve got this ink black roar of water coming down. A bit like this like we have today we have to day [but ] much fuller. And the power of the spate on the river Findhorn is...incomprehensible until you actually see it. It’s completely exhilarating”

-- Jamie Whittle on Open Country (re-broadcast on 14 December).

Ostpolitik

Dieter Helm is characteristically sharp:

To meet [a] series of new challenges, Europe needs more than a set of national responses, however much these might be in individual member-states's narrow interests. That Germany is in the driving seat, both as Gazprom's hub and with the presidencies [of the EU and G8], provides a timely chance to prepare Europe for its future energy dependency, and to better align its internal energy market reforms with the external challenge.

But at stake is much more: if Germany fails to go down the European path, it will be a break with one of the deep political objectives of the EU, and it will show the sceptical voters of Europe that the EU cannot deliver in an area of such vital interest. Energy is where a significant part of the case for greater European integration may be won or lost.

Pinochet

The Economist, the house magazine of old fashioned liberalism and maybe neo-liberalism too, gets it right:

No ifs or buts. Whatever the general did for the economy [Pinochet] was a bad man...

...it took the return of democracy in 1990, with its ability to bestow legitimacy, to create an investment-led boom and a large fall in poverty. Elsewhere in Latin America, free-market reforms were enacted by democracies...

...Even if history bothers to remember that he privatised the pension system, that should not wipe away the memory of the torture, the “disappeared” and the bodies dumped at sea. His defenders—who include Britain's Lady Thatcher—really should know better.

Lovey Dove-y

"The wider public interest"..."outweigh[s] the need to maintain the rule of law".

It looks like an extraordinary thing for the highest officer of the law in any jurisdiction to say. But the BBC's diplomatic correspondent writes: "Nobody anywhere is...surprised at [the] decision" [to end a corruption investigation into a British-Saudi arms deal].

Well, even if that's true (and not everyone agrees -- see comments below by one activist), please let's have a dispassionate and rigorous analysis of what the attorney general's statement and the Prime Minister's reasoning say about: 1) the British constitutional system and the place of law within it; and 2) how, precisely, "the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East" is served.

(The activist wrote:

Why should anyone want 'integrate' into a country that: goes to war illegally; makes money selling arms to despotic regimes; lets arms traders know they above the law; allows the judiciary to be overruled by the executive; claims that it is not in the 'national interest' to uphold the rule of law and; has a government that brazenly pretends that the 'national interest' is not 'economic' ('national interest' halts arms corruption inquiry, 14 December). Let's face it, we are hooked on oil and will do anything to ensure we keep on getting it, including sell arms to pay for it - and blow the impact on global climate. Only one political party has stood up against all of this but, because of our outdated electoral system, it hasn't a single seat in parliament. Vote Green for sanity and self-respect!

")

Bye baiji

What would Daoists say about the extinction of the Yangtze Dolphin?

Horn of Africa

“I am ready to die,” [says] Osama Abdi Rahim, dressed head to toe in camouflage and marching around with a loaded rifle. He is 7 years old.

-- Somalia’s Islamists and Ethiopia Gird for a War, front paged in the NYT on 14 Dec. The article continues:

“I’ll be honest,” said Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, the deputy security chief for the Islamists. “America is the best friend of Islam. It wakes up the sleeping Muslim.”

Factors behind the hysteria include drought and demographics. A startlingly pessimistic article in The Economist this summer (The Path to Ruin, 10 August) noted:

It wouldn't take much for famine to seize hold of the [Somali borderlands in the Horn of Africa]. Humanitarian action has kept the starving alive, but it has not enabled them to recover their lives. The trend is an ever increasing need for food aid plus ever less money from donors to pay for it. The World Food Programme (WFP) is responsible for delivering most of the aid in the Horn. It says that the number of Ethiopians on its books has doubled since the 1990s, in bad years to as many as 10m. The situation is not much better elsewhere. Some 1.7m hungry people are reliant on food aid in south Somalia—when the WFP can get it to them. And 3m people in Kenya, mostly in the country's arid north, will get some kind of food aid this year.

