The most destructive ideology in the 20th century was that of the Red Menace of socialism. The application of socialism in China, Russia, Cambodia and elsewhere in the world resulted in over 100 million people suffering early, egregious deaths - and that excludes those who died in wars. While the failure of socialism was entirely predictable, as the great Ludwig von Mises described in his 1922 masterpiece Socialism, the human catastrophe it caused was beyond people's comprehension to forecast.
I have previously stated that it is entirely likely that more people will die due to environmentalist political ideology in the 21st century than in the last. Like socialism, its proponents will honestly believe that they are working towards a better world and, like socialism, its proponents will be unable to recognise, or admit to, the harm they cause.
The 20th century saw the rise and fall of the Red Menace. The 21st is already seeing the rise of the Green Menace. Let's hope it also sees its fall and before too much damage is done.
From the UK's TimesOnline comes this article quoting the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington, on the impact of ethanol replacing oil:
The rush towards biofuels is theatening world food production and the lives of billions of people, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser said yesterday.
Professor John Beddington put himself at odds with ministers who have committed Britain to large increases in the use of biofuels over the coming decades. In his first important public speech since he was appointed, he described the potential impacts of food shortages as the “elephant in the room” and a problem which rivalled that of climate change.
“It’s very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food,” he told a conference on sustainability in London yesterday.
“The supply of food really isn’t keeping up.”
By 2030, he said, the world population would have increased to such an extent that a 50 per cent increase in food production would be needed. By 2080 it would need to double. But the rush to biofuels – allegedly environmentally friendly – meant that increasing amount of arable land had been given over to fuel rather than food.
The world’s population is forecast to increase from the six billion at the start of the millennium to nine billion by 2050. Already biofuels have contributed to the rapid rise in international wheat prices and Professor Beddington cautioned that it was likely to be only a matter of time before shoppers in the United Kingdom faced big price rises because of the soaring cost of feeding livestock.
His comments come just a month after the Government welcomed a European Commission target requiring 10 per cent of all fuel sold in British service stations to be derived from plants within 12 years. Already biofuels attract a 20p per litre reduction in duty to encourage their uptake. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, recently announced additional funding for biofuel research and farmers can claim subsidies to grow crops for energy.
Last year President Bush called for a massive increase in the use of ethanol in America over the next decade. The US now devotes more acreage to growing corn than at any time since 1944. Farmers planted 90.5 million acres in 2007, 15 per cent more than a year before. If White House efforts to double ethanol production this year are achieved, and in due course 40 per cent of that corn ends up in petrol tanks, the world will face a harder and costlier time feeding itself.
A spokesman for Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, insisted that the Government was well aware of the possible negative effects of biofuels. “We take this issue very seriously and we are not prepared to go beyond current target levels for biofuels until we are satisfied it can be done sustainably.”
Professor Beddington said that the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute that politicians, scientists and farmers must begin to tackle it immediately.
“Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment,” he said afterwards. “However, I am concerned there is another major issue along a similar time-scale, an elephant in the room – that of food and energy security. This is giving me and many of my scientific colleagues much concern.”
Population levels are growing so fast already that an extra six million people are born every month. Growing enough food for everyone was further challenged, he said, because of climate change, which was likely to lead to a shortage of water.
Scientists say that intense dry spells will become more frequent over the next century. The supply of water will be put under further pressure because of the increased number of people who need it, not only to drink but to keep their crops alive. The production of a tonne of wheat, for example, requires 50 tonnes of water.
Because it was almost impossible to control the population increase in the short term, Professor Beddington told the conference, other measures would need to be taken. “Agriculture has been doing pretty well against the population size but things are changing now and they are changing quite dramatically,” he said.
“Don’t we need to do something about food? Demand has grown enormously, particularly in China and India, where much of the driving force is increased demand. By 2030 energy demand is going to be up by 50 per cent and demand for food is going to be up by 50 per cent.”
The increase in demand has been reflected by the rapid rise in the prices of basic commodities, including wheat, over the past two years.
Biofuels have been put forward as a means of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions pumped out by fossil fuels but recent studies have questioned their impact when all factors, such as the use of fertilisers on the crops, are taken into account. Critics have been angered by the loss of tropical rainforests, which have been cleared to allow farmers to grow biofuel crops.
Deforestation has been calculated to account for about 18 per cent of world greenhouse gas emissions and Professor Beddington said that to destroy rainforests in order to grow biofuel crops was “insane”. He added: “Some of the biofuels are hopeless, in the sense that the idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid.” He said that human ingenuity was extraordinary and he was confident that food production could be boosted, including by growing genetically modified crops.
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme, told the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday: “The shift to biofuels production has diverted lands out of the food chain. Food prices such as palm oil in Africa are now set at fuel prices. It may be a bonanza for farmers – I hope it is true – but in the short term, the world’s poorest are hit hard.”
The poor are always hit hardest. Ironically, these are the people that environmentalists claim to be most concerned about. It's also somewhat perplexing that environmentalists are comfortable with the destruction of rainforests in order to produce ethanol, which will have minimal impact anyway.
In the 20th century there was the old line "Reds under the bed", which came about due to fact that socialists needed to mask their true intention in order to infiltrate society.
In the 21st century there is no need for similar secrecy. Environmentalism has established itself as being the 'morally superior' philosophy of our time. Thus, the Green Menace sits right in front of us and veritably shouts its message for all to hear.
Will humanity wake up to the threat before or after another hundred million people, or more, are driven into early graves?
In news given little coverage by major media outlets, the head of the UN Peacekeeping Force will be retiring after eight years on the job.
In this article the two 'highlights' of his tenure are the 'unprecedented growth' of the force to 100,000 and the establishment of a code of conduct.
The thing has an astronomical 7.5 billion dollar budget yet manages to achieve absolutely nothing positive for the world, of which those in Darfur, East Timor and Lebanon are shining examples.
