The consequences of Iraq

Timothy Garton Ash summarizes the current conventional wisdom on the consequences of Bush's misadventure in Mesopotamia:

Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

As we like to say around here: Mission Accomplished!

Pessimism about the prospects for GHG abatement

Perhaps, as Bill Barnes suggested yesterday, I am too pessimistic about the prospects for the collective action necessary to mitigate climate risk. When I try to find reasons for optimism, however, I usually can only come up with one, and that is that we actually don't need to get that many global actors to agree on a framework for abatement. In fact, just three actors--the U.S., the E.U., and China-- account for about half of all global emissions. You add in Russia, India and Japan, and you have almost two thirds of global emissions. In other words, you only need to get three to six actors to agree to a framework.

Of course, the barriers to such an agreement are vast. China and India are fervent about achieving economic growth at almost any cost, and seem insistent that any abatement framework take into account historical emissions, not just current ones. Why should they be forced to abate emissions just as they are embarking on the road to wealth, when the U.S. and the EU were allowed to pollute their way to greatness? The Russians, on the other hand, seem to hold the daft notion that climate change (which they seem to think equals some nice linear "warming") will actually be good for them.

But the biggest problem is probably here in the United States. Our people are so greedily materialistic, and our leaders so fecklessly beholden to the pettily venal interests of consumerism (both supply- and demand-side), that it seems hard to imagine how the U.S. will embrace any serious abatement program. Which politician is going to have the temerity to tell the American people they must live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live in more compact cities, and pay much higher prices for electricity? Can you imagine anyone getting elected on that basis? Just remember back a few years ago to this famous moment:

Not long ago, the Democratic-led Senate took up the issue of stricter fuel-efficiency standards, only to reject the idea. At one moment during the debate, the Senate Minority Leader, Trent Lott, exhibited a picture of a Smart car as if he were a lawyer prosecuting a multiple homicide. Pointing to the ultra-efficient and—necessarily—small automobile, which is popular in cities like Paris and Rome, he suggested that it would be an offense for anyone in the United States to consider driving one. "This is still America," he declared.

It is only with peril that one can dismiss such incidents as mere buffoonery.

Ken Arrow on climate change

1972 Nobel Economist Ken Arrow, whom I met recently at a talk by Tad Homer-Dixon at Stanford, explains why climate change is the quintessential global public good (bad):

Two factors deserve emphasis, factors that differentiate global climate change from other environmental problems. First, emissions of CO2 and other trace gases are almost irreversible; more precisely, their residence time in the atmosphere is measured in centuries. Most environmental insults are mitigated promptly or in fairly short order when the source is cleaned up, as with water pollution, acid rain, or sulfur dioxide emissions. Here, reducing emissions today is very valuable to humanity in the distant future. Second, the scale of the externality is truly global; greenhouse gases travel around the world in a few days. This means that the nation-state and its subsidiaries, the typical loci for internalization of externalities, are limited in their remedial ability. (To be sure, there are other transboundary environmental externalities, as with water pollution in the Rhine Valley or acid rain, but none nearly so far-flung as climate change.) However, since the United States contributes about 25% of the world’s CO2 emissions, its own policy could make a large difference.

In sum: the U.S. can and should act unilaterally on abating GHGs, but global collective action is also necessary.

Schelling on climate uncertainty

Thomas Schelling, the 1995 Nobel Economist, puts a fine point on the argument that the inarguably vast uncertainties with regard to climate change are a justification for inaction in terms of GHG abatement or adaptation and preparedness measures:

In some public discourse, and in sentiments emanating from the Bush Administration, it appears to be accepted that uncertainty regarding global warming is a legitimate basis for postponement of any action until more is known. The action to be postponed is usually identified as “costly.” (Little attention is paid to actions that have been identified as of little or no serious cost.) It is interesting that this idea that costly actions are unwarranted if the dangers are uncertain is almost unique to climate. In other areas of policy, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, inflation, or vaccination, some “insurance” principle seems to prevail: if there is a sufficient likelihood of sufficient damage we take some measured anticipatory action.

Sisley advert

Annals of "you can't make this shit up": check out this new ad for Sisley that a Shanghai advertising agency just put out:


I particularly like three details in this ad. First, look at the eyes of the model on the right: she appears seriously wasted -- like it's about 6:30 am after a long, long night. Good times. Second, look at the credit card near the bottom of the image: what's neat is that it seems to have some kind of real powder on it ("china white"?) -- an excellent application of co-branding that I am sure the Chase execs in New York will really appreciate. Third, look at the text, which describes these models as "fashioin junkies." At first I thought this was a mispelling, but I think it's actually a pun, a play on the spelling of "heroin," but also a tongue-in-cheek nod to the way Chinese translations of English magazine ad copy typically mangle spelling and grammar.

Impact of climate change: a scenario

James Galbraith:

The climate collapse—which may bring the flooding of New York, Boston, London, Calcutta, and Shanghai—will be a calamity next to which the end of the Soviet Union will seem very small. Long industrial chains, for jet aircraft, automobiles, telecommunications, electricity, and much else, will crumble, as they did in the USSR and Yugoslavia, particularly if new interior boundaries form and countries break up. And interior boundaries will form, as those on the high ground seek to defend it. The demographic effects will be similarly dire: Older, urban males (like me) with no survival skills will die. Rural New England will turn into a deforested exurban slum.

This brings us back to... public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.

Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards—against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture—will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel, and the long food production chains [will] have to be shortened. At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way.

The reason why the ideological right is absolutely terrified of the climate change issue is that it inevitably raises the necessity of radical government activism and intervention (and redistribution). The causes of global warming are so deeply systemic that only a radical governmentality can possibly hope to abate it. The other prospect is civilizational collapse, somewhere probably long about the middle of the next century.

Personally, I find the latter scenario most likely, that is, civilizational collapse. I believe that the global middle classes stand ready to make literal Louis XIV's famous dictum, après moi le déluge, rather than give up their blighted eidolon of endless growth. Only a global benevolent dictatorship of some sort could derail the ambitions of that global middle class and its political enablers. But the Catch-22 is that any global dictatorship is highly unlikely to be benevolent.

In short, we're fucked.

Where does wealthy come from

Very interesting New York Times article about the new class of super-wealthy, and the debate over whether they really "deserve" all that money. This is how one of those guys justifies his huge wealth accrual:

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter's "unique talent" for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. "I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career," Mr. Hindery said, "who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear."

He counts himself as a talented entrepreneur, having assembled from scratch a cable television sports network, the YES Network, that he sold in 1999 for $200 million. "Jeter makes an unbelievable amount of money," said Mr. Hindery, who now manages a private equity fund, "but you look at him and you say, 'Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills.'"

At an intellectual level, what I find most outrageous about the superwealthy is not that they think they "deserve" to earn insane multiples more than mere mortals, or even that they think of themselves as a force for good in the world (which some of them may be). No, what's most appalling is the way they think their wealth is entirely due to their own talent, and that it has nothing to do with the public providing a structuring environment in which such wealth is achievable. They have no awareness, in other words, that "the market" is a construct that depends, hugely, on norms and services that are collective -- and that arguably should be paid for by those who benefit most from them.

The Derek Jeter parallel is astounding mainly not because some tycoon has the temerity to compare himself to Jeter -- who, incidentally, gets his $20m+ a year despite being the second-worst fielding shortstop in the bigs. What's most amazing is that Hindery seems to have no inkling that Derek Jeter's getting paid millions for hitting a leather ball with a stick is not simply a result of "innate talent," bur rather has something to do with the structure of the sports market. If anything, such sports metaphors ought to give these latter-day robber barons pause. Consider this simple mental test: is the reason why the top baseball players today get paid 30x what they did in the 1950s or 1920s because they are 30x more talented than their predecessors? Or might it have something more to do with the way the market for major league sports has changed over the intervening years? And who shapes that market?

Sometimes I wonder whether assholes like Hindery say stuff like this to the New York Times as of some Grover Norquist-orchestrated PR effort to keep the top marginal tax rates down. (Can these people really believe in the hearts believe that markets are "natural" and not man-made? Have they really no appreciation for the enormous element of luck that plays into business success -- much, much more so than success in professional sports?) But then I remind myself what people I've met like this are like, and I realize that they really are that arrogant and that ignorant.

And let's not even get into the way in which the existence of a class of superwealthy people fundamentally undermines the operation of a democracy that has evolved a de facto pay-to-play model of representation.

The Facebook Platform

I don't usually write about tech stuff on this blog, but a friend's inquiry prompted me to write something about the new developer program over at Facebook. Facebook Platform is definitely an interesting innovation -- the exact opposite of the dithering that goes on at MySpace (which, incidentally, again reflects the social division between the two platforms that Boyd noted last month). And it's definitely being well-marketed: I note in particular that Bay Partners has started a whole fund just dedicated to funding Facebook apps. A funding vehicle solely dedicated to the ecosystem of what is itself only a startup? That's a marketing coup, for sure. It's also probably a waste of money (see last paragraph).

By far the most interesting part of the platform is the viral component - when a friend adds an app, their news stream notes it in their profile. Clicking on the item brings you to the app, where you can play with it yourself and/or add it. This is an extension of the general social networking aspect of the site. In Zuckerman's keynote launching the Platform, he brings up a political example: someone starts a group dedicated to a political point, and then he invites his friends; when they join, their friends are notified, and can then join themselves -- and the result is very useful especially for organizing flash mobs political rallies.

Now, this viral sharing of information obviously makes a lot of sense for organizing groups of people to do stuff. But the question is what kinds of applications do you want to share in this viral fashion. In other words, what kinds of apps will you want to add, just because you see your friends adding them? The obvious example that springs to my mind is games. If my friends think a game is cool, I'll probably try it. News alerts? Maybe (I might go, say, for an app that found the nastiest daily YouTube video). Personal finance stuff? Doubt it -- just because my brother adds a finance app doesn't make it seem that much more compelling to me.

But that's still thinking of apps in terms of single-user functions. The real killer apps in this space will surely be social apps, probably of sorts that we haven't necessarily thought of yet. The trivial example is a calendaring/invitation app -- if my friends start to migrate to a new calendaring app, I'll almost certainly go with them. The smart money is in thinking about what kinds of social apps might come next. Apps for doing stuff together. So what are quintessentially social activities that are currently underserved in the apps space? My initial thoughts (perhaps for obvious reasons, given why I am blogging at 5:00 a.m.): domestic matters. Apps related to babying and mommying? Cooking apps? (Anarchist cooking??) There could well be some very cool new ideas there.

Looking at the more macro story, this is an effort by Facebook to make the "Windows 95" play to developers. What I mean by that is that this is an entirely inward-looking application platform -- the stuff you build for Facebook will only work for Facebook users, and as a developer, you are at the mercy of Facebook at both a technical and a business level. How many crack developers will want to develop stuff for someone else's platform? It's only really worth it if the platform is/becomes the de facto standard for all users (e.g. Windows 95). Absent Facebook as a de facto standard destination for the majority of web users, however, there will always be bigger opportunities for developers in if they build apps outside Facebook. Which means that, unless they've thought of an app which is really tailored exclusively and exactly for Facebook users--e.g. extensions of Facebook's own core competencies--the best developers are likely to continue to develop stuff for the general Web, not for Facebook's proprietary platform.

It's all about the developers. As Steve Ballmer famously observed, "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.... YES!"

QUOTE: Mike Davis on urbanization

Mike Davis:

This is not a war of civilizations but an oblique clash between the American imperium and the labor-power it has expelled from the formal world economy. The future contours of this new "twilight struggle" are difficult to foresee. Trends may persist or wholly original features, including unexpected ideological hybrids, may emerge.

Who, for example, would have predicted in 1900 the convergence just twenty-five years later between urban Marxism and rural rebellion in East Asia? The current vogue of Pentecostalism and Sayd Qutb in the new slums of Latin America, Africa, and Asia may be permanent hegemonies or, then again, the urban poor's version of the peasant millenarian movements and anticolonial Ghost Dances of the 1890s.

What is clear is that the contemporary megaslum poses unique problems of imperial order and social control that conventional geopolitics has barely begun to register. If the point of the war against terrorism is to pursue the enemy into his sociological and cultural labyrinth, then the poor peripheries of developing cities will be the permanent battlefields of the twenty-first century.

– "The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos," Social Text 81 (2004): 14-15.

Who will take the blame for Iraq?

Reading the New York Times's day-late-dollar-short editorial calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq brings to mind what I think is in fact the key question that is stalling all progress on the American Iraq policy: who is going to take the blame for the catastrophe? There strike me as being at least four different camps on this question, each of which has radically different political goals, and none of which are either willing to partner with another group or can form a majority on their own.

At one extreme are the die-hards. These guys still believe that the war was a great idea in the first place, and that it is capable of being brought to a successful conclusion. I'm thinking here of folks like the delightful Podhoretz family. These guys want to make sure that "if the venture fails" then the blame will go to anyone who at any time has expressed any qualms about motivations underlying the war--in other words, virtually all Democrats and a sizable number of Republicans.

These are the prime promulgators of the incipient Dolchstosslegende, blaming liberals and the media for the catastrophe, even as they deny that there is a catastrophe. These guys are trying a straight replay of the Vietnam blame game, trying to create the public impression that the reason we lost that war was because of media quislings and liberal pansies.

In this effort to blame the failure in Iraq on liberalism, however, these guys face two formidable challenges. First, unlike in Vietnam, it's awfully hard to rope the liberals into any responsibility for the way the war has been waged -- there's no LBJ or JFK to blame for starting the war. Second, the anti-war movement, such as it's been, has been far more polite (read: passive & ineffective) than its 1960s-70s antecedent. This time around, there just won't be rioting long-hairs for this wingnut fringe to pin the blame on. Cindy Sheehan's candlelight vigils just don't measure up to Chicago 1968.

With that said, these guys are definitely laying the groundwork for blaming the withdrawal on the next (almost inevitable Democratic) president. They're being assisted in this by Bush, who is doing everything he can to push off the withdrawal to the next administration, so that he can maintain for historical posterity that if only his course had been stayed, it would all have worked out great. And indeed, to some extent the political strategy is working: the threat of being blamed for the failure in Iraq is certainly part of what has the current Democratic leadership incapable of pushing hard for a withdrawal. You might say that they are scared of their party's historical shadow.

Second, at the other extreme, are those who want to blame the failure for the war in Iraq on anyone who supported the war in any way. This group blames a culture of imperialism, and wants to try to make anyone who supported the war look like an idiot, complicit in the catastrophe. The strategic goal for this group is to try to forge a historical sensibility that will hamstring this country's ability to commit similar crimes in the future. The maximal hope is to pin the blame for the war's failure on the political culture of imperialism--and thereby destroy that political culture. This prospect seems like a long-shot as well (cultures of imperialism do disappear, but it takes a greater trauma than the one we have thus far suffered in Iraq) but it explains the antics of folks like Cindy Sheehan.

What's interesting about this group is that while they call for immediate withdrawal, their efforts to affix the blame for the disaster on all who supported the war actually makes it politically more difficult to build a consensus to withdraw. In short , this group is willing to let the war go on longer rather than let those they deem co-responsible for the war get off scot free. They want the country to learn a lesson, not just make some hasty political compromises to get out of Iraq. Now, whatever you may think of the ethics of this position, it is clear that political decisions are never reached this way in this country. And I mean never: the whole political history of the country is a series of half-measures and compromises, and the idea that this is a turning point in that part of our political culture is foolish. Be that as it may, the fervently antiwar crowd, nonpragmatists to a man and woman, are trying to turn Iraq into the tombstone of American imperialism. Which is why committed American imperialists view these people as treasonous -- they intend to undermine what the imperialists consider to be the core values and ambitions of the country.

Third, you have the flip-floppers formerly known as liberal hawks (or, more accurately: the liberal imperialists) -- Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, pundits named Berman, etc. These guys supported the war, and believe in the empire, but realize that the Iraq war is lost and the time has come to leave, because staying only weakens the empire. This group mainly focuses its blame-gaming on the Bush administration, specifically on his execution of the war. In other words, these guys argue that the war was a good idea in the first place (which is why they voted for it), but that the implementation has been a hash. (In other words, if only a President Gore had been running the war, it would all have worked out great.) The main problem these guys face is that the argument is so out of kilter with the facts that it is hard to sell this story. Specifically, it's clear that there is an institutional, systemic problem that led us into this four year catastrophe, not just one man's poor leadership. However, this critique is all but impossible for them to make, because they suffer from the original sin of having voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002. That original vote, supported by a little over half of the Democrats in Congress, is what makes it very difficult to blame the war on conservatism. The result is the ongoing flaccid finger-pointing at Bush, and little ability to get GOPers to support withdrawal. In sum, these people lack any political leverage on the issue, because they have so little credibility.

The last group, and really the key to all this, is the core of the GOP. Not the rightest half of the party that runs in uncontested GOP strongholds (they're in the first group), but rather the majority of the GOP politicians who face big political consequences if the voters decide to blame the GOP for the war. These guys have loyally supported Bush on the Ben Franklin principle that if they don't hang together, they shall most assuredly hang separately. But the Dems have also let these folks off easy so far, by not trying to pin the blame for the catastrophe on the GOP. The Dems have done this in large part, of course, because any attempt to blame the rank and file of the GOP for their support of the war runs into the tricky problem that many Democrats also supported the war, at least at first. These GOPers don't know who to blame for the war exactly, and most of them are politically terrified that no matter what happens, they are going to get blamed. On the one hand, since Bush will certainly get stuck with a huge chunk of the blame (unless some miracle lets him pull a chestnut of victory from the fires of Baghdad), sticking with Bush is presents a horrible political risk. On the other hand, breaking with Bush to go with the liberal hawks presents the same problems for this group as it does with the liberal hawks: how can you blame Bush alone for something that you supported so vociferously for so long? None of these people want to be the first to break with Bush, but none of them want to be left behind with the wingnut fringe, if they're in a swing district and a lot of the party has already moved.

In sum, it's a classic political impasse. But here's the key point: this impasse is a disaster for the troops on the ground. While Washington plays a four-way game of political chicken over the political responsibility for the policy failure, its the military that continue to ooze blood into the sands of Mesopotamia. Rather, what the troops want (need!) is a reasonable, realistic discussion of what comes next. The original mission--to create a stable, democratic, prosperous Iraq that would be a beacon of hope and change for the Middle East--clearly has failed. Dead as a doorknob, and everyone knows it. So, given that Iraq is in a civil war, the question is: what next? Specifically: what do we want our force posture in the Middle East to be in five years, and how do we get there from here in an orderly fashion?

That's the debate the military wants us to have, but in the meanwhile, Washington is trying to sort out who is going to take the fall for getting us into the mess. And whatever the rhetoric on all sides, that's hardly supportive of the troops.

Global weirding

Bizarre tales of climate change:

• Snowstorm shuts down Johannesburg?!
• Increased CO2 makes poison ivy more potent?

A good example of what Amory Lovins refers to as "global weirding."

Bush: Blair's no poodle

From The Sun, George Bush explains his relationship with Tony Blair:

As for the pressure he's been under at home over Iraq, I ask him about it, try to buck him up as a friend . . . "Are you doing OK?" But the truth of the matter is each person carries their own burden.

I've heard he’s been called Bush’s poodle. He's bigger than that. This is just background noise, a distraction from big things.

The impact of Bush's denial reminds me of the following apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson:

When Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress, legend says, he wanted to spread the rumor that his opponent was a pig-fucker. Johnson's campaign manager said, "Lyndon, you know he doesn't do that!" Johnson replied, "I know. I just want to make him deny it."

Sometimes the denial is worser than the accusation.

Rains in Pakistan kill 228, spark protests

Mass death in Karachi yesterday in the face of torrential rains. We can't know whether this storm was the result of global warming, but the key element of this story is in the details of how the deaths occur, and of the political conditions under which this takes place.

KARACHI, Pakistan - Collapsed houses and severed electrical cables killed at least 228 people after heavy rains and thunderstorms lashed Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi, an official said Sunday....

The country's economic hub, a dynamic but chaotic city with fragile infrastructure, frequently seethes with tension and street protests, some sparked by massive power outages. The atmosphere has been particularly tense since May 12, when political unrest left more than 40 people dead....

Most of the deaths were caused by collapsing homes but snapped power lines electrocuted at least 20 people people, Ahmed said.

Electricity was still disrupted in some neighborhoods Sunday. Residents angry after a night without power to run fans or air conditioners in the sweltering summer heat staged street protests, Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal said....

Reading the details of the story, we can see the way multiple systems under stress -- antinomian political movements, a wretched electrical grid, and generally awful urban infrastructure (and, we might add, massive political corruption) -- can be brought across a tipping point by an extreme weather event. Global warming will make these extreme weather events more common, precipitating political crisis in already-vulnerable places like Karachi.

Again, the takeaway is simple: the key headline impacts of climate change will not be weather events, but rather will be more general political crises.

Impact of climate change on Bangladesh

Good article on the incipient impact of climate change on Bangladesh. The article rightly underscores the open political anger expressed by Bangladeshi politicians about the fact that tens of millions of his countryfolk are likely to be displaced by climate change induced geographic changes, on account of polluting behavior by the rich on the far side of the earth.

What the article doesn't attempt to do is to think through what the second- and third-order effects of such a refugee crisis may be in a country that is already desperately poor, politically unstable, increasingly prone to Islamism, and all but completely bereft of any potentially palliative social services. Thinking through those second- and third-order impacts is what will really make your hair stand on end.

Oh, and did you know that there are more than 300,000 Bangladeshis living in the UK,
and that they "experience disproportionately high rates of unemployment, overcrowding, and certain types of health problems," making them increasingly susceptible to the appeal of Islamism?

Direct to Video: Al Qaeda's message to America

Azzam al-Amriki (an American-born Al Qaeda member) has risen to become the #3 spokesman for Al Qaeda when addressing Americans. He's just released a new video, which bears watching:

Also worth checking out is Michael Scheuer's trenchant analysis of what the video tells us about the scary savviness of Al Qaeda's media strategy.

Climate change as IR version of "passive aggressive"?

In the aftermath of the just-signed G8 agreement on restricting greenhouse gases -- a watered-down and ineffective-by-design agreement that Al Gore immediately labeled "a disgrace" -- Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Friday made a speech in which he described global warming as

a form of external aggression against Africa as the impact of the phenomenon is felt more acutely on the continent than elsewhere. "Africa used to suffer outside aggression in the past, the latest form of aggression is climate change," Museveni said after talks in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Our climate is very warm so if it becomes warmer we will suffer more, yet the people emitting these greenhouse gases are not ourselves, it is others," the long-standing Ugandan leader added.

In what sense is this a fair charge? Certainly it seems well accepted that if a company pours toxins into a river that it knows will poison those who live downstream, then that company is legally liable for the damage it does. The challenge with the climate change parallel is that even though the general effects of increasing greenhouse gases is well understood -- it leads to global warming and often radical changes in precipitation patterns -- its effects are both very long-term and very hard to disaggregate, at a local level, from stochastically natural variation in the weather. Over time, however, I believe that these charges will be made to stick. In the medium term, I believe the possibility for international class action cases (toxic torts) based on greenhouse gas emissions is hardly out of the range of conception.

I wonder, however, whether Museveni is wise to push this security angle. If in fact it is a matter of security, then it seems that the lesson of the Melian Dialogue is likely to apply: namely, that the strong will do what they can, while the weak will suffer what they must. The U.S. would be wise to adopt a security lens for understanding the threat of climate change, but for the likes of Uganda, building a legal strategy may make more sense.

What we're reading: A Savage War of Peace

An amazing book, with some stunning insights in particular how the use of torture informs a struggle against an insurgency. Money:

From a purely intelligence point of view, experience teaches that more often than not the collating services are overwhelmed by a mountain of false information extorted from victims desperate to save themselves further agony. Also, it is bound to drive into the enemy camp the innocents who have wrongly been submitted to torture. As Camus declared: "torture has perhaps saved some at the expense of honour, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it has created fifty new terrorists who, operating in some other way in in another place, would cause the death of even more innocent people." Torture, one feels, is never warranted; one should never fight for a good cause with evil weapons. Again, says Camus, "it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them...."

And more:

One of the worst aspects of the admission of torture as an instrument is the wide train of corruption that invariably follows in its wake. In a submission to the "Safeguard Committee" of September 1957, [Paul] Teitgen [head of the Algiers police and himself a Dachau survivor] wrote words that would apply equally to any latter-day authoritarian regime, whether it be Greece, Chile, Spain or the Soviet Union:

Even a legitimate action... can nevertheless lead to improvisations and excesses. Very rapidly, if this is not remedied, efficacity becomes the sole justification. In default of a legal basis, it seeks to justify itself at any price, and, with a certain bad conscience, it demands the privilege of exceptional legitimacy. In the name of efficacity, illegality has become justified.

In a civilised society, torture has no more counter-productive and insidious long-term effect than the way it tends to demoralise the inflicter even more than his victim.

From Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, Algeria 1954-1962, p. 205, 206.

Supposedly Bush has read this book. I wonder what he thought when he read that passage.

DHS tells NYC to prepare for major hurricane

New York, get ready:

Weather experts have said the nation's largest city is about due for a major hurricane with 130 mph winds and a 30-foot storm surge that could cause the Hudson and East Rivers to overflow.

The storm threatens to inflict more than $100 billion in economic losses while forcing the evacuation of 3 million people — more than six times the population of pre-Katrina New Orleans.

Whale caught in May hunted in 1890

From the Associated Press:

BOSTON — A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2 -inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated at 115 to 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was probably manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.

The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.

"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a nonlethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."

The whale hearkens to a far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called to the site after it was found.

Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional way for Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.

Whaling has always been a prominent source of food for Alaskans and is monitored by the International Whaling Commission.

Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island

Vulcan point in Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on Luzon (PHI)

Source: Elbruz.org

Quote of the day: Burke

"A great empire and little minds go ill together."
- Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with America, 1775

Carbon trading market may collapse

One reason why it is imperative to start planning for how to deal with the worst possible effects of global warming is that there is a very significant possibility that no greenhouse gas mitigation will take place, and we will end up in an extremely high GHG world. One reason we should start planning for this outcome is that the current leading global abatement mechanisms, rooted in the Kyoto Accord, seem on the verge of a catastrophic implosion.

The devil is in the details, but the short version of the story is that the "carbon trading market," which currently involves corporations trading "carbon offsets" to the tune of over $50B a year, is beset by suspicions that many of the carbon reductions that these corporations are supposedly paying for are not taking place, because of fraud, mismanagement, and lack of oversight. An investigation by the Financial Times a couple of months ago revealed:

• Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
• Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
• Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
• A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
• Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

In theory, the idea behind the carbon market is that it is more cost effective and economically rational shut down the most polluting sources first. In principle, a liquid market in carbon credits will allow the world to shut down GHG polluters in order of inefficiency, which generally means that gross polluters in third world countries are often selling their "offsets" to first world corporations. To put it schematically, the market is designed to allow a company like HSBC or Google, say, to pay some Chinese coal-fired power plant to shut down in exchange they can continue to pollute. The reasoning is that it costs the global economy less to shut down a superannuated Chinese power plant than it does to shut down a major Western bank.

All of this works only if there is a legitimate, liquid, and nonfraudulent global market. But these conditions, alas, do not hold. To put the matter graphically, what seems to be happening is that the companies that are selling the offset are simply pocketing the money from the market and then continuing to pollute along their merry way. This in essence amounts to a giant defrauding of the environmental goodwill of generally first world (especially European) companies by generally third world companies, with a willfully blind eye being turned by the governments in these latter countries.

What this means is that not only is GHG abatement not being effectuated by the market, but also, concomitantly, that the credibility of the carbon market itself may well soon collapse. Just imagine the political fallout as it emerges that European companies have paid billions to Chinese and Indian companies, which have simply pocketed the money without abating a thing. The bottom line is that, absent an effective apparatus for global governance and enforcement -- something ideologically opposed by the libertarian right in the United States, and by nationalists in most countries -- the chances for an effective market in emissions abatement seems vanishingly unlikely to emerge.

(It's worth noting that it's not clear that the central government of China, which appears to be the guiltiest country, actually has the authority to prevent the fraudulent behavior of the companies that are selling the credits. Local party bosses in the provinces are largely masters of their domain, and if they are tolerating this kind of fraudulent behavior on the part of their region factories -- many of which they have personal stakes in -- it's not clear that Beijing has either the appetite or the capacity to force them to change. Another reason why planning for the worst is the safest thing to do.)

CIA admits to running secret detention center in Poland

According to a CIA spokesman, a newly issued report about a its clandestine torture center in Poland is "biased and distorted" -- but not false.

Stunning report on prewar intelligence

One of the great myths of the Iraq war is that responsibility for the catastrophe is somehow attributable to the failures of the intelligence community. Some of this is fair: the war was sold to the American public largely on the back of CIA Director George "Slamdunk" Tenet's willingness to allow the Bush regime to publicly misrepresent the community's assessment of the likelihood that Saddam has WMDs. And without that sales job, there might have been no war.

But the real story about intelligence and the war is how much the intelligence community has gotten things right. That elemental rightness explains why there has been a running war between the White House and Langley for much of the past four years. On the one hand, the White House has waged an overt and public campaign to pin the political blame for the Iraq catastrophe on the intelligence community. The White House has been able to largely get away with this political misrepresentation because the classified status of the intelligence reports has made it hard for reporters or anyone else to challenge the White House's claims about the content of these reports. On the other hand, the intelligence community and some (presumably Democratic) members of Congress have fired back by leaking the intelligence reports showing that they did tell the President that there was scant evidence that Saddam had WMDs, that there was no evidence that he had operational connections to Al Qaeda, and that any attempt at replacing the Iraqi dictatorship would be fraught with difficulties, and likely to create enormous new problems.

The latest sortie in this battle has just taken place, and it takes the form of a devastating new report from the Senate Intelligence Committee which gives the lie to to the oft-heard claims that the Iraq catastrophe was either (1) unanticipated and unanticipatable and/or (b) simply the result of poor execution by the Bush administration. The Senate report summarizes the pre-war intelligence reports issued by the intelligence agencies -- notably two still-classified reports by National Intelligence Council, which is the umbrella organization responsible for synthesizing intelligence estimates from across the Intelligence Community -- concerning what the intelligence community believed would be the likely consequences of invading Iraq. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the major prewar conclusions of the community (and I quote):

• Democracy: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that establishing a stable democratic government in Iraq would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.
• Terrorism: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that al Qaida would probably see an opportunity to accelerate its operational tempo and increase terrorist attacks during and after a US-Iraq War
• Terrorism: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that a heightened terrorist threat resulting from a war with Iraq, after an initial spike, would probably decline slowly over the subsequent 3-5 years.
• Domestic instability: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that Iraq was a deeply divided society that would likely engage in violent conflict unless the occupying power prevented it.
• Political Islam: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that the United States' defeat and occupation of Iraq would result in a surge of Political Islam and funding for terrorist groups.
• The influence of Saddam's neighbors: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that Iraq's neighbors would jockey for influence in Iraq, with activities ranging from humanitarian reconstruction assistance to fomenting strife among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups.
• The influence of Saddam's neighbors: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that Iranian leaders would try to influence the shape of post-Saddam Iraq to preserve Iranian security and to demonstrate that Iran is an important regional actor.
• Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that military action to eliminate Iraqi WMD would not cause other regional states to abandon their WMD programs, or their desire to develop such programs.
• Security: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that the Iraqi government would have to walk a fine line between dismantling the worst aspects of Saddam's police, security, and intelligence forces and retaining the capacity to enforce nationwide peace.
  
• Oil: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that Iraq's large petroleum resources would make reconstruction a less difficult challenge than political transformation, but that postwar Iraq would nonetheless face significant economic challenges
• Humanitarian Issues: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that major outside assistance would be needed to meet humanitarian needs.
• Infrastructure: The Intelligence Community assessed prior to the war that major outside assistance would be needed to rebuild Iraq's water and sanitation infrastructure.
  

Every one of those claims is detailed at copious length, with lots of footnotes. Moreover, with the partial exception of the comment on oil (which did not anticipate the insurgency's ability to be able to indefinitely cripple oil production capabilities), every one of these assessments was spot-on.

There was an intelligence failure, all right. But it took place in the Oval Office, not in the three-letter agencies.

Andrew Bacevich, reflecting on his son's death in Iraq

Andrew Bacevich, the esteemed military theorist, recently has endured the death of his son, a U.S. soldier in Iraq. He writes movingly of what this means, politically:

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

Nagasaki

August 7, 1945:
August 12, 1945:Per Phil's request, via Atomic Bomb Museum.

Getting hit by an IED in Iraq

In this brief footage, you can feel the combination of boredom and terror which is the essence of warfare:

Great pic of SF after '06 earthquake

Click through for better res:

Edwards on Iraq War Funding

From CNN:

BLITZER: I know you're very upset that the Democrats in Congress blinked on this issue of a troop withdrawal, but they simply don't have the votes to override a presidential veto.

What are they supposed to do if they want to keep funding the troops but at the same time make their point?

EDWARDS: What they should do is continue to submit funding bills supporting the troops to the president with a timetable for withdrawal. And if the president of the United States, George Bush, continues to veto those bills, it's the president who's deciding he's not going to fund the troops. And ultimately that would actually require George Bush to start withdrawing troops from Iraq.

And my basic view about this, Wolf, is not complicated. I think that the American people want a different course in Iraq. They made that clear in the last election. and what I am asking is for the Congress to stand its ground, to do what it needs to do for America. This is not about politics. It's about life and death.

[SNIP!]

BLITZER: So the sitting members, like Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator Biden, Senator Dodd, Congressman Kucinich, what do you expect they're going to do?

EDWARDS: What I expect them to do is stand their ground, to continue to support bills that have a timetable for withdrawal and to use whatever tools are available to them to prevent a bill going to the president that does not have a timetable for withdrawal.

It's not complicated. That's what the American people want and I think that's what they should do.

BLITZER: Some of the Democratic leaders say they're going to find other opportunities in the next few months to attach that kind of troop withdrawal deadline to other legislation that the president wants. So while they're not -- we're not going to get everything they want right now, they're still going to have that opportunity down the road.

EDWARDS: This president is not going to negotiate about this, Wolf.

How clear could anything be?

He will not negotiate. He will not compromise. He does not think he's capable of doing anything wrong. He has to be stopped.

And the power that the Congress has is its constitutional power to fund. And they need to use that power to force this president down a different course. It's that simple.

Edwards is right. It really is that simple.

Tea Leaf Coalitions

One unexpected result of climate change may to drive the formation of interesting new (or rather, old) political coalitions, specifically, green-black(shirt) coalitions that combine nativism with environmentalism. If the Germans used to call the green Party a "Watermelon Party" (i.e. green on the outside but red on the inside), we might call these new coalitions "tea leaf" coalitions. To see what I'm talking about, check out the British National Party's statement on the environment. Similar things are at work with Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in Australia, and Pia Kjaersgaard's People's Party in Denmark. All this is to say that we shouldn't expect that the politics of climate change abatement will necessarily be "liberal" or "progressive."

(There is a strong historical precedent for such unpleasant political assemblages. Not only is there the case of German national socialism--Hitler was a famously ardent nature-lover, and the concept of Lebensraum has a certain conservationist ring to it--but let's not forget our own Madison Grant, who was both cofounder of the Save-the-Redwoods League and the author of "The Passing of the Great Race," which Stephan J. Gould described as "the most influential tract of American scientific racism," and was the academic work that did most to justify the passage of the famously racist Immigration Act of 1924, which largely shut off immigration to the U.S. for the next four decades.)

There are a couple things going on here. Part of it is about these far-right parties looking for a way to clean up their image, to go beyond the single issue of immigration and national-cultural integrity, to broaden their electoral appeal among voters already inclined to cast protest votes (i.e. green voters). But it's also important to note (and here is where the history lesson above gets valuable) that the connection between racism and nativism, on the one hand, and environmentalism, on the other, is not without a certain abiding logic.

Take the case of climate change and carbon emissions. We know that on average an American has a carbon footprint that is 7X that of, say, a Mexican. Every Mexican who comes to the United States will, very quickly, come to consume at a much higher level. Keeping foreigners out (and down) does, therefore, keep down environmental damage. Or rather, it allows the current main polluters to continue to monopolize their front-row seats at the pollution table. What underpins both environmentalism and nativism, and links the two together, is a common "zero-sum game" mentality.

What do I mean by a zero-sum game mentality? Let's break down the regional carbon emissions problem into a numerical schematic. Imagine the world consists of, on the one hand, 1000 people in the third world, each of whom produces 10 "carbon emissions units" (CEUs), and, on the other hand, 100 people in the first world, each of whom produces 100 CEUs. In this simplified model, the world as a whole is producing 20,000 CEUs. Now let's say that the world decides that we need to reduce our carbon footprint to 15,000 CEUs. Assuming there's no migration, we might work out some arrangement whereby the wealthy world magnanimously agrees to take on 80% of the CEU reduction. That would mean the third world now gets to produce 9000 CEUs, or 9 CEUs per capita, and the first world gets to produce 6000 CEUs, or 60 CEUs per capita.

But look what happens if we allow migration. (We'll assume no natural population growth, to simplify the thought experiment.) Let's say we allow just 50 people to move from the third to the first world, so that the population in the third world is now 950 and the population in the first world is 150. Assuming we agree to that same carbon reduction agreement, the per capita consumption of CEUs for current residents of the first world will have to drop not just by 40%, but by 60%! Even assuming that we agree to split the necessary carbon reduction evenly between the first and third world (e.g. to 7500 CEUs per world sector) if we've allowed those 50 immigrants to move, then first world per capita CEU consumption will have to go from 100 to 50 -- a 50% drop. In the meanwhile, the per capita drop will be only 21% in the third world. In fact, even if we make the third world take on 80% of the CEU reduction, the immigration effect will mean that per capita reduction will still have to be 47% in the first world versus only 37% in the third world.

I'm not saying that fascist policy-makers have actually done math of this sort, but you can see the logic: if there's only a certain amount of total polluting that is going to be allowed, then conserving those pollution rights for you and yours is not a politically illogical way of thinking.

A Virtual Country (Only)

Some amusing news today about how the Indian Ocean country of the Maldives has opened the first "virtual embassy" on Second Life, beating out Sweden for the honor.

Somewhat less amusing is the fact that the Maldives, eighty percent of which lies under one meter sea level and which is home to 360,000 people, is likely to disappear as a real country in the next hundred years.

One billion climate refugees?

Christian Aid, a UK charity, has issued a report that claims that climate change may displace as many as a billion people by the middle of the century. That would more than quintuple the current number of refugees worldwide. The report emphasizes the important point that most of those climate refugees will not be transnational migrants, but will be displaced within their own countries (IDPs, in the U.N. jargon). Most of the victims will be in South Asia, the Middle East, and the Sahel in Africa. Full report here.

A billion refugees strikes me as unlikely, but it's not beyond the realm of conception. What is unthinkable, on the other hand, are the humanitarian and political implications of such a crisis.

To the shores of Tripoli

Lebanese tanks pound a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli that is the headquarters of a group with suspected links to al Qaeda. Ominously, the rebels got the best of the initial exchange, killing 22 soldiers and losing only 17 of their own warriors. Check it:

African dessication

The Economist has an interesting article on the implications of global warming for Africa (sub. req.). Particularly interesting is this image:


The next step is to map which of the countries that are in the shaded region have the most other stressed systems (political, economic, military, agricultural, etc.) and you begin to get a good sense of where things are going to get really bad.

And here's the key point: the ecological/climate crisis is going to appear in the headlines as a crisis of political economy in these regions. Thus the climate crisis in Darfur may appear as a "genocide." Thus the climate crisis in Nigeria may appear as an uprising of a new breed of global guerrillas. Thus the climate crisis in Zimbabwe may appear as the sociopathic derangement of a superannuated leader.

Media and the new face of war

It wasn't until half a decade after the end of American involvement in Vietnam that fully aestheticized moving images of the Vietnam War began to appear, with movies like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). With the advent of cheap personal video recording and editing equipment and free video-sharing services, such representations are appearing out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a "reality-based" or "gonzo" format in near-real time. Here's an example.



Hat tip: MR.

L'Altipiano delle Cinquemiglia, Italy, May 2007

Where I was on Thursday. Southern Abruzze, at about 1200 meters elevation:

Tag cloud for the Republican debate

I confess I'm already so bored with the '08 campaign that I haven't watched either the Dem or the GOP debate, and have instead just been reading about the results. Luckily, someone had the smart idea to put all the GOP candidate comments in a "tag cloud" format, with somewhat interesting results. In addition to what these clouds reveal about the diverging concerns of the candidates, I also suspect that the standing of each candidate is probably strongly correlated with the number of words each candidate managed to get into the debate. To wit:

• Romney: 2371 words
• McCain: 2060 words
• Giuliani: 1623 words
• Gilmore: 1475 words
• Brownback: 1420 words
• Tancredo: 1149 words
• Huckabee: 1002 words
• Paul: 995 words
• Hunter: 945 words
• Thompson: 924 words

The insight here is that Rudy is going down, the Thompson surge is about to crash, and Romney is, at the end of the day, looking like the guy to beat. At least, that's what that one variable suggests...

Bill Buckley all but calls Cheney a liar

Virtually everyone at the National Review is a GOP hack, but apparently the old man himself isn't. Buckley today bluntly calls out Cheney for making "false allegations" and Bush for taking "ill-considered actions."

This statement is simply a matter of recognizing reality, of course, but still, it's encouraging that Buckley is modeling this, because recognizing reality is a lost art on the right these days.

Favorite novels

Kevin Drum has an amusing post on the silliness of the perennial question that Presidential candidates get posed about their preferred books. He suggests that a smart candidate ought to modulate his answer depending on the interlocutor, with the following categories, along with my own modest answers:

1. Moderately intellectual choice, suitable for being interviewed by George Will: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
   
2. Funny choice, suitable for being interviewed on MTV: Joseph Heller, Catch-22
3. Multicultural choice, suitable for being interviewed by New York Times: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
   
4. Populist choice, suitable for being interviewed by Parade: J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
   
5. Safely patriotic choice, suitable for being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh: Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
   
6. Thoughtful choice, suitable for being interviewed on PBS: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
   
7. Anti-terrorism choice, suitable for being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan: Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

How Racism Works

The New York Times has an extremely important article today about racism, summarizing the findings of a recent study on officiating in the NBA. It turns out that white refs call fouls at a higher rate on black players than on white players, and that black refs call fouls on white players at a higher rate as well, though with less bias. It's also worth noting that while blacks notch 5/6ths of all minutes played, 2/3rds of the refs are white. Here's the gloss on the findings, by Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers:

“There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

At this point in the tortured hisory of race and racism in the United States, racism is not so much about conscious haters, but rather about subtle biases that manifest themselves in the smallest but most significant ways that people choose who to befriend, where to play, and who to collaborate with. This represents massive progress from the 1950s. but still indicates how far we have to go before overcoming the sorry history of slavery.

The right place to discuss the Armenian genocide

I posted earlier this year on the effort by the US Congress to declare the mass murder of Armenians by Turks in the 1910s a "genocide," an effort I condemned as, essentially, none of our business. I also suggested that, just as the appropriateness of a particular abortion technique ought to be for doctors not politicians to decide, so the question of whether or not these slaughters constitute a "genocide" was not something for politicians to decide, but rather for historians versed in the evidence to debate. If you want to know more about what the historians think, you can start here (sub. req.).

GOP's inexorable slide

This graph from the Iowa Futures Market shows how betters are rating the Democrats' versus the Republicans' chances at the White House in '08. The red line represents the GOP, the blue line the Dems, and the numbers on the Y axis more or less correspond to the percent chance that this market judges each party has of winning the Presidency.

To be honest, I am shocked that the market rates the GOP's chances so highly. I'm guessing the only reason why the GOP is deemed to have any chance at all is because the Dems may nominated Hillary.

Coping with Climate Change: Australia

The Economist's description of the drought in the Murray-Darling basin (Australia's largest) provides a harbinger of how global warming will force painful accomodations:

The Murray-Darling's troubles are likely to worsen. As Australia's population continues to grow so does demand for water in the cities and for the crops that grow in the river basin. Meanwhile, global warming appears to be heating the basin up and drying it out. Although few scientists are confident that they can ascribe any individual event—including today's drought—to global warming, most agree that droughts like the present one will become more common.

Many of the world's rivers, including the Colorado in America, China's Yellow river and the Tagus, which flows through Spain and Portugal, are suffering a similar plight. As the world warms up, hundreds of millions of people will face the same ecological crisis as the residents of the Murray-Darling basin. As water levels dwindle, rows about how supplies should be used are turning farmers against city-dwellers and pitching environmentalists against politicians. Australia has a strong economy, a well-funded bureaucracy and robust political institutions. If it is struggling to respond to this crisis, imagine how drought will tear apart other, less prepared parts of the world.

Droughts have long plagued the Murray-Darling. The region is afflicted by a periodic weather pattern known as El Niño. At irregular intervals of two to seven years, the waters of the central Pacific warm up, heralding inclement weather throughout the southern hemisphere. Torrential rains flood the coast of Peru, while south-eastern Australia wilts in drought. The duration of these episodes is as unpredictable as their arrival. They can range from a few months to several years. As a result, the flow of the Darling, the longest tributary of the Murray, varies wildly, from as little as 0.04% of the long-term average to as much as 911%. Although the most recent El Niño ended earlier this year, it has left the soils in the basin so dry and the groundwater so depleted that the Murray-Darling's flow continues to fall, despite normal levels of rainfall over the past few months.

Read the whole thing to see how Australia is renegotiating all the last two centuries' social compromises about water--something that will need to happen everywhere as climate changes.

MC Rove

Disturbing:

George Bush, Manly Man

George Bush pays $275 a pop to get his face made up for public appearances.

Mitigating climate risk: alternative energy sources

Although his data is a bit dated, Caltech chemist Nate Lewis provides a compelling, bottoms-up analysis of the potential of non-carbon energy sources as a way of mitigating climate change. The main takeaway is that we're not going to get much done developing non-carbon energy sources until we price in the environmental externalities of carbon-based energy sources. In short, we need a carbon tax, bad.

Hat tip: EF.

USA Ethics: A new twist

Debra Yang, who as the US Attorney in Los Angeles was leading a corruption probe into the affairs of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), resigned last October. The main framing of this story, so far, has to do with the fact that White House Counsel Harriet Miers apparently was threatening to can Yang, presumably to shut down the investigation of a GOP lawmaker.

But what really jumped out at me about this story is the circumstances under which Yang actually ended up departing. According to The Hill, "she was lured away by a $1.5 million-plus offer to become a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher LLP, which is defending Lewis in the probe" (emphasis added).

What a brilliant, precedent-setting idea: if some USA is investigating you on a corruption charge, you hire an expensive law firm, and arrange to have them hire away the prosecuting attorney. If you can't beat 'em, co-opt 'em....

Terrifying Weather

In today's Times, my friend Tad Homer-Dixon breaks down the security threat posed by climate change.

Blowback from the collapse of the modernist project

John Hagedorn has an important article that explains how the collapse of the social modernist project of development is at the root of today's "global gangs." Money:

Unlike the expansion of the state in the earlier industrial era, in the global era the state has retreated in the face of instantaneous financial flows and neoliberal monetary policy, while emphasizing punitive policies toward marginalized communities. Gangs and other groups of armed young men occupy the vacuum created by the retreat of the social welfare policies of the state....

Although the collapse of socialism and demoralization of left-wing forces have been replaced by new social movements that show promise for social change, in some places institutionalized gangs and other groups of armed youth have moved into the vacuum created by the demise of the left. These groups are cynical about politics and looking desperately for a better life today, not tomorrow. For them, the promises of modernity have proven to be illusory. Gangs are one price we pay for the failure of the modern project.

The collapse (or rather, the willful assassination) of the dream of social modernism continues to produce all sorts of unexpected blowback.

Armenian genocide

Matt Welch in today's LA Times argues that the United States, in particular the President in his annual April 24 address on "Man's Inhumanity to Man," should refer to the slaughter of Armenians as a genocide. A couple months ago, I argued that such a vote was a purely symbolic act that threatened to undermine real American interests in the Middle East.

Welch, however, suggests a way in which not using the G-word may in fact harm our real interests. Welch quotes the most recent U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Marshall Evans:

"In the real world," Evans told a packed Beverly Hilton hall of diaspora Armenians in February, "when an official policy diverges wildly from what the broad public believes is self-evident, that policy ceases to command respect."

Evans, a career, keep-your-head-down foreign service type, surveyed the available literature on the events of 1915-23 before taking the Armenian post in September 2004 and concluded that the U.S. position of avoiding the word "genocide" diverged so wildly from the historical consensus that it undermined Washington's moral authority.

This is in principle a reasonable argument. However, it embeds two assumption, first, that the United States should be pursuing the so-called moral project that Bush claims to be pursuing in the Middle East, and second, that in fact Bush has any moral authority that can be undermined. I would strongly question both those assumptions. Welch's conflation of "Bush" with "Washington" doesn't make me very happy, either.

Malawi: Case study of a country at risk from climate change

Malawi is a medium-sized, landlocked country in Southern Africa. It's not the kind of place where the impact of climate change will take place in the form of telegenic catastrophes of massive storms or huge floods. Rather, climate change is steadily forcing incremental changes that the local social, economic, and political systems largely lack the capacity to adapt to, as this report based on a study by Action Aid International makes clear:

Farmers are increasingly concerned about the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. "Food availability has been an issue over the years since the disasters began. Much as we have experienced floods in those days, the impact was somehow not as severe. As time went by, there has been a drop in crop production due to frequent flooding and droughts," said a farmer in Salima district.

Malawi's experiences are often traced back to the 1991/92 drought in southern Africa, which affected over six million people. Since then, the report noted, the severity of disasters has escalated.

In other words, the headline events which climate change are far less likely to be weather-related than they are to be stories about hunger, about social strife, about unemployment, about rising death rates from HIV (Malawi's adult HIV rate is estimated at 14%), and so on. Climate change risks tipping these stressed systems into full-blown collapse. The report lays bare how the different stressed subsystems impacted by climate change--natural, political, social, and economic--all interact to create multiple negative feedback loops:

There has also been a noticeable increase in diseases, such as malaria, cholera and dysentery, associated with changes in rainfall patterns, creating health challenges that are particularly affecting women farmers. "We now travel longer distances to fetch water, and spend most of the time in health centres instead of working in our fields," the report quoted a female farmer as saying....

Poor land use and deforestation are also serious concerns among people in Salima and Nsanje. Farmers are aware that these activities result in more floods and droughts, but are not empowered to intervene. Many pointed fingers at the role of tobacco estates in felling trees in their neighbourhood....

The increasing food insecurity caused by climate change has also limited the number of casual jobs available on commercial farms. In the past, nearby small-scale sugar and tea plantations were sources of employment for many people in Nsanje. However, farmers say that flood-induced migration means that there are now many more people seeking work on the plantations than there are jobs available.

Some mitigation plans are being considered, but it's probably not nearly enough:

The Malawians are considering enhancing food security by developing community-based storage systems for seed and food, and enhancing the resilience of food production systems to erratic rainfall by promoting the sustainable production of maize and vegetables in wetlands and catchment areas.

However, Action Aid said the implementation of NAPA faced capacity constraints at district level, and a lack of coordination among sectors. "In addressing adaptation challenges, it is imperative that a multisectoral approach is taken, beginning at the community level with the smallholder farmers who are directly affected by climate change. These farmers need skills, knowledge and access to credit for the addressing short- and long-term needs of diversifying from maize into other crops."

Aid agencies and the Malawian government have been considering providing drought insurance to smallholder farmers. The Commodity Risk Management Group (CRMG) of the World Bank developed an objective indicator that could be used as a proxy measure of the exposure of Malawi's maize production to drought, but it was poorly linked to crop yields, according to the FAO, which was now working on the idea.

A Trillion Dollar Risk?

The GAO says the U.S. government faces at least a $919 billion liability under a worst-case scenario of flood and crop losses due to global warming.

Global Warming to Shorten Our Days

Global warming is literally going to shorten our days, according to a recent study:

As water warms, it expands, causing sea level rise. Felix Landerer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues used a computer model to find out what effect this expansion will have on the distribution of water around the globe....

Two factors mean that this tends to move water's mass away from the equator and towards the poles. First, the depths of the North Atlantic should warm more quickly than depths elsewhere, thanks to a current there that carries water down from the surface. So the expansion and movement of water is strongest there. Second, a quirk of our planet's geography means that the continental shelf's surface area happens to be larger at high latitudes than around the equator.

Having more mass at the poles, which is closer to Earth's axis of rotation, will make the planet spin faster.

But not to worry: the shortening will be by only 0.12 milliseconds over the next 200 years, according to Landerer.

2007 Pulitzer for Photography

Amazing photo series of a single mom caring for her dying ten year old son. About as anguishing as anything I've ever seen.

Pornography : English :: Communism : French

Classic Gopnik:

Pornography was to British writers of the fifties what the Communist Party was to French writers of the time: they didn’t entirely approve of it, but felt that being attached to it would keep them from being seen as mere intellectuals.

From a different article in the same issue of the New Yorker, I also enjoyed this line:

When it comes to architecture and design, most of this new Beijing looks like some provincial official's dream of modernization.

That's because the new Beijing in fact is some provincial official's dream of modernization. See for example, this, or this, or this.

Global Warming goes to the Security Council

The Guardian today explains the point of Britain's decision to refer climate change to the U.N. Security Council:

The entire point of the exercise [is] to reframe the way people think about this problem. There's good, pragmatic reasoning behind that. The glum reality is that governments tend to take security threats more seriously than any other kind. Just think of what Washington has spent on the "war on terror". If George Bush gets his latest budget through Congress, he will have spent $750bn of American taxpayers' money on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a little over five years. Environmentalists drool when they imagine what they could have done with a fraction of that money. Even a quarter of the total, say a meagre $200bn, could have paid for enormous strides towards a low carbon economy. It could, for instance, have paid to transform the way we generate electricity, by capturing carbon and storing it in the ground, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

It's a sad but true statement that this country will only get serious about something as big as climate change when we decide to couch it in terms of war. This in fact explains all the "War on X" rhetoric that pops repeatedly in American political discourse (and always in capital letters): The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War on Terror, etc. You'll know this country's finally getting serious about universal health care when some president declares "War on Uninsurance," or some such....

HIV and Climate Change: Diplomatic Equivalent?

In referring climate change to the Security Council today, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett cited as a precedent the Security Council's decision in 2000 to take up the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a security issue, arguing that, "We want to see the same thing happen with climate change, that it comes from the fringes into the mainstream." She then goes on to quote Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, whose economy depends on hydropower from a reservoir that is already depleted by drought, as calling climate change "an act of aggression by the rich against the poor." She glosses Museveni's statement by noting that, "He is one of the first leaders to see this problem in security terms. He will not be the last."

In fact, the Museveni quote underscores how the decision to refer climate change to the Security Council breaks very different, indeed radically different, diplomatic ground from the Security Council's uptake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The HIV epidemic undoubtedly represents a grave security risk for many countries. But the epidemic is not something that one country can be credibly construed as having imposed on or done to another. By contrast, the risks associated with climate change can and perhaps rightly should be seen as an (passive-)aggressive act by one party against another. No one can see the HIV epidemic as an act of war, but given what we now know about climate change, carbon emissions can in some sense be seen as an act of war.

Whatever the moral validity of viewing climate change in these sort of perpetrator-victim terms, as a matter of diplomatic protocol I question the wisdom of any Foreign Minister endorsing the view that what her country is doing constitutes "an act of aggression" -- and indeed implying that her country's main allies are also engaging in such aggression. Obviously we urgently need to address the problem of global warming. But in strict diplomatic terms, an admission like this could provide a precedent for poor countries expressing their demands for change in terms of a rhetoric of political violence. And that's hardly useful.

Fifty years of climate change wisdom

Check out this video from 1958 about anthropogenic climate change. Part of a series of educational films produced by Bell Telephone Company in the 50s and 60s, it was directed by Frank Capra and voice-overed by Mel Blanc. Amazing:

Hat tip: MO.