The Economist article includes a chart of population growth, showing the total number of people in Ethiopia rising from about 75 million today to 144m by 2030, and Kenya from about 35m to 65m over the same period the same time. Somalia's population, says the graph, will grow from about 8m to nearly 20m. Somalia has the highest fertility rate of the three countries (6.8 children per woman) and there are sizeable Somali minorities in Ethiopia and Kenya too.

A cause for celebration

Bushmen from the Kalahari desert have won a court case in which they accused Botswana's government of illegally moving them from their land.

Don't know how lucky you are, boys

Breakup, chaos, poverty, violence and extreme corruption: it happened to the USSR and was hailed as a triumph of democracy.

"A large majority of Russians...regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for 'communism' but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's 'collapse' was 'inevitable' because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three 'subjective' factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in 'privatising' the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians, including even the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, therefore still see December 1991 as a 'tragedy'.

In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was lost - a historic opportunity to democratise and modernise Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991".

-- Stephen Cohen, who puts a lot of the blame on Yeltsin, in The Guardian and The Nation.

I'm not sure the majority of Russians are right to believe the USSR didn't have fatal defects. Clearly, however, a less destructive transition path was possible.

We don't care

A useful post by Clive Bates here, on which I have commented as follows:

Thanks indeed for this sober and thoughtful analysis. I found it particularly useful after reading a 12 Dec article in the New York Times by Steve Lohr titled The Cost of an Overheated Planet.

It's clear that governments and societies (which are not the same think - thank you, David Cameron) will sometimes spend on things they think will reduce the risk of big hazards. A Lohr points out, "In the late 1950s...American military spending reached as high as 10 percent of the gross domestic product and averaged about 4 percent, far higher than in any previous peacetime era. A Soviet nuclear attack was a danger but hardly a certainty, just as the predicted catastrophes from global warming are threats but not certainties."

The article then touches on the implications of spending 1% of US GDP to fight global warming (incidentally, says Lohr, 1% of US GDP is more than $120 billion a year, or $400 a person; it is about equal to the Bush administration’s tax cuts in 2001; and roughly the amount spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2006).

At first sight one might think: "Case closed - if [we] are willing to spend 1% on war surely [we] are willing to match this in the struggle to save the planet", or some such worthy statement (1% being also the figure Stern recommends for expenditure to fight climate change).

As you rightly point out, however, revealed preferences for things that seem to be remote tend to be smaller, even among those who self-define as altruistic (which takes us back to Adam Smith, the Chinese empire and one's little finger).

Climate change is perceived as a much more remote, and lesser threat than nuclear war was in the 1950s and 60s.

It may be that that perception is wrong. The probabilities of a nuclear exchange between the USSR and the USA, which occasioned the latter to spend up to 10% of GDP to fight it, may for much of the time, including in the 1950s, have been smaller than thought (although, if Robert McNamara is right about Castro, we got incredibly close in 1961). And the possibility of "runaway" climate change is not, as far as I know, something that serious scientists dismiss completely (this would not necessarily be as bad as nuclear war, just that it could be very bad).

I'm not suggesting one should try and create a "duck and cover" hysteria about global warming. I am suggesting we need to recalibrate our understanding of respective risks.

Here's a further thought. As you say, in Britain (and other rich industrialised countries) we are willing to spend disproportionate sums on immediate near term problems. You give the good example of health care in the last few days of life.

So what if societies such as ours started to place greater value on the near term impacts of climate change (for example, the likely loss of tropical coral reefs at less than 2C global average temperature rise)?

I feel out of my depth using a term like "the construction of value", but isn't that what we are talking about? Those concerned with local and global social and environmental justice may seek to reshape values so that more people cherish such things (yes, even in our revealed preferences) a little more with respect to what we believe to be our own near term utility. (By the way, perhaps there is a case for dialogue/education with those facing terminal illnesses and their families regarding the case for a less drawn-out death -- ouch! a difficult but valid debate).

