The Next Generation Asks World Leaders at UN Climate Summit 2014: Why Not Act on Climate Change?
Author: The Cayman Institute
© 2014The state of the climate — and what we might do about it
Today, the UN begins its Climate Summit, enlisting the world to work together on a problem that’s too big for any one country to solve. Lord Nicholas Stern helped write the delegates’ report that outlines where we are now — and what we could do next. It’s a big vision for cooperation, with a payoff that goes far beyond averting disaster. He asks: How can we use this crisis to spur better lives for all?
Peter Van Buren, Back to the Future in Iraq
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” In it, he went after the war of that moment and the money that the U.S. was pouring into it as symptoms of a societal disaster.
President Lyndon Johnson’s poverty program was being “broken and eviscerated,” King said from the pulpit of that church, “as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war… We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” Twice more in that ringing speech he spoke of “the madness of Vietnam” and called for it to cease.
Don’t think of that as just a preacher’s metaphor. There was a genuine madness on the loose — and not just in the “free-fire zones” of Vietnam but in policy circles here in the United States, in the frustration of top military and civilian officials who felt gripped by an eerie helplessness as they widened a terrible war on the ground and in the air. They were, it seemed, incapable of imagining any other path than escalation in the face of disaster and possible defeat. Even in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when there was a brief attempt to paint that lost war in a more heroic hue (“a noble cause,” the president called it), that sense of madness, or at least of resulting mental illness, lingered. It remained embedded in a phrase then regularly applied to Americans who were less than willing to once again head aggressively into the world. They were suffering from, it was said, “Vietnam syndrome.”
Today, almost 25 years into what someday might simply be called America’s Iraq War (whose third iteration we’ve recently entered), you can feel that a similar “madness” has Washington by the throat. Just as King noted of the Vietnam era, since 9/11 American domestic programs and agencies have been starved while money poured into the coffers of the Pentagon and an increasingly bloated national security state. The results have been obvious. In the face of the spreading Ebola virus in West Africa, for instance, the president can no longer turn to civilian agencies or organizations for help, but has to call on the U.S. military in an “Ebola surge” — even our language has been militarized — although its forces are not known for their skills, successes, or spendthrift ways when it comes to civilian “humanitarian” or nation-building operations.
We’ve already entered the period when strategy, such as it is, falls away, and our leaders feel strangely helpless before the drip, drip, drip of failure and the unbearable urge for further escalation. At this point, in fact, the hysteria in Washington over the Islamic State seems a pitch or two higher than anything experienced in the Vietnam years. A fiercely sectarian force in the Middle East has captured the moment and riveted attention, even though its limits in a region full of potential enemies seem obvious and its “existential threat” to the U.S. consists of the possibility that some stray American jihadi might indeed try to harm a few of us. Call it emotional escalation in a Washington that seems remarkably unhinged.
It took Osama bin Laden $400,000 to $500,000, 19 hijackers, and much planning to produce the fallen towers of 9/11 and the ensuing hysteria in this country that launched the disastrous, never-ending Global War on Terror. It took the leaders of the Islamic State maybe a few hundred bucks and two grim videos, featuring three men on a featureless plain in Syria, to create utter, blind hysteria here. Think of this as confirmation of Karl Marx’s famous comment that the first time is tragedy, but the second is farce.
One clear sign of the farcical nature of our moment is the inability to use almost any common word or phrase in an uncontested way if you put “Iraq” or “Islamic State” or “Syria” in the same sentence. Remember when the worst Washington could come up with in contested words was the meaning of “is” in Bill Clinton’s infamous statement about his relationship with a White House intern? Linguistically speaking, those were the glory days, the utopian days of official Washington.