UNITED NATIONS: The French head of UN peacekeeping will step down at the end of June after presiding over an unprecedented growth of a force that now fields 100,000 personnel around the world, UN officials said on Thursday.
Marie Okabe, a UN spokeswoman, told a press briefing that Jean-Marie Guehenno, 58, confirmed to his staff on Thursday morning that "he will be leaving in mid-2008" after eight years in the post.
Guehenno's contract expires at the end of June, another UN official said. When Ban Ki-moon took over as UN secretary-general in January 2007, Guehenno was one of the few senior holdovers from Kofi Annan's administration to be asked to stay on.
"Eight years is a long run and it's a very tough job," said Beth Cole, an expert on peacekeeping operations at the United States Institute of Peace, a Washinton-based think tank.
"He (Guehenno) has presided over an explosive growth in operations and over a lot of very important innovations. He should be congratulated for his work," she said.
Indeed Guehenno, a former French civil servant, oversaw an unprecedented growth of the department of peacekeeping operations (DPKO), which now oversees almost 100,000 personnel in 20 peacekeeping missions around the world with an annual budget of 7.5 billion dollars.
He also supervised a sweeping restructuring of UN peacekeeping to make it more efficient and more effective, UN officials said.
Peacekeeping was split into a department of peace operations, tasked with strategy, day-to-day direction and management, and a department of field support that consolidate the support functions of UN field personnel, procurement and financial management.
Last year, there were rumors that the United States was keen on having one of its officials take over DPKO.
But Cole said this was unlikely since the United States is not a major contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping.
In addition, she added, US national Jane Holl Lute was put in charge of the key department of field support last year.
Lute is the wife of Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, a three-star US army general tasked with overseeing the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There was no word on who was likely to succeed Guehenno. "What we really need is a good manager who can continue to oversee the very important reforms that are being implemented," Cole said. "Demands are so huge both in terms of personnel and in terms of funding."
"My particular hope if that the person they find would have some mission experience," she added.
Guehenno is also credited with turning UN peacekeeping into a professionalized service, notably by giving it a doctrine and a focus on conduct and discipline.
But UN peacekeeping missions around the world have also been plagued by cases of sexual abuse of women and corruption by a minority of the blue-helmeted soldiers, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast and Haiti.
Cole conceded that the sexual exploitation issue "has been particularly difficult for DPKO" but added: "I think they handled it pretty well."
Of Guehenno, she concluded: "He did as well as he could with the tools that he had and we need to have a bigger tool box in that shop."
Guehenno joined the United Nations in 2000 after a long and distinguished career in the French government, including in the foreign ministry.
He also served as head of cultural affairs at the French Embassy in Washington from 1982 and 1986.
It should come as no surprise that a man from the Quai d'Orsay should be such an ineffectual leader of UN peacekeeping operations or that the wife of a three-star US army general is somehow qualified to oversee the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here's my favourite Turkish opinion writer, Mustafa Akyol, with an article Islamic Reformation 101, which gives a very nice summary of the history of thought about how Islam should be interpreted. It really shows how far in front of other Muslim nations in the region the Turkish are in terms of allowing reason to be a major factor in the religion.
The ongoing ‘hadith revision’ by a team of theologians in Ankara is an important step in reinterpreting Islam by making the distinction between what is ‘historical’ and what is ‘religious’
This week Turkey made international headlines not only with its military's land operation in northern Iraq or its never-ending tug of war over the headscarf.
There was also the scholarly and tedious work carried out by a group of theologians in Ankara, supported by the Diyanet (Turkey's official religious body), to revise the “hadiths” – the words and deeds of Prophet Mohammed. “Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts,” read the BBC's headline. “Turkey strives,” the Guardian observed, “for 21st century form of Islam.” According to the Financial Times, this was “Turkey's fresh look at Prophet.”
Are these far-fetched comments, or does the revision of hadiths by Turkey's officially sanctioned Islamic experts really point to something fundamentally important? To find an answer, one first needs to probe what the hadiths really are. And to do that, one needs to go back to the roots of Islam. Koran, reason, and more:
In the beginning, there was the Koran.
Westerners who haven't read this book generally assume that it must be something like the New Testament – i.e., a book which reports the life and works of the religion's founder. Yet that is not the case at all. The Koran actually hardly speaks about Prophet Mohammed. It rather speaks to him. The Muslim Scripture include passages that give orders to Mohammed, warn him or encourage him in the face of the odds he faced. But it does not tell anything about who he was. If you read the Koran, you actually become much more knowledgeable about the life of Moses, Jesus or Abraham than that of Mohammed.
Of course the prophet of Islam must have said so many things during his 23-year-long mission, but he insisted, “nothing from me should be written besides the Koran.” Muslim tradition holds that he said so because he feared that his mortal words could have mistakenly been added to the divine book. Right after his death, the Koran was canonized and copied by his closest believers, and tradition again holds that the holy book came until today “without even a single letter of it being changed.”
Thus, in the first century of Islam, the Koran was the only authoritative book Muslims had at hand. When they disputed about its meaning, or about what to do in a specific situation, there were enough people who remembered what the prophet said or did on such matters. But as time passed, the oral tradition became increasingly vague and doubtful.
Meanwhile, a group of Islamic thinkers emerged who placed emphasis on human reason as a source of knowledge. Having been inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, these thinkers, known as “Mutazilites,” said that the Koran and human reason would be enough to find the truth. “God gave us both textual revelation and personal intelligence,” the Mutazilites argued, “so we should use both.” They also believed that God was just and merciful by nature, and that He could not have forsaken these principles.
The rise of the Sunna:
In those formative decades of Islam, not everybody was as trustful of reason as the Mutazilites. Ahmed ibn Hanbal (780-855) arose as their main intellectual rival. According to Hanbal, reason could lead man astray, so a true believer had to refrain from being too much of a rationalist. The true guide would be the Koran, of course, but to understand the Koran one needed interpretation, and Hanbal was willing to limit the role of reason in that interpretation process. As an alternative, he emphasized the “sunna,” or tradition, of the prophet. Instead of free thinking on the Koran as the Mutazilites did, a good believer had to look at what the prophet said or did on any specific issue.
The followers of Imam Hanbal soon became known as the “people of the tradition,” or “ahl-al-sunna,” or, simply, the “Sunni”s. And the source of the “tradition” they decided to follow was nothing but the hadiths. But more then a century had passed from Prophet Mohammed's time and the oral tradition had produced so many hadiths that the prophet had to have lived for centuries to produce them. Moreover everybody knew that some people had been making up these narratives just to support their ideas or even to bolster their business. (A famous story is that a honey merchant made up the hadith that “believers should start the day by eating honey.”) People were also unconsciously projecting their ideas or practices on the prophet. Toward the end of the second century of Islam, i.e., in the early ninth after Christ, the “hadith chaos” had become a true problem.
That's why scholars such as Muhammad al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj decided to evaluate and catalogue this oral tradition. Focusing on the reliability of the chain of transmitters, these scholars created collections of “sahih,” or trustworthy, hadiths. To date, Sunni Muslims regard the works of six of these scholars as trustworthy. These “six books,” which are all made up of many volumes, constitute the “second source” of classical Islam after the Koran. The other two sources, i.e, “ijma” (consensus) and “qiyas” (analogical reasoning) are just tools of the jurists used for evaluating the first two. The kernel of shariah:
The role of hadiths in Islam is crucial, because they make up the source of much of the shariah, i.e., Islamic law. The Koran is relatively a small book, and much of its focus is on theological issues such as God, creation or the afterlife. There are some Koranic rules and regulations about social life, but they are quite limited. (Moreover, there are different views on how literal they should be understood; but that would take us to “Islamic Reformation 201.”)
Compared to the Koran, the hadiths are huge and they are full of minute details about how a Muslim should live. For example the Koran just says “be clean,” but the hadiths contain long chapters explaining how Prophet Mohammed used to wash himself. Then there are commentaries based on these hadiths giving unbelievably detailed instructions on how a Muslim should be clean by “imitating” the prophet. The content of these commentaries are very similar to the Halakha of Orthodox Jews.
Moreover, the hadiths constitute some of the harsh measures of shariah. The stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates, the banning of fine arts, the seclusion and suppression of women, or the punishments for drinking alcohol or other sins – all of these are based on the hadiths, not the Koran. Professor Khaleel Mohammed, scholar at the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University, argued that hadiths also made Islam less ecumenical. "[While] the Koran viewed Judaism as the chief monotheistic religion,” he noted, “it was the Hadith that demonized the Jews and Judaism."
What went wrong:
Once the Islamic shariah was settled in the Middle Ages, the Muslim world took it for granted until modern times. Islamdom, after all, was a glorious civilization that did not need to question itself. But with the advent of modernity, and the obvious ascendance of the West, Muslim thinkers started to have self-doubts. In the 19th century, the misfortunes of the Islamic world gave rise to the search for a change. Soon two different trends emerged: Secularists and modernists. (Fundamentalists, as a third force, would catch up later.)
To the Bernard Lewisian question of what went wrong, the secularists had a simple answer: For them, the problem was religion. It was a chain on Muslim societies, and its role had to be minimized in order to achieve “progress.” The secularist and anti-clerical line of thinking that was prevalent in Europe at the time – and, is quite powerful still today, especially in France – convinced the secularists of the Muslim world that religion was already a myth whose time would soon expire.
Modernists, on the other hand, thought that the problem was not religion, but the traditionalism and obscurantism that it was trapped in. Thus instead of abandoning Islam, they argued for its reinterpretation. Not too surprisingly, they discovered the lost tradition of the Mutazilites and started to question the authority of the hadiths. The first major challenge to the sunna came from the Indian modernist Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898). He eventually came to reject all hadiths as unreliable. Others such as Jamaluddin Afghani or Muhammad Abduh, with varying degrees, tried to diminish the role of hadiths and emphasize the Koran. The great Turkish poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who authored the Turkish National Anthem in 1922, was also a modernist who criticized fellow Muslims for venerating the Koran, but failing to use their reason on it.
The Turkish way:
Since the 19th century the demand for a re-evaluation of the hadiths is common among Muslim intellectuals. But it is Turkey's official religious authority, the Diyanet, which took the first authoritative step toward a hadith revision. Why is that?
The answer is to be found not only among the team of Islamic scholars at Ankara University, but also in the social reality of Turkey, which has created a demand for a new, updated Islamic understanding.
Societies are less principled than intellectuals, and the majority of people are not interested in religious reform unless their way of life makes it necessary. In that regard, Turkey is an important case study, because as arguably the most modernized of all Muslim nations, its believers face questions that their co-religionists in, say, Afghanistan, don't. Today an urban Turkish Muslim lives in an environment in which equality between sexes is taken for granted and people openly question, or even defy, the religious teaching that suggest otherwise. The same urban Turkish Muslim probably supports the country's EU bid, because that is much better for his business and the future of his kids.
In others words, Turkey has a growing Muslim middle class – also dubbed as “the Islamic bourgeoisie” – which is becoming modern in many ways, but which also wants to be loyal to its faith. Hence comes demand for “modern Islam.” In the past two decades, Turkey has seen the rise of popular modernist theologians who argue that “the Islam in the Koran” is much more rational and liberal than “the Islam in the tradition.” Some of these popular reformists are “Muslim feminists,” who argue that the “male domination ideology” has corrupted the post-Koranic tradition.
Not the secular way:
This is not necessarily what the secularist guardians of Turkey have dreamt of – they would prefer to see religion become a non-issue. For a Turkish secularist, to speak so much about religion is, by definition, backward and medievalish. Since Atatürk told us that the true guide in life is science, not religion, they would ask, why these people still care about what the Koran really meant 14 centuries ago? However, some people do care about religion, and modernization doesn't necessarily make them more secular – as evidenced in the United States.
Behind the hadith revision that is still underway in Ankara there lies all of these complex historical and social phenomena. When the new hadith collection comes out, it won't probably be an earth-shattering act of “reform.” But it will be a valuable step to reinterpret Islam by making the distinction between what is “historical” and what is “religious.”
Actually most Muslims don't like the term “reformation.” The president of Diyanet, Dr. Ali Bardakoğlu emphasized just yesterday that “this is not a reform.” The term sounds to Muslims as if it implies that Islam's divine sources have a problem, and they need to be fixed by people. No Muslim worth their salt would say that. But a believer can well accept that there are problems in the “cultural baggage” of Islam – and time has come to deal with them. This is what the “Turkish Islamic reform” is all about. By revising some of the hadiths that have been used to suppress women, and putting some of the others in their historical context, the theologians in Ankara are really taking a big step.
Last year I wrote about the left wing labels used to stifle debate.
Today I introduce formal definitions to help people understand exactly what each term means.
Sexist - a man who is winning an argument related to women
Racist - a white male who is winning an argument (in recent years) about Islam
Islamophobe - a person who is winning an argument that terrorism in the world is carried out 99% of the time by Muslims
Fascist - a conservative who is winning an argument with the left on any topic
Homophobe - a male who is winning an argument that marriage should only be between a man and a woman
Xenophobe - a white person who is winning an argument on immigration
Climate Change Denier - a person who is winning a climate change debate based solely on the science
Warmonger - a person (typically male) who believes that peace comes through strength and not through appeasement, cultural capitulation, the efforts of a bunch of Baby Boomer socialists gathering together to protest in front of US Marines' offices at UC Berkley, or from know nothing, dictator loving Hollywood celebrities who chuck tantrums when the mayonnaise in their dressing room isn't at the right temperature, the champagne has not been corked and the bed hasn't been turned down on the right side who make anti-US military films such as Redacted and Rendition in order to prove their 'bravery'.
There you go.
A handy list to understand exactly why you're being referred to as one of the above.
I have to say that this Obama video created by Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am is somewhat creepy while at the same time recognising that it is quite catchy.
People are looking for a new Messiah and many seem happy to anoint Barack Obama in spite of his lack of experience and hard left political positions.
With the crucial Texas and Ohio primaries just hours away the Clinton camp has been lobbing grenades at Obama across a wide range of issues, most notably with their "3AM phone call" ad to call into question his national security credentials.
With the Republican nomination settled it's the Democratic Party that is providing all of the interest at this stage of the election cycle.
It's amusing to see two highly unqualified, unaccomplished candidates attacking each other's records. The fact that one of them could become President should give the rest of the world pause for thought.
Has anyone noticed that all of the solutions proposed by the Climate Faithful require us to radically alter our way of life and give up those things that have enabled Western civilisation to prosper?
CAR travel should be cut by 80%, road construction halted and public transport boosted if Australia is to meet carbon emission targets, energy experts have warned.
"The car is doomed," Monash University associate professor Damon Honnery said, discussing the findings of a soon-to-be-published research paper, Mitigating Greenhouse: Limited Time, Limited Options, written with Dr Patrick Moriarty.
Why the heck is the car doomed? Because it puts out a bit of CO2? Why is the solution to the so-called carbon problem found in banning cars altogether and not developing zero emission vehicles?
Federal and state governments should stop building new arterial roads, the two scientists from Monash University's department of mechanical and aerospace engineering argue.
Instead, governments must focus on phasing out cars, improving the energy efficiency of public transport and making people use it, they argue. "Ultimately, we are going to have to move to a decentralised society where most people need to travel far less," Professor Honnery said.
"People are going to have to fundamentally change the way they think about travel and make much more use of non-motorised travel such as cycling and walking."
By 'people' does he mean the great, unwashed masses who he clearly doesn't associate himself with? What does it mean to live in a decentralised society? I drive 15km to work each day. Clearly, I can't walk that far. Assuming that I could be motivated to ride a bike then it's still going to take a long time, I'll need to deal with extreme weather (very hot, very wet, very cold) at different times of the year, I'll need to have a shower when I get to work (impact on water usage) and I'll need to have somewhere at work to store my suit, as it's not really recommended cycling material.
All of these things have a serious impact on productivity. Who's that going to hurt first and hardest? Not these supposed academics, for whom the concept of personal productivity is as foreign as having a real understanding of how the world works.
The research comes as Professor Ross Garnaut paints a bleak picture of the dangers and costs of global warming, suggesting Australia may need to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 90% by 2050.
Why does Garnaut restrict his recommendation to Australia? Surely, the report should suggest that the world needs to slash its greenhouse gas emissions and that if the major emitters agree to reduce carbon then we should also. Going it alone in order to 'show leadership' to the world is hardly a sensible policy.
Passenger cars account for 8% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, and all other transport such as freight accounts for 6% of emissions, according to the Australian Greenhouse Office. Power generation accounts for 50% of Australia's emissions.
Sooooooooo, deal with power generation first?
The big emission cuts needed in the transport sector require a near-total shift from the private car to public transport, the paper argues.
As pointed out above, that position is completely unsustainable by rational argument.
Dr Moriarty also believes there must be big reductions in air travel. "An overseas trip might become a once-in-a-lifetime experience rather than an annual event," he said.
Again, why take a position that air travel must be cut down rather than air travel be made carbon friendly?
RACV public policy general manager Brian Negus said there needed to be a balanced approach to planning for future car use: "We need to improve the road system so you get more efficiency and less congestion."
And key roads still needed to be built, he said. The RACV has long argued that the Metropolitan Ring Road, which currently ends at Greensborough, should be linked with the Eastern Freeway.
The RACV also wants more money poured into public transport, and a renewed focus on car pooling, walking and cycling, as a way of freeing up road space.
Semi-lunatic enviro campaigner James Lovelock, famous for his Gaia theory, demonstrates that he hasn't understood much about the world for at least the entire second half of his life.
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Of course, Lovelock gets it entirely wrong. The environment now is remarkably cleaner than in 1965. Leaving aside Brazil's, India's and China's rise, which Lovelock could not have anticipated so it's fair to say that he was commenting on Western countries. Acid rain - dealt with. Smog - dealt with. The hole in the ozone layer - insofar as there was ever a man made problem (which seems less plausible these days) - dealt with. Energy efficiency - huge improvements. Water quality - terrific. Etc, etc, etc.
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
It should come as no surprise that the 'old' new age nonsense of Gaia theory should underpin the 'new' new age religion of climate science. It's unlikely that The Guardian would notice the irony in that statement.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
Does anyone really think that much of Europe will be Saharan? Seriously? I guess Tim Flannery and his deranged acolytes might but any reasonable thinking person can't.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
All zealots have an 'unshakable conviction that can be unnerving'; that's why they unnerve people.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
Australia's Productivity Commission recently showed that plastic shopping bags have a zero impact on the environment. The Commission called environmental groups to give presentations outlining the danger to the environment, which they all failed spectacularly to do. It turns out that far from being a danger to the environment, plastic shopping bags are an important factor in rubbish disposal, as nearly 100% of them are used for that purpose.
'Catastrophe is unstoppable'? What's unstoppable are the rantings of lunatics like Lovelock.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
At least he understands that ethical consumption is a scam, as is any politically driven idea that carries the 'ethical' label.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Food is easy. Energy is easy. This stuff is not hard.
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."
I'd say - "Politics".
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
So what's he suggesting? That we can't do anything about it therefore we should go on a five minutes to Doomsday splurge so that we can enjoy the last remnants of civilisation as we know it?
What has happened to real science in the last ten or so years?
The Ramones were an American rock band often regarded as the first punk rock group.
Formed in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, in 1974, all members of the band used stage names with their surnames as "Ramone", though none of them are actually related. They performed 2,263 concerts, touring virtually non-stop for 22 years. In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played their final show and then disbanded. The band's three founding members—Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone—died within eight years of the break-up.
The Ramones failed to achieve much commercial success during their years of recording and performing. Their only album to reach certified gold status in the U.S. was their compilation album Ramones Mania. Appreciation of the band has grown since the 1980s, and they now regularly appear on "all-time greatest" lists, such as Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Rolling Stone’s list of 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were voted the second greatest rock and roll band ever in Spin Magazine, trailing only The Beatles. On March 18, 2002, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
David Archibald's latest paper destroys the myth that CO2 is to blame for the warming we've seen since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid 19th century. He puts the warming effect from anthropogenic CO2 at around 0.1C, which is the conclusion I came to some time back.
However, that's not the point of this post. I provide it as background because it includes the following graph:
The question that needs to be posed is this...
Given that Climate Change presents an existential threat to the earth's climate system, that there's a consensus of scientific opinion that the consequences will be dire and that the cost of not taking urgent action are significant then should the United Nations take military action against China in order to save the world given the huge increase in CO2 output projected for them?
Naturally, it's a deliberately provocative question but why shouldn't it be asked?
If the projection in the above graph is correct and 'the science is settled' then the world is doomed.
In order to preserve world peace - the UN's primary objective - it must be incumbent on it to gather together those nations whose governments are keen to take action against anthropogenic global warming and stop China, militarily if necessary. That would be a pretty amusing spectacle, really; blue helmeted UN soldiers doing what they normally do - running away from a fight - while the UN's European half-brother, the EU, expends more time fighting with itself than tackling China.
If China - and India for that matter - will not reduce carbon emissions then why shouldn't they be subject to strong international action?
The situation really does show the apparently contradictory positions that the United Nations manages to navigate with no sense of cognitive dissonance.
In Australia the recent release of the Garnaut Report suggests that if Australia slashes its economic wrists by working towards a 90% reduction in CO2 by 2050 then it will be seen as a great world leader, a visionary country and an inspiration for recalcitrants such as China to follow.
I didn't notice China follow Australia's lead with the whole democracy thing, or take much notice of any of our world leading occupational health and safety standards, or take our side on ending North Korea's concentration camp status, or even reform their economy by floating their currency.
You do have to give them credit for taking our lead on one important thing, though. They have hired a bunch of Aussies who worked on the Sydney Olympics to help make their upcoming version of the games a propaganda triumph.
The reason that people would think that another country would follow Australia's lead - on moral grounds - has always eluded me.
The Rudd Government has directed the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to commence a formal inquiry into grocery prices to ensure working families are getting a fair deal at the supermarket.
Supermarkets are being put on notice with the Rudd government ordering the consumer watchdog to investigate grocery prices.
Labor says Australians are paying too much for the essentials and has directed the ACCC to conduct a formal inquiry into grocery prices.
People who were expecting the government to take action that would actually lead to lower grocery prices might be a little surprised by today's news:
Grocery prices will rise as new tax increases on truckies are passed on to consumers.
Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese announced that state transport ministers will implement National Transport Commission (NTC) recommendations to move towards full cost recovery for heavy vehicles.
Registration fees for 75 per cent of the nation's 365,000 heavy vehicles will now rise.
The commonwealth's fuel tax for trucks and buses - the Road User Charge - will be increased by 1.367 cents to 21 cents per litre from January 1, 2009.
Mr Albanese said the changes were necessary to ensure heavy vehicle users paid their fair share of road construction and repair costs.
But he conceded increased freight costs would be passed on to consumers.
"This will lead to a cost increase of around about 32 cents per week for the entire family grocery budget," Mr Albanese told reporters.
"We recognise that we'd rather not have any increases at all but I think that people will understand that (this) ... needed to be done."
Nah. It's OK, Mr Albanese. You go and increase all of the taxes you want. As long as you think that "people will understand" - especially when there's an upcoming massive budget surplus - then that's just fine with me.
Societies don't break down all of a sudden. It usually takes years of slicing away at individual liberties, implementation of increasingly onerous economic policies and a failure to uphold and protect the values that built the society in the first place.
Today's Britain would be unrecognisable to Churchill. That would have been true in the 1970s, as well, a time in which social upheaval in Britain was a real problem. Can you imagine what the place would be like now if Thatcher had not have come to power and implemented those economic reforms necessary to get the place back into shape? The left may excoriate her but without Thatcher modern Britain clearly loses her place as Europe's most important nation.
Now Britain has to find a way of maintaining its intellectual capital, which seems to be deserting the place like rats off the ship of state.
Britain is experiencing the worst "brain drain" of any country as highly qualified professionals settle abroad, an authoritative international study showed yesterday.
Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years.
There are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.
More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development.
No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.
The figures, based on official records from more than 220 countries, will alarm Gordon Brown as tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent on educating graduates. The cost of training a junior doctor, for example, is £250,000.
The most popular destinations are English-speaking countries such as Australia, America, Canada and New Zealand and holiday areas including France and Spain.
Almost 60 per cent of those leaving take jobs, although hundreds of thousands of retired people live abroad.
The report is a statistical analysis which does not study the motivation for leaving Britain. However, high house prices and taxes and poor climate are frequently cited.
A spokesman for the Paris-based OECD said last night: "British people have lots of opportunities to move and work abroad so very highly-skilled people are travelling around. It is seen by many British people as part of their personal development to have some experience abroad."
Britain's exodus is far higher than any of the OECD's other 29 members. Germany has lost only 860,000 highly-skilled workers, America 410,000 and France 370,000.
The OECD found that 27.3 per cent of those emigrating had health or education qualifications, 37.7 per cent had humanities or social science degrees and 28.5 per cent were scientists or engineers.
Britain has a shortage of graduates in many of these fields and universities have long warned that some of the brightest hopes are being lost to higher salaries abroad.
The report cited research suggesting that 62 per cent of the world's "star scientists" live in the US, primarily because of the efforts made by American research universities to attract them.
Danny Sriskandarajah, a migration expert at the IPPR think-tank, said: "There is a long-term trend of British people lured abroad by a slightly better lifestyle. They are actively targeted by countries such as Australia and New Zealand."
The emigration was leading to a rapid change in British society as large numbers of highly-skilled immigrants moved to this country to replace those leaving, he said.
"Britain has been lucky - although it has lost substantial numbers of people, it has attracted more than a million skilled immigrants to replace them. If they stop coming then that would be a problem."
Those people are coming from Eastern Europe not South Asia or North Africa, which might be your first thought.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics last year, suggested that 207,000 Britons - one every three minutes - left in 2006. The emigration rate is at its highest since just after the Second World War.
The term brain drain was coined in the 1950s following the mass emigration of scientists and other experts to America. Tens of thousands of people also left the country to escape the industrial unrest and high taxes of the 1970s.
Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, said: "Ten years of Labour has re-created the brain drain. High taxes and Government interference are driving people away."
The study found that foreign-born people make up 8.3 per cent of Britain's population. A House of Lords report into the economic impact of migration is due next month.
Prof David Coleman, of St John's, Oxford, said the brain drain was "to do with quality of life, laws and bureaucracy, tax and all the rest of it".
Prof Christian Dustmann, of University College London, said: "The costs of leaving a country are substantial. The rewards must be very high."
I wonder whether those planning the UK's future take into account the large number of qualified people who are leaving and the number of unqualified, rent-seekers that are moving there?
Do the policies that have created the problem belong to the right or the left?
I'll give you some time to think about that.
Tick...tick...tick...
You probably didn't need that much time to work out that embracing left wing policies must lead to societal disintegration.
Today's New Left, as ushered in by Tony Blair, appeared to have struck a fair balance between conservative financial policies through lowered taxes and left wing social policies while at the same time disconnecting itself from the chains of the union movement and enhancing flexibility in the workforce.
One of Britain's major problems has come through the way it has used increased tax receipts to buy off political constituencies that have no love for the country (particularly Muslim immigrants) and no love for its history or contribution to Western society.
The brain drain the country is experiencing is a symptom of much deeper problems. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be another Thatcher on the political horizon to sort the place out. (Nothing Follows)
What do Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Jesse Jackson, Oliver Stone, George McGovern, Ted Turner, Steven Spielberg and Katie Couric all have in common?
They love Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
So did British socialist Neil Clark who went to Cuba seeking paradise but found a country where the average person lives in abject poverty and without enough food each month to make ends meet.
Neil Clark says that he went to Havana in search of a left-wing Utopia and discovered instead an island fortress of poverty, corruption and currency apartheid.
It’s a country where the vast majority live in poverty, while a tiny, corrupt elite live in luxury. It’s a place where, 14 years after South Africa abolished apartheid, a form of it still operates. And it’s a country where you can be threatened with prison not just for criticising the country’s leadership, but also for querying a medical bill.
Welcome to Cuba, the ‘socialist’ paradise built by that great egalitarian Fidel Castro, who after 49 years at the helm has finally decided to hand over power — in the manner of a true democrat — to his brother Raúl.
My wife and I, as unreconstructed paleo-lefties who support Clause Four, free school meals and NHS dental provision, had long wanted to visit Castro’s Cuba. All the people whose views we respect had said that the Caribbean island was a progressive model whose policies on education and healthcare ought to be copied throughout the world. We went there last April desperately wanting to like the place — after all, if George W. Bush and other right-wing nasties hated Cuba so much, then the country must be on the right tracks.
But we returned home terribly disillusioned. Neither of us had been to a country which was so utterly decrepit.
Stay on the officially approved tourist trail round the newly renovated streets of ‘Old Havana’ and you’d get the impression that Cuba was a tropical version of Switzerland. There are smart restaurants, designer shops and modern hotels. Wander a few streets away, however, and you’ll witness scenes of incredible dereliction. Dilapidated buildings with wires hanging out, streets that haven’t been resurfaced for more than 50 years, balconies that look like they’re going to fall down at any minute. In my travels in the Middle East and Asia, I’ve certainly witnessed squalor, but nothing prepared me for the back streets of Havana. The average wage in Cuba is a pitiful $17 a month. The monthly ration which includes 283g of fish, 226g of chicken, ten eggs and 1.8kg of potatoes is barely enough for a fortnight, meaning most Cubans need to work the black market to stay alive. Things that we in Britain take totally for granted — such as toilet paper, toothpaste and pens — are luxury goods in Cuba. I’ll never forget the look of joy from an old lady when I handed her a couple of old marker pens and a coloured pencil.
For Fidel’s chums, life is somewhat easier. Despite its calls for further belt-tightening, the Cuban government last year ordered Series 1, 3 and 5 BMWs for all its ambassadors and a Series 5 model for Raúl Castro, who had taken charge of the country after his brother’s hospitalisation.
The heartbreaking consequences of Cuba’s currency apartheid were bought home to my wife and I on a Saturday afternoon visit to Havana’s Coppelia ‘Ice Cream’ park. To the right of the park gates was a long queue of Cubans who had only Cuban pesos. They have to wait on average two hours every weekend to get their weekly scoop of ice cream. On the left, there was walk-in access to tourists and the lucky locals who had convertible pesos. Fifty years on, the Cuban revolution has turned full circle in a truly Orwellian fashion. Once again the locals find themselves excluded from the best beaches in their country, as they were under Batista. And prostitution, so rife in pre-revolutionary days, is back — the jineteras being the only group of Cubans allowed to enter the new purpose-built resorts.
US sanctions are routinely blamed by Cuba’s defenders for the country’s plight. But while sanctions are harsh and morally indefensible, there’s little doubt that they have been used by the regime as a smokescreen to cover up inefficiencies and corruption. Four years ago the head of the country’s largest tourism company, Cubanacan, was fired after millions of dollars went missing — the loss only coming to light after all state enterprises were ordered to transfer their US dollars into convertible pesos.
The totalitarian nature of Castro’s Cuba is no right-wing myth, but a reality. And you don’t have to be a political agitator to fall foul of the authorities, as my wife and I discovered. We had been told by our holiday rep that the hotel’s resident nurse would administer free basic medical care, but if we required the call-out services of a local doctor, we’d have to pay. After a day’s snorkelling I had a touch of ear-ache, so I popped along to the nurse’s office to ask if she had any medication. The nurse was a man, who after the most cursory examination of my ear pronounced that I had an infection which required antibiotics. How much would the antibiotics cost, I asked. About £60, he replied. As we were returning home later that day, I told him that I’d leave it till I got back. ‘Yes, but you still have to pay me £30 for this consultation,’ he replied. ‘But the services of the nurse are free,’ I said. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he replied.
Furious at being taken for a ride, my wife and I refused to pay and headed back to our room. But on trying to check out of the hotel later that morning, we were astonished to be told by the receptionist that if we did not settle the medical bill, she would ‘call state security’ and we would be arrested. We would not be allowed out of the country — ‘state security’ would apprehend us at the airport. The ‘doctor’ then reappeared to say that the rate — which had been set in stone — was after all negotiable, and that he’d accept £25. Forced into the corner and threatened with a night (at least) in a Cuban jail, we reluctantly paid up. ‘It’s nothing more than theft,’ I said to the ‘doctor’ as I handed over the money. ‘It doesn’t go to me,’ was his response. ‘It goes to the state.’
If the money from such scams really did go to the state — and towards improving the lot of the Cuban people — I wouldn’t have been so upset. But I strongly suspect that a share of my £25 will go towards the next fleet of BMWs for Castro’s cronies.
After the stress of our final day in Cuba, my wife and I were hugely relieved to leave the country. And when we were safely airborne, we both reflected that if any country was in need of a revolution, it was Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
And this is the place that Michael Moore holds up as a bastion of utopian health care.
The term Useful Idiots certainly applies not only to Cuba-lovers but also to those who support Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and, unfortunately, a bunch of other totalitarian regimes.
You know that the media is getting short of news stories when it's breaking news that we can watch New Zealand PM and block of wood impersonator, Helen Clark, and Australian PM and Mandarin speaking school nerd, Kevin Rudd, at a press conference.
Waterboarding? Watch Clark and Rudd? Waterboarding? Watch Clark and Rudd?
It should come as no surprise that yet another entertainment industry figure has taken a swipe at the current US administration. It seems to be how they earn their credibility points in the Hollywood social set.
The fact that it's an Australian is upsetting insofar as few of us - even those who disagree with the war in Iraq - would describe President Bush as a war criminal.
Oscar winner Eva Orner has described the US government as a "bunch of war criminals".
The Australian filmmaker won the Academy Award for best feature documentary as co-producer of Taxi to the Dark Side, a film about the US government's use of torture in its war against terror.
The documentary features interviews with US soldiers who participated in the torture of suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
Ms Orner said she did not blame low-ranking soldiers for such behaviour.
"Obviously, everyone's responsible for their own actions, but you put people in bad situations who are ill-equipped, not trained, under enormous pressure and getting orders from above to do bad things," she told ABC Radio from Los Angeles today.
"I don't really believe it is terribly much their fault, it comes from much higher sources.
"The current administration are a bunch of war criminals and they need to be stopped. People need to know what's going on."
Ms Orner said she was surprised such a dark film - directed by Alex Gibney - had won the Oscar.
Why would she be surprised when such rubbish as An Inconvenient Truth and Farenheit 9/11 won awards?
"This is one of the toughest films I think either of us has made," she said."It wasn't a lot of fun."
Resting on the desk in her hotel room was the shiny Oscar Tom Hanks presented to the 38-year-old at the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.
It wasn't a dream, she thought, looking over at the statuette.
New York-based Orner and her American filmmaking partner, Alex Gibney, won the documentary feature Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, an expose on the US government's use of torture in its war on terrorism.
Orner is both a Moral Idiot and Cowardly Piece of Crap.
It's not brave to attack the US administration or the military.
If she wants to really support truly moral positions and be brave then why doesn't she do a documentary on:
- Saddam Hussein's torture regime, which included feeding people into tree shredders; - Fidel Castro's regime of suppression, torture and murder; - The concentration camp disguised as a country - North Korea; - The human rights abuses, especially against women, occurring all over the Middle East; or - The 10,000+ acts of terror carried out in the name of Islam since 9/11?
No. That would take real courage. That would require a real understanding of the world. That would require an ability to understand evil.
And those are traits that she lacks.
It seems that when people become part of the Hollywood set they don't mature and grow up, they grow down. Listening to their rantings is like listening to a bunch of rich, narcisstic school kids.
One of the positions that environmentalists have taken pretty much since the movement was created is that they have a better understanding of what's best for the developing world than the developing world does itself.
Over recent years this has seen Big Green oppose every single development aimed at helping give the poor nations of the world an improved standard of living whether it's mining, new energy projects or improved food production through such things as GM crops.
Unsurprisingly, some countries are now in a position to help themselves and it's making Big Green gnash its teeth and wail about the end of the world. Big Green is always wailing about the end of the world.
The latest reason for gnashing of teeth? India's new cheap-as-chips micro car, the Tata Nano. Good on the Indians, I say.
It's small, it's cheap, it's low emission so... the arrival of the Tata Nano, India's new 'people's car', has been greeted by a wailing and a gnashing of the teeth from the environmental aristocracy. The prospect of millions of the global peasantry driving, emitting and pushing up 'our' gas prices is a nightmare. It promises to be, said Yale environmental law professor Daniel Esty, "an environmental disaster of substantial proportions."
In fact, the size, or even existence, of this environmental disaster is doubtful. A few millions of a car that emits 30 g CO2 per km simply isn't even an influence upon global CO2 emissions, let alone a disaster of even insubstantial portions. At that emission rate, doing 20,000 km a year each car will produce 600 kg of CO2: one hundred million of them on the roads would be less than 1 per cent of current emissions of over 6 Gtonnes. No, not substantial then.
But whether it is a substantial addition or not is dwarfed by the seeming ignorance of other commentators: "In none of our reports did we assume there'd be a car like this," said Judi Greenwald, a researcher with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Well, OK, cut Judi a little slack, no one did predict a car exactly like this: but everyone has indeed predicted that something similar would happen, that the peons would at some point be able to get off Shank's Pony and move around in the same way us civilised folks do. Indeed, all the concerns we have about global warming are rather based upon predictions that this will happen.
Apologies, but this is where a little economics becomes necessary. Yes, we've all heard of the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, those people who issue the reports containing the scientific consensus on the issue (yes, we are assuming they are correct here). Greenland's ice disappears sometime around 2,500, East Antarctica a couple of centuries later and boy, then we all really are in trouble. But all too few people, and unfortunately all too few environmentalists, stop and wonder where those numbers come from. Yes, we've got lovely computer models to tell us what the temperature rises will be if we stick x amount of methane into the atmosphere, y amount of CO2 and so on: but someone, somewhere, has had to work out how much methane, how much CO2 is likely to be so emitted. And that comes from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, the SRES.
The SRES is a series of economic models based upon four families (again divided into scenarios but we're not going to worry about that level of detail). The A1 family assumes that in 2100 the world output (GDP) will be $550 trillion for some 7 billion people. That is, that the world will be at least ten times richer in 92 years than it was eight years ago (essentially, growth goes on as it has since 1850). A2 (what the Stern Review uses and, umm, the low globalisation model) has 16 billion people and $250 trillion in GDP. B2 10 billions and $250 trillion, B1 $350 trillion and 7 billion again. These are the economic assumptions upon which everything we are told about climate change rests. Yes, there are different assumptions in them about how technology develops but all of them are entirely without any attempts at all at mitigation. That is, all the numbers we work with assume that we don't have carbon taxes, we don't ban patio heaters, we don't abolish the aeroplane. Anything we do along those lines reduces the damage that might be done.
Just as an aside we might note that these models all assume that the less trade we have, the more regionally based the world economy, the more self-sufficient we all become, buying locally, the worse the outcome. Campaigning to reduce globalisation to counter global warming is like fucking for virginity.
While none of the families specifically predicts the Tata Nano, all of them predict that the great unwashed will indeed have transport: and no, none of them predict that that transport will not be fossil fuel based. So while those folks at the Pew Center might be correct that this specific thing was not predicted, something very like it was. In fact, the existence of growing wealth and thus mobility is rather written into the plans that worry us.
Which leads us to the glorious George Monbiot. In a recent column he said:
"So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat."
Leave aside his (known) ignorance of economics: growth is not defined by nor is it dependent upon the consumption of resources. It's defined as the addition of value to them: making sandpaper and a computer chip both consume sand, but one is the addition of rather more value than the other. Thus economic growth is not constrained in the way that he thinks by resource availability. Look rather to his "this is of course impossible".
In talking about climate change and the dangers thereof he tells us that a continuation of past economic growth is impossible. But as we can see above, the world's largest report on the subject, indeed the scientific consensus, is that said growth is indeed possible. In fact, the terrors of climate change depend upon it being so, for the whole science is based upon the outcome of economic growth. Thus George has either, by showing the impossibility, told us that climate change isn't a problem or that, perhaps more likely, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Which brings us back to those worrying about the Tata Nano: it isn't a horror for the climate, it isn't a disaster. It's actually one of the things already built into our models which lead us to our current understanding of what will happen. We've already taken account of it in our calculations, you see? As we have all those other things: more flights, more people, more wealth. We even know the solution, a Pigou Tax, but that's a matter for another day.
For a group of people who think they have the moral high ground, the immoral positions of Big Green make Big Oil look like Pope John Paul II.
I'm also constantly surprised by the view of Big Green that resources are finite. The fact is that resources are infinite; when one runs out another is found. Who remembers that whale oil used to be one of the world's biggest industries?