So to your final point: "perhaps a human rights or pure justice lens would be better". Well yes! The comparison may be a tendentious, but imagine a political economist of the 1770s looking at the economic case for and against the abolition of slavery. That would provide useful data, but it would only take him so far. The battle in that case was political.

Also, this time the people on the receiving end may have other ways of expressing their grievances or otherwise making themselves felt - through, for example, large scale migration from West Africa to Europe.

Reading it back, this comment comes across as impossibly idealistic. As Jonathan Glover points out in his extraordinary book Humanity: a Moral History of the 20th Century, we have hardly begun to tackle the social psychology and practical ethics of warfare, still less issues such as environmental protection.

But as he is flavour of the week, let's cite Barack Obama - let us have the audacity to hope.

24 hour party people

This on the impacts of a small nuclear war, both directly and on the climate, is interesting -- not least as it appears in "proliferation week", when the US aids NNPT cheeky chappy India, and the Israeli PM says they have the bomb.

The day before yesterday

In An Inconvenient Truth (and here), Al Gore quotes Winston Churchill: "we are entering a period of consequences". The phrase came to mind in connection with at least three different things to which I was more or less paying attention on Wednesday, 6 December: the publication of the report of the Iraq Study Group; the pre-budget statement from Gordon Brown; and my own meanderings as a country mouse visiting The City, which took in a street opera and a discussion of carbon trading.

The ISG report may bang a few Washington heads together over the consequences of what has happened since the 2003 invasion. But both the shriller critics of the Iraq war, such as Greg Palast, and the more thoughtful, such as Mark Danner (see Iraq: the war of the imagination), point to reasons why, in the unlikely event it is implemented, this is unlikely to be enough.

Meanwhile, in Britanistan, Chancellor Brown chose not to announce the "green" budget some had hoped for. Small additional revenues from travel taxes (£5 on flights and £23 on a motorist who drives 10,000 miles a year) will be used to fill a hole in finances, not to transform the transport system (never mind the whole economy). If Brown is serious about the recommendations of his own Stern review, he is not showing his cards now.

My own business in London allowed time to contemplate two very different approaches to dealing with the consequences of the actions of the majority of us in rich industrial societies.

The first was And While London Burns, an "opera for one" about climate change which you download onto an MP3 player and then follow on foot as an audio guide leads you around byways in the Square Mile.

I will not review it in detail here, but this is a serious, imaginative, engaging, astute, ambitious and resonant but musically weak drama. A central theme is fully imagining, and taking responsibility for, the consequences of our actions.

In three acts, Fire, Dust and Water, treading from the earth of a once-buried temple of Mithras to the golden ball of fire thrust into the air on top of The Monument, the opera glimpses down many alleys (and passes roads untaken, from Blake to the Blitz), but it centres on the mental breakdown/liberation of a City worker at an investment bank that services BP, one the great beasts of the carbon web.

Among several effective sequences is a walk around the underground ring in Bank station passing exits one to six as the possible consequences of one through six degrees of climate change are dramatised. No need, now, to read Mark Lynas's forthcoming book! (One note of detail: I did the walk on a cold winter day when the fans, which extracted heat from deep below ground during London's summer heatwave, were not turning. So the dramatic effect here was lost.)

But what works best dramatically in the opera is also, perhaps, where one of the greatest questions lies: the consequences of imagining downfall and apocalypse, and how this makes one feel, think and act.

Because even though And While London Burns searches for optimism – finishing with a chorus "we could build a new city" – a strong sense of apocalypse runs through this "requiem for a warming world". And for the protagonist, this is a drama of escape: to follow the trail of his lost love who gave up her safe middle class job and now hides out on some remote sunny beach, waiting for the downfall of Empire.

Visions of catastrophe run through many cultures. In the West, drawing on traditions that include the pursuit of the millennium, these took a new turn with the industrialisation of work and war, and a growing sense that humans themselves can destroy each other and the planet on a massive scale. (Cruel pre-modern imaginings of destruction by supernatural fury still thrive in things like the Left Behind series).

My generation, growing up in the last days of the Cold War, could with good reason allow nuclear annihilation to squat on our dreams: a reality well captured in Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982). So the idea of a human-caused catastrophe that only cockroaches and Keith Richards survive is nothing new. The apocalypse outlined by James Lovelock sometimes seems mild by comparison.

There is nothing wrong with a bit of apocalyptic imagining. (Children of Men is one of the better recent genre films). In connection with climate change I have indulged in it myself in an article sensationally titled Tsunami coming for us all (Andrew Baird and others have cast doubt on the idea that reefs and mangroves really did afford significant extra protection to coastal communities, but I think the main point of the piece – that we need to think harder about the human impact on nature – still stands).

Giving some space for the worst imaginings can help us to deal with them. But how?

As I hear it, for the protagonist of And While London Burns (and, I guess, its authors), there can be no salvation within "the system". This belief is most clearly illustrated through the treatment of Swiss Re, the giant reinsurance company caught at the heart of what the opera portrays as a spinning paradox. Swiss Re thrives on "just the right amount of disaster" but would be ruined by a sharp increase in damages associated with climate change. Meanwhile, Swiss Re must invest its revenues in the very oil and gas companies that cause climate change.

The company and the network of which it is part must look for ever new markets in order to grow, and in an image of a crazy, dizzy dance, round and round the Gherkin, the sense of a snake eating its own tail, with the ultimate madness – echoed by voices around and around on the soundtrack – "they are even selling the sky".

This sounds like a reference to carbon trading, which was the subject of another bit of business I had in London that day: a panel debate at ABN AMRO on "Gourmet Carbon versus Commodity Carbon".

Ricardo Bayon, co-editor of Voluntary Carbon Markets (Earthscan, January 2007), set the context. Regulated carbon markets are growing fast from a total volume about $9bn in 2005 to $21.5bn in just the first nine months of 2006 (with the EU ETS accounting for $18.5bn and the CDM about $3bn).

Voluntary markets were smaller and harder to measure, he said, but the best guess was that ten to twenty million tonnes of CO2 were traded in 2005 at an average of about $10 per tonne – making a market worth $100m to $200m market last year.

So the voluntary market is small – perhaps just one hundredth the size of the regulated market, but it is growing fast too.

[Disclosure: Coral Bones has received a grant from (among others) Ecosecurities, a major player in the CDM, and carbon offset for emissions associated with the project has been donated by Climate Care]

The six panellists and, I guess, most of the hundred or so attendees from organisations with names like Ecosystems Markets and Evolution Capital, clearly do not believe in dropping out. Some see a bright new market, and a chance to make money. And most clearly believe it is possible to change "the system" from within.

Here is a sketch of a case in their favour. First, as Pedro Moura-Costa of Ecosecurities put it, a voluntary market can be a place for experimenting and getting things to work ahead of a regulated market that requires compliance. Perhaps the most striking example of this pre-compliance phase may prove to be the State of California, where legislators and the governator have agreed to return total emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% cut them by 2050 under a cap-and-trade system. Just to reach the 2020 target would mean a cut of around [did he say 25% or 45%?] on present emissions, said panellist Joe Nation, who is a California state assemblyman (D) and a co-author of AB 32. The governor is pushing for this in six months because, said Nation, "like 87% of Americans" he understands the gravity of the situation. (The Bush administration is threatening to sue California. As no one quite said: "bring them on".)

Second, a voluntary market can allow individual consumers and groups of consumers to express preferences and back them with money, and maybe this can aggregate into something good.

A number of arguments are made against this second point. For example, carbon sequestration in forestry has been described as like drinking water to lower sea level (attrib. Oliver Rackham) or worse (The Cornerhouse). And offsets are just a way of buying one's way out of a guilty conscience and don't lead to the changes in behaviour needed to actually reduce emissions (this criticism has been given life by a comparison to indulgences offered by priests in Europe in the Middle Ages).

On the indulgence point, well yes Martin Luther was right that the system was corrupt. But what if the priest or monastery spent the money raised from indulgences on something that actually benefited of the poor, the sick and the abandoned rather than timeshare on plainsong?

What if purchaser of the voluntary offset has a certificate he or she feels she can trust which says that something less bad than nothing at all was done with the money to reduce emissions that would otherwise have taken place? (Imagine a priest with a chain of custody from your indulgence all the way to the hot soup going into the mouth of a starving peasant). Millions of people in rich countries donate hundreds of million of dollars and euros to development organisations to alleviate poverty on the basis of evidence that is often as sketchy, and/or does as little to address the root problem.

A voluntary carbon offset standard (VCS) was, not suprisingly, central to the discussion at ABN AMRO. One should remember the lessons of the CDM, said Mark Kenber of The Climate Group. In the early days, "we thought it would solve everything" - climate change, global poverty, injustice. Of course it hasn't but, he said, it is a first step. And until such time that the international community agrees on an enforceable system that enforces stabilisation at "450ppm or whatever the science indicates" the players sould try to develop a robust international standard that permits the market in reductions to grow (The Climate Group has this. See also this from The Carbon Trust.)

There's a lot to think about here (the interim statement on Coral Bones is: "offsets do not solve the problem of emissions from flights or make the project 'carbon neutral'. But they are better than doing nothing to account for emissions"). Do we really need carbon markets to protect the likes of Mexico's Sierra Gorda, as some panellists argued? It begins to seem like some sort of religion.

It's a no brainer is that we need to do a lot more soon, however powerful the interests vested against change.

A final point. Al Gore chooses an odd quote for his foreword to Voluntary Carbon Markets: "Between the idea and the reality...Falls the Shadow". If you read the whole poem from which this quote is taken it's not exactly encouraging, but then its author knew more about London and desolation than most.

A paradise for fly tippers

Nida Al Fulaij of the People's Trust for Endangered Species writes to all Hog Watchers to suggest they nominate the hedgehog in a competition for the quintessential icon of the English environment (www.icons.org.uk).

It's a nice thought, but I like some of the other suggestions too, including Watchtree Nature Reserve. Helen Rimmer says:

"Watchtree Nature Reserve was established on the foot and mouth burial site in Cumbria. Ironically, prior to F & M the site was an old airfield, which had become a paradise for fly tippers. Over 100,000 native trees have been planted (23 species) along with 4 km of hedgerows. A lake (with bird hide), reedbeds, wetlands and ponds have also been established. It is teeming with wildlife & also some rare species have now made their home there. The site is now run by DEFRA and is open to the public at certain times. It’s fantastic!"

Temperature tantrums

"Now, maybe it's because I have a toddler at home, but the EPA's argument, presented by Deputy Solicitor General Gregory Garre, quickly sounds very familiar. 1) I can't clean it up; 2) Even if I could, I don't want to clean it up; 3) You can't make me clean it up; and 4) China is making an even bigger mess. How come China never has to clean it up? When and if all that fails, the EPA, like my son, just puts its hands over its eyes and says there is no mess in the first place."

Dahlia Lithwick The Supreme Court Melts Down Over Greenhoues Gases (http://www.slate.com/id/2154622/).

The Anthropocene at the opera

Last year, in an article we commissioned for openDemocracy's debate on the politics of climate change, Bill McKibben wrote:

"But oddly, though we know about [climate change], we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?"

Now, the Ashden Trust has published what seems to be the first review of the world's first opera about climate change, And While London Burns.

The memo Hadley didn't send

"The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.

The puppet can't cut it. Here's what we can do to help:

Iraq needs strong leadership, a strong man to bring stability to the country. A strong man. General something. Like that guy in Pakistan. Or somewhere. What was his name?"

A world historical skirmish

The New York Times and others report the opening salvos in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 05-1120:

"The Supreme Court stepped gingerly into the national debate over global warming on Wednesday, asking how much harm would occur if the Environmental Protection Agency continues its refusal to regulate greenhouse gases from new vehicles".

The cast in this strange combination of (on the one hand) epic struggle for the future of man and biosphere and (on the other) grosteque farce includes Dick Cheney's hunting buddy Antonin Scalia, Gregory Garre and Ken Starr. Twelve states, mainly along the US Atlantic and Pacific coasts, three cities, a U.S. territory and 13 environmental groups are pitched against the administration of the George W Bush, the EPA, trade associations for car and truck makers and automobile dealers, Michigan and eight other states.

The dumbass AP reporter (or his/her editor) writes "many scientists believe [carbon dioxide] is flowing into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate". Believe?

In a battle between a corrupted legal system and science who will win? As David Archer recently wrote on Realclimate (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/avery-and-singer-unstoppable-hot-air/) - riffing Thomas Jefferson and Richard Feynman -- " I tremble for humanity when I reflect that nature cannot be fooled. You're damn right I’m scared".

Das Prinzip Hoffnung

"It may be true that the EU is the world’s best hope on climate change. Unfortunately, that is just another reason to feel gloomy about the future of the planet" - Gideon Rachman, FT, 27 Nov

"Rigour not anger"

...was the phrase used by Jonathan Freedland today on The World at One to describe the late Nick Clark.

It's something we need more of, and not just in journalism

China article published

"China: time for a politics of climate change" was published simultaneously in both languages on chinadialogue.net today.

The numbers may be a little wobbly in places, but not to the extent that the argument is undermined.

The article was written in early October, with a quick update in early November. Had it been completed a few days later, it would have taken account of the calculations by Paul Baer and Michael Mastrandrea (High Stakes, IPPR, 6 Nov 2006).

Frans de Waal forecasts the future

"Given that our brains absorb and reflect everything around us, they are barely our own. We all carry society's brains around, and the biggest advance in science will come from disentangling the feedback loop between brain development and the ancient primate tendencies that shape our societies.

We have the distinction of going where no species has gone before. Whether we make good use of that distinction depends on human nature and the way we choose to organise our societies. What is the value of medical discoveries if most people cannot afford them? What good does it do to harness power if we only use it to make weapons? Who can say that anti-science forces will not send us backwards in time?

This is why we need a deeper understanding of human nature, and this can be achieved only if the social sciences replace their ideology-laden, fragmented approach with objective science grounded in a unitary theory of behaviour. There is only one such theory around, which is why I predict that 50 years from now every psychology and sociology department will have Darwin's portrait on the wall."

"Things bad begun..."

Ahdaf Soueif quotes Shakespeare wisely: "Glamis hath murder'd sleep..."

This is Lagos

Around the city, garbage dumps steam with the combustion of natural gases, an auto yards glow with fires from fuel spills. All of Lagos seems to be burning.

Newcomers to the city are not greeted with the words “Welcome to Lagos” They are told “This is Lagos” – an ominous statement of fact. Oliza Izeobio, a worker in one of the sawmills along the lagoon, said, “We understand this as ‘Nobody will care for you, and you will have to struggle to survive.’ ” It is the singular truth awaiting the six hundred thousand people who pour into Lagos from West Africa every year. Their lungs will burn with smoke and exhaust; their eyes will sting; their skin will turn charcoal grey. And hardly any of them will ever leave.

Rem Koolhas described how his team, on its first visit to the city, was too intimidated to leave its car. Eventually, the group rented the Nigerian President’s helicopter and was granted a more reassuring view:

"From the air, the apparently burning garbage turned out to be, in fact, a village, an urban phenomenon with a highly organised community living on its crust…What seemed, on ground level, an accumulation of dysfunctional movememtns, seemed from above an impressive performance, evidence of how well Lagos migh perform if it were the third largest city in the world."

The impulse to look at an “apparently burning garbage heap” and see an “urban phenomenon,” and then to make it the raw material of an elaborate aesthetic construct, is not so different from the more common impulse not to look at all.

Folarin Gdadebo-Smith [who works in local government] says. “You’re aware of the ‘megacity’ thing...Lagosians talkabout it as a trophy. As far as I am concerned it’s an impending disaster.

-- George Packer in The New Yorker

Lost

Max Rodenbock quotes strange bedfellows to telling effect:

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander must make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."

—Carl von Clausewitz, On War

"The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda."

—From the Web log of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, following a visit to New York in September 2006

Soros and priorities for Europe

At a public meeting yesterday in Oxford, George Soros and Timothy Garton-Ash both said quite a lot of sensible things; but on the point on which I questioned Soros, who was plugging his new book, he left me unconvinced.

The specific point concerned the future role of the European Union. Soros thinks the EU -- a far from perfect but actually existing example of an open society -- can play a key role in building a more just world order, but that it needs to define a mission. As Garton-Ash was probably correct to say, the EU cannot simply keep offering membership to an ever larger number of states (although, for Soros and I guess for Garton Ash, keeping the process of negotiation with Turkey alive is crucial). Europe, Soros said, needed something new to motivate people, to "get them out on the streets" in the way the cry for freedom had in so many central and eastern European countries.

I asked what, given the sheer number of very hard problems facing the world (some of them maybe unprecedentedly hard), should the Europeans choose as a priority, or priorities? Soros answered that one priority should be a common European energy policy in the face of a resurgent, bolder and nastier Russia.

I agree that Europe's energy future is vital, and share Soros's concern about the dangers of the present situation. But I am sceptical of the answer he gave. Is a common energy policy really something around which large numbers of people could mobilise? Perhaps if repackaged as part of an "employment/climate change/global justice and development" mission? Hmmm, let's keep talking.

To be fair, Soros did not hear my question or that from others very well (the venue was the echoing University Church) and he only had time for brief answers .

At first, I sympathised with another questioner who asked him "what if it's all too late?". She was refering to the growth of fundamentalist terrorism in the UK (on this, I don't think the UK authorities are exaggerating because I don't see a convincing argument that it is in their interest to do so). But then again -- in contrast to her fear -- here and now is where we have to learn to be more serious and tougher in the sense of not giving up hope and facing the problem sensitively and firmly, as George Soros has not done since at the age of 13 or 14 he joined the anti-Nazi resistance in Budapest in 1944.

"...having first exhausted every other possibility"

Coming back to the UK from Mexico via New York and Boston a few days ago (before the US elections), I was struck that some of the talk among rational people about responding to climate change is at to least as radical as it is in Europe. This even goes for some politicians too. So, for example, it was said that Henry Waxman in the House and Jim Jeffords in the Senate have talked about an 80% cut in US emissions by 2050.

This impression is reinforced by a contribution to the Policy Forum in Science (3 Nov 06) by David Doniger, Antonia V. Herzog and Daniel Lashof which takes seriously the idea that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas could be stabilised at no more than 450ppm CO2e without bringing the whole show to a grinding halt.

(the quote in the title of this post is the second half of the much over-quoted observation which begins "The Americans always do the right thing...")

Manufacturing perception

At the periphery of coverage in English language media this morning, dominated as it is by results from the US mid term elections, are reports from Gaza. And there is what looks like a typical contrast between a UK and a US version. So, the Guardian reports "Israeli kill 18 in Gaza", including 8 children killed in their sleep, with 40 more wounded, all civilians, and a huge outpouring of anger at the morgue; while AP reports "Hamas urges attacks on US targets", with scarcely a mention of the deaths and no mention that many of them were sleeping children.

P.S. 9 Nov: reporting on this issue improved over the next 24 hours, with US sources reporting the deaths, and UK press reporting Hamas calls for revenge.