Just consider three commonplace terms of the moment: “war,” “boots on the ground,” and “combat.” A single question links them all: Are we or aren’t we? And to that, in each case, Washington has no acceptable answer. On war, the secretary of state said no, we weren’t; the White House and Pentagon press offices announced that yes, we were; and the president fudged. He called it “targeted action” and spoke of America’s “unique capability to mobilize against an organization like ISIL,” but God save us, what it wasn't and wouldn't be was a “ground war.”
Only with Congress did a certain clarity prevail. Nothing it did really mattered. Whatever Congress decided or refused to decide when it came to going to war would be fine and dandy, because the White House was going to do “it” anyway. “It,” of course, was the Clintonesque “is” of present-day Middle Eastern policy. Who knew what it was, but here was what it wasn’t and would never be: “boots on the ground.” Admittedly, the president has already dispatched 1,600 booted troops to Iraq’s ground (with more to come), but they evidently didn’t qualify as boots on the ground because, whatever they were doing, they would not be going into “combat” (which is evidently the only place where military boots officially hit the ground). The president has been utterly clear on this. There would be no American “combat mission” in Iraq. Unfortunately, “combat” turns out to be another of those dicey terms, since those non-boots had barely landed in Iraq when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey started to raise the possibility that some of them, armed, might one day be forward deployed with Iraqi troops as advisers and spotters for U.S. air power in future battles for Iraq’s northern cities. This, the White House now seems intent on defining as not being a “combat mission.”
And we’re only weeks into an ongoing operation that could last years. Imagine the pretzeling of the language by then. Perhaps it might be easiest if everyone — Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and Washington’s pundits — simply agreed that the United States is at “war-ish” in Iraq, with boots on the ground-ish in potentially combat-ish situations. Former State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren spent his own time in Iraq and wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People about it. Now, he considers the mind-boggling strangeness of Washington doing it all over again, this time as the grimmest of farces. Tom
Apocalypse Now, Iraq Edition
Fighting in Iraq Until Hell Freezes Over
By Peter Van BurenI wanted to offer a wry chuckle before we headed into the heavy stuff about Iraq, so I tried to start this article with a suitably ironic formulation. You know, a déjà-vu-all-over-again kinda thing. I even thought about telling you how, in 2011, I contacted a noted author to blurb my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and he presciently declined, saying sardonically, “So you're gonna be the one to write the last book on failure in Iraq?”
I couldn't do any of that. As someone who cares deeply about this country, I find it beyond belief that Washington has again plunged into the swamp of the Sunni-Shia mess in Iraq. A young soldier now deployed as one of the 1,600 non-boots-on-the-ground there might have been eight years old when the 2003 invasion took place. He probably had to ask his dad about it. After all, less than three years ago, when dad finally came home with his head “held high,” President Obama assuredAmericans that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” So what happened in the blink of an eye?
The Sons of Iraq
Sometimes, when I turn on the TV these days, the sense of seeing once again places in Iraq I'd been overwhelms me. After 22 years as a diplomat with the Department of State, I spent 12 long months in Iraq in 2009-2010 as part of the American occupation. My role was to lead two teams in “reconstructing” the nation. In practice, that meant paying for schools that would never be completed, setting up pastry shops on streets without water or electricity, and conducting endless propaganda events on Washington-generated themes of the week (“small business,” “women's empowerment,” “democracy building.”)
We even organized awkward soccer matches, where American taxpayer money was used to coerce reluctant Sunni teams into facing off against hesitant Shia ones in hopes that, somehow, the chaos created by the American invasion could be ameliorated on the playing field. In an afternoon, we definitively failed to reconcile the millennium-old Sunni-Shia divide we had sparked into ethnic-cleansing-style life in 2003-2004, even if the score was carefully stage managed into a tie by the 82nd Airborne soldiers with whom I worked.
In 2006, the U.S. brokered the ascension to power of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia politician handpicked to unite Iraq. A bright, shining lie of a plan soon followed. Applying vast amounts of money, Washington’s emissaries created the Sahwa, or Sons of Iraq, a loose grouping of Sunnis anointed as “moderates” who agreed to temporarily stop killing in return for a promised place at the table in the New(er) Iraq. The “political space” for this was to be created by a massive escalation of the American military effort, which gained a particularly marketable name: the surge.
I was charged with meeting the Sahwa leaders in my area. My job back then was to try to persuade them to stay on board just a little longer, even as they came to realize that they'd been had. Maliki’s Shia government in Baghdad, which was already ignoring American entreaties to be inclusive, was hell-bent on ensuring that there would be no Sunni “sons” in its Iraq.
False alliances and double-crosses were not unfamiliar to the Sunni warlords I engaged with. Often, our talk — over endless tiny glasses of sweet, sweet tea stirred with white-hot metal spoons — shifted from the Shia and the Americans to their great-grandfathers' struggle against the British. Revenge unfolds over generations, they assured me, and memories are long in the Middle East, they warned.
When I left in 2010, the year before the American military finally departed, the truth on the ground should have been clear enough to anyone with the vision to take it in. Iraq had already been tacitly divided into feuding state-lets controlled by Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. The Baghdad government had turned into a typical, gleeful third-world kleptocracy fueled by American money, but with a particularly nasty twist: they were also a group of autocrats dedicated to persecuting, marginalizing, degrading, and perhaps one day destroying the country’s Sunni minority.
U.S. influence was fading fast, leaving the State Department, a small military contingent, various spooks, and contractors hidden behind the walls of the billion-dollar embassy (the largest in the world!) that had been built in a moment of imperial hubris. The foreign power with the most influence over events was by then Iran, the country the Bush administration had once been determined to take down alongside Saddam Hussein as part of the Axis of Evil.
The Grandsons of Iraq
The staggering costs of all this — $25 billion to train the Iraqi Army, $60 billion for the reconstruction-that-wasn’t, $2 trillion for the overall war, almost 4,500 Americans dead and more than 32,000 wounded, and an Iraqi death toll of more than190,000 (though some estimates go as high as a million) — can now be measured against the results. The nine-year attempt to create an American client state in Iraq failed, tragically and completely. The proof of that is on today's front pages. More
Commentary: Christopher Jorebon Loeak – President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
This is the transcript of a video “address to the world” released by President Loeak on 18 September 2014 ahead of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit. The full video can be viewed here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8t7ElMPS_8
Out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, climate change has arrived.
In the last year alone, my country has suffered through unprecedented droughts in the north, and the biggest ever king tides in the south; and we have watched the most devastating typhoons in history leave a trail of death and destruction across the region.
Lying just two meters above sea level, my atoll nation stands at the frontline in the battle against climate change. The beaches of Buoj where I use to fish as a boy are already under water, and the fresh water we need to grow our food gets saltier every day. As scientists had predicted, some of our islands have already completely disappeared, gone forever under the ever-rising waves. For the Marshall Islands and our friends in the Pacific, this is already a full-blown climate emergency.
Some tell us that we should begin planning to leave. But how can we? And why should we? These islands are our home. They hold our history, our heritage and our hopes for the future. Are the world's polluters asking us to give up our language, our culture, and our national identity? We are not prepared to do that – we will stay and fight. If the water comes, it comes.
Brick by brick, I built the seawall behind me with my own hands. But even this is barely enough to protect my family from the encroaching waves. Last year, after returning from a visit to the United Nations in New York, I was so shocked by the damage from the rising tides that I added another foot of bricks to the wall.
In the Marshall Islands we have a saying – “Wa kuk wa jimer”. It means that we are all in the same boat together. What is happening here is a mere preview of the havoc that awaits if we continue with our polluting ways. If my country goes, others will surely follow. We are the canary in the coalmine.
The climate crisis is forcing us to take matters into our own hands, both at home and on the international stage. Last year the Marshall Islands hosted the largest-ever Pacific Islands Forum Leaders' meeting in Majuro and it remains one of the proudest moments of my Presidency.
The big outcome was the Majuro Declaration for Climate Leadership, a powerful message from the world's most vulnerable countries to the big emitters that surround us that the time for talk is over, and the time for action is now. Our efforts had an impact with the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan all committing to be climate leaders, and to do more to tackle climate change. At this time last year, I presented the Declaration to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and promised to bring the spirit of Majuro to his Climate Change Leaders' Summit in New York, which is now less than a week away.
The Summit comes not a moment too soon. It is the first gathering of world leaders on climate change in nearly five years, and just over a year before our deadline to sign a new global treaty on climate change in Paris at the end of 2015.
Paris cannot be another Copenhagen. The world has changed too much. The science is more alarming, the impacts more severe, the economics more compelling, and the politics more potent. Even the world's two biggest polluters – China and the United States – are working together to find a pathway to a new global agreement.
But there are still some that seek to slow us down.
To my fellow world leaders I say “next week's Summit is a chance for all of us to be the leaders we were elected to be”. We must send a strong and united message to the world – and to the people that we represent – that we are ready to do a deal next year. And to avoid the worst impacts of a warmer world, this new deal must capture a vision for a carbon-free world by the middle of the century. Without it, no seawall will be high enough to save my country. Together, we must find the courage to rise to this challenge. It is time to build the greatest climate change alliance the world has ever seen.
My people are counting on it, as is all of humanity.
Christopher J. Loeak is the President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
Whether We Engage or Do Nothing… This Changes Everything
The following is an excerpt taken from the introduction of Naomi Klein's newly published book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and appears at Common Dreams with permission from the book's publisher Simon & Shuster. All rights reserved.
“Most projections of climate change presume that future changes—greenhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea level rise—will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole. In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large-scale impacts. At that point, even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially unstoppable processes are set in motion. We can think of this as sudden climate brake and steering failure where the problem and its consequences are no longer something we can control.” —Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society, 2014
“I love that smell of the emissions.” — Sarah Palin, 2011
I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. Not like Donald Trump and the Tea Partiers going on about how the continued existence of winter proves it’s all a hoax. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most of the news stories, especially the really scary ones. I told myself the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my “elite” frequent flyer status
Climate change is… hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.”
A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke (“more signs of the Apocalypse!”). Which is another way of looking away.
Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, I was to discover while researching this book, is yet another way of looking away.
“Climate change is… hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.”
Or we look but try to be hyper-rational about it (“dollar for dollar it’s more efficient to focus on economic development than climate change, since wealth is the best protection from weather extremes”)—as if having a few more dollars will make much difference when your city is underwater. Which is a way of looking away if you happen to be a policy wonk. Or we look but tell ourselves we are too busy to care about something so distant and abstract—even though we saw the water in the subways in New York City, and the people on their rooftops in New Orleans, and know that no one is safe, the most vulnerable least of all. And though perfectly understandable, this too is a way of looking away.
Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. Meditate and shop at farmers’ markets and stop driving—but forget trying to actually change the systems that are making the crisis inevitable because that’s too much “bad energy” and it will never work. And at first it may appear as if we are looking, because many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still have one eye tightly shut.
Or maybe we do look—really look—but then, inevitably, we seem to forget. Remember and then forget again. Climate change is like that; it’s hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.
We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. And we don’t have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing. Just continue to do what we are doing now, whether it’s counting on a techno-fix or tending to our gardens or telling ourselves we’re unfortunately too busy to deal with it.
All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.
There are ways of preventing this grim future, or at least making it a lot less dire. But the catch is that these also involve changing everything. For us high consumers, it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth. The good news is that many of these changes are distinctly un-catastrophic. Many are downright exciting. But I didn’t discover this for a long while.
“All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.”
I remember the precise moment when I stopped averting my eyes to the reality of climate change, or at least when I first allowed my eyes to rest there for a good while. It was in Geneva, in April 2009, and I was meeting with Bolivia’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO), who was then a surprisingly young woman named Angélica Navarro Llanos. Bolivia being a poor country with a small international budget, Navarro Llanos had recently taken on the climate portfolio in addition to her trade responsibilities. Over lunch in an empty Chinese restaurant, she explained to me (using chopsticks as props to make a graph of the global emission trajectory) that she saw climate change both as a terrible threat to her people—but also an opportunity.
A threat for the obvious reasons: Bolivia is extraordinarily dependent on glaciers for its drinking and irrigation water and those white-capped mountains that tower over its capital were turning gray and brown at an alarming rate. The opportunity, Navarro Llanos said, was that since countries like hers had done almost nothing to send emissions soaring, they were in a position to declare themselves “climate creditors,” owed money and technology support from the large emitters to defray the hefty costs of coping with more climate-related disasters, as well as to help them develop on a green energy path.
She had recently given a speech at a United Nations climate conference in which she laid out the case for these kinds of wealth transfers, and she gave me a copy. “Millions of people,” it read, “in small islands, least developed countries, landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China, and all around the world—are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute. . . . If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life. We have only a decade.” More
At Climate March in New York, a Clarion Call for Action
After months of planning, the People’s Climate March began rolling through a large swath of Midtown Manhattan on Sunday, taking public frustration over stalled efforts to curb carbon emissions to the streets in a noisy, vivid display of unity.
At 11:30 a.m., the march began moving east along 59th Street from Columbus Circle, proceeding along a circuitous, two-mile route, and drawing labor and immigrant groups, students and politicians, scientists and religious leaders. The march will turn south on Avenue of the Americas, head west on 42nd Street to 11th Avenue and finish at 34th Street.
The protest comes two days before a climate summit at the United Nations, which will be attended by President Obama. The meeting is expected to create a framework for a potential global agreement on emissions late next year in Paris.
The timing of the march is significant in another regard. Last week, meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that this summer — the months of June, July and August — was the hottest on record for the globe, and that 2014 was on track to break the record for the hottest year, set in 2010.
“Climate change is no longer an environmental issue; it’s an everybody issue,” Sam Barratt, a campaign director for the online advocacy group Avaaz, which helped plan the march, said on Friday.
“The number of natural disasters has increased and the science is so much more clear,” he added. “This march has many messages, but the one that we’re seeing and hearing is the call for a renewable revolution.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, whose administration announced this weekend a sweeping plan to overhaul energy efficiency standards in all city-owned buildings, is among the high-profile participants expected to join the march, including the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon; former Vice President Al Gore; the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo; at least two United States senators; and one-third of the New York City Council.
Additionally, nearly 2,700 climate events are planned in more than 150 countries to coincide with the march, considered the centerpiece of the international protest. They range from a small rally in Tanzania, to major demonstrations from Berlin to Bogata.
On Sunday morning, participants from across the country began to arrive at the staging area near the American Museum of Natural History. Rosemary Snow, 75, stretched her legs after a nearly 14-hour bus drive from Georgia.
“I thought we’d have a lot of younger people on the bus,” said Ms. Snow, who made the trip with her grandson. “There’s a really great mix of people.”
Ms. Snow had traveled with dozens of others who came from different parts of the state, including Valdosta, Savannah and Atlanta.
A professor at the University of Georgia, Chris Cuomo, from Decatur, Ga., said the group was organized by the Georgia Climate Change Coalition.
She said she hoped their presence at the rally would “let the rest of the world know that people from small-town America, urban America, rural America care about climate change.”
Nearby, Ahni Rocheleau of Santa Fe, N.M., was seated while eating a breakfast of organic yogurt and buckwheat pancakes. She is a member of the Great March for Climate Action, a cross-country walk to raise awareness for alternative and sustainable energy practices.
“We hope the heart and mind of the people will be awakened,” she said. “Coal is not the way to go.”
The march was expected to tie up traffic across a broad area of Manhattan, from the Upper West Side through Midtown. In a traffic advisory, the police braced the public for the closing of dozens of streets along the route. A lane for emergency vehicles, however, was kept open.
Nearly 500 buses have been bringing marchers from South Carolina, Kansas, Minnesota and Canada, while a “climate train” transported participants from California.
Marchers assembled before 11:30 a.m. north of Columbus Circle, specifically along Central Park West between 65th and 86th Streets, which the police planned to use as a staging area. A number of pre-march events were planned in the vicinity of Columbus Circle, including a labor event on Broadway, an interfaith religious service on West 58th Street and a rally by scientists outside the Hayden Planetarium on West 81st Street.
At 12:58 p.m., a moment of silence will be followed by a blare of noise — a symbolic sounding of the alarm on climate change — from horns, whistles and cellphone alarms. More than 20 marching bands and tolling church bells will contribute to the cacophony.
There will be no speeches, but the march will end with a block party on 11th Avenue between 34th and 38th Streets. There, participants can get a closer look at many of the floats and other artwork created for the march, including a 30-foot inflatable life preserver, 100 sunflowers and a model of the New York City skyline with bicyclists powering its lights.
New York’s political establishment was set to come out in force. On Friday, Mayor de Blasio announced on Twitter his intention to join the protest. “Proud to walk in #PeoplesClimate March on Sunday,” he wrote. “It’s everyone’s responsibility to leave a livable planet for the next generation.”
At least 17 council members planned to march. In a nod to the event, the Council announced a related package of bills on Friday aimed at reducing the city’s carbon footprint by connecting unemployed New Yorkers to green jobs, making buildings more energy-efficient and promoting low-carbon transportation. The legislation seeks an 80 percent reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
With its bands and colorful floats, the march offers a festive atmosphere, but organizers said that the underlying message was somber. “We are trying to celebrate our lives and this planet in order to show that this is what we are fighting for,” said Leslie Cagan, the logistics coordinator for People’s Climate March. “It’s the human spirit — and everything else on this planet — that is in danger.”
The march was organized by a dozen environmental, labor and social justice groups, including the Sierra Club, Avaaz, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, 350.org, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and 1199 S.E.I.U. In addition, more than 1,570 “partner organizations” have signed on to march.
Organizers were hoping that the warm weather forecast for the day would yield a large turnout.
“Our biggest problem is the financial power of the fossil fuel industry,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of “The End of Nature.”
“We can’t match that money,” he said. “So we have to work in the currency of movements — passion, spirit, creativity and bodies — and it will all be on display on Sunday.” More
Curbing climate change: The deepest cuts
ON SEPTEMBER 23rd 120-odd presidents and prime ministers will gather in New York for a UN meeting on climate change. It is the first time the subject has brought so many leaders together since the ill-fated Copenhagen summit of 2009.
Now, as then, they will assert that reining in global warming is a political priority. Some may commit their governments to policies aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. What few will say is how many tonnes of carbon dioxide these will save—because they almost never do.
According to scientists, cutting carbon-dioxide emissions is an essential part of reducing catastrophic risks from climate change. Yet governments are persistently averse to providing estimates of how much carbon a policy saves. That may be because, in countries where climate change is controversial, it makes more sense to talk about the other benefits a scheme offers rather than its effect on carbon. Or it may be that, in countries which are enthusiastic about renewable energy, pointing out that it may not save that much carbon is seen as unhelpful. Or perhaps governments think climate change is so serious that all measures must be taken, regardless of cost (though their overall lacklustre record suggests this is not the case).
Whatever the reason, the end result is that while the world’s governments have hundreds of policies for tackling climate change, some of them very expensive—China, America and the European Union spend $140 billion a year on subsidising renewable energy—it is hard to say which policies are having the greatest effect.
So The Economist has made a stab at a global comparison of carbon-mitigation efforts. Chart 1 is the result. It ranks 20 policies and courses of action according to how much they have done to reduce the atmosphere’s stock of greenhouse gases. We have used figures from governments, the EU and UN agencies. As far as we know, this exercise has not been carried out before.
Apples, meet oranges
First, a health warning: the policies and actions on our list are not strictly comparable. Some are global, some regional and some national. Some are long-standing; some new. A couple are not policies at all, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the closure of polluting factories and to inefficient state farms reverting to grassland, locking up carbon.
And the numbers almost all come with caveats. It is fairly easy to estimate how much carbon a new field full of solar cells or a nuclear-power plant saves by looking at the amount of electricity it produces in a year and how much carbon would have been emitted if fossil fuels had been used instead, based on the local mix of coal, gas and oil. But as Paul Joskow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, the standard “levelised” calculations, which divide the total amount of power a plant will produce over its lifetime by its total lifetime cost, are a poor way to compare fossil fuels and renewable energy.
Other measures have problems, too. Take the effects of fuel-efficiency standards. Would companies have curtailed their cars’ emissions anyway to sell more of them to cost- and mileage-conscious drivers? And how much has better fuel efficiency encouraged drivers to drive farther?
A further complication is that many policies have benefits beyond—or indeed closer to hand than—those they offer in terms of climate. Burning less coal saves lives in the near future as well as reducing climate risks in decades to come. Saving forests preserves wildlife, not just carbon.
So our table should be treated with caution. It is only safe to say that one policy is better than another in climate terms if it beats it by a wide margin.
As it happens, though, there are some very wide margins to be found. One policy stands head and shoulders above all others. And it is one that few people other than climate-policy specialists will have thought of in this context: the Montreal protocol, a 1987 agreement to phase out substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in air conditioners, refrigerators and so on. It was enacted to limit the damage such substances were doing to the ozone layer, a goal which it has achieved.
Like carbon dioxide and many other gases emitted by industry and agriculture—methane and nitrous oxide, for example—CFCs are greenhouse gases. And they are extremely potent ones, causing thousands of times more warming per molecule than carbon dioxide does. That means stopping CFC production, which was in the range of millions of tonnes a year, delivered a climate benefit equivalent to cutting carbon-dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.
Collateral benefits
Guus Velders of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment has compared the warming effect that would have come about if the emissions of such chemicals had continued to grow at the rate they were growing before the protocol with what has come about thanks to their banning. The net effect is equivalent to that of a whopping 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is more than twice today’s total annual greenhouse-gas emissions, which are equivalent to about 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (carbon dioxide itself makes up about three-quarters of that, with methane, nitrous oxide and some gases used in industry making up the rest). Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a think-tank, says that if CFCs were uncontrolled the annual figure would be 8 billion tonnes higher. The Montreal protocol has had nearly as big an effect as all the rest of our list put together.
Trailing some way behind the Montreal protocol is a small group of measures—not really climate policies—that have been responsible for avoiding between 4% and 7% of greenhouse-gas emissions. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear power avoided the production of 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2010—that is, emissions would have been 2.2 billion tonnes higher if the same amount of electricity had been produced by non-nuclear plants. Energy from dams and other hydroelectric sources avoided 2.8 billion tonnes (though emissions of methane from the reservoirs behind some of those dams mean the net effects were less than that). Between them they generated 6,000 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2011, compared with 450TWhrs for wind and less than 60TWhrs for solar. The high rate at which new wind and solar capacity is being built will eat into this lead, but it will take some time to overturn it.
The other item in this group is something of a cheat. In 2007 Su Wei of China’s foreign ministry said that his country’s one-child policy, by reducing the number of births between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s by 300m, had reduced carbon emissions by 1.3 billion tonnes in 2005 (because there were fewer people to consume goods which generated greenhouse gases in their production). Taking this argument further, one could say that the fall in global fertility since 1960 cut emissions even more. That is not exactly a climate policy. But it is a reminder that greenhouse gases are powerfully influenced by factors far beyond the scope of climate-change policies.
Three other lessons emerge. First, policies to slow or reverse deforestation are more important than one might expect. Trees absorb carbon as they grow and release it when they are cut down. According to a recent study in Science, declining deforestation in Brazil meant that the country produced 3.2 billion tonnes less atmospheric carbon dioxide between 2005 and 2013 than it would have if the tree-felling had continued unabated. That is 400m tonnes a year. The slowdown in deforestation in tropical countries is one of the reasons that the conversion of forests to farmland now accounts for only 11% of greenhouse-gas emissions globally, much less than 20 years ago.
The other reason for deforestation’s dramatically reduced share of total emissions, though, is that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide have continued to grow rapidly. The rise is not as fast as it might have been. Rules that make vehicles more efficient and improve the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances have done more than might be expected. America has been setting standards for vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions and fuel efficiency since the mid 1970s; the current rules are forecast to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 6 billion tonnes in 2012-25, meaning by about 460m tonnes a year. America’s Department of Transportation reckons that overall such rules have reduced carbon-dioxide emissions by a cumulative 14 billion tonnes. Europe’s equivalent regulations for passenger cars and light trucks do less (European vehicles were more efficient to start with) but are still respectable; being adopted by overseas manufacturers who want to sell cars in Europe gives them an unquantified extra clout. More
Climate Injustice – Excerpt from Disruption
‘When it comes to climate change, why do we do so little when we know so much?’
Through a relentless investigation to find the answer, Disruption takes an unflinching look at the devastating consequences of our inaction.
The exploration lays bare the terrifying science, the shattered political process, the unrelenting industry special interests and the civic stasis that have brought us to this social, moral and ecological crossroads.The film also takes us behind-the-scenes of the efforts to organize the largest climate rally in the history of the planet during the UN world climate summit.
This is the story of our unique moment in history. We are living through an age of tipping points and rapid social and planetary change. We’re the first generation to feel the impacts of climate disruption, and the last generation that can do something about it. The film enlarges the issue beyond climate impacts and makes a compelling call for bold action that is strong enough to tip the balance to build a clean energy future. More
Perpetual War, Indefinite Detention, And Torture: The U.S. And Israel’s Shared Values
The United States and Israel have “shared values” but not when it comes to upholding democracy and the rule of law. Their shared values are perpetual war, torture, indefinite detention, and military courts.
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| Israeli soldiers arrest Palestinian minors in the West Bank city of Jenin |
Guantanamo is a perfect example of this. Both states have been in a state of perpetual war for quite some time with Israel against the Palestinians since its founding in 1948 while the U.S. can trace back its war to its founding in 1776 and the colonization of Native American lands. Today’s global war on terror is the latest chapter in that saga. Under perpetual war, the United States and Israel can justify a litany of draconian policies, such as indefinite detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing.
International human rights law prohibits torture and detention without charge or trial. The UN Convention Against Torture strictly forbids torture, even in “exceptional circumstances” like “a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency.” Meanwhile, article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention.” The rights to a fair trial, due process, and to be free from torture and inhumane treatment are basic human rights that governments are obliged to uphold. Yet, both the United States and Israel practice indefinite detention – also known as “administrative detention” in Israel – and torture.
Administrative detention and torture in Israel
Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories without charge or trial over the years “for periods ranging from several months to several years,” according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. B’Tselem figures also report that, “At the end of May 2014, 196 Palestinian administrative detainees were held in facilities run by the Israel Prison Service (IPS).” Israel recently locked up over 250 Palestinians in administrative detention as part of its operation to find the three missing but killed Israeli settlers, putting the current population at around 450.
Three Israeli laws allow and regulate Israel’s administrative detention powers – the Administrative Detention Order, theEmergency Powers (Detention) Law, