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.”
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
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.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.
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.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Remembering Ryszard
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.
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.
Friday, January 19, 2007
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".
"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".
Thursday, January 18, 2007
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.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
"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]
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]
Monday, January 01, 2007
Friday, December 15, 2006
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).
-- 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.
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.
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!")
Thursday, December 14, 2006
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.
-- 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.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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.
"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.
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.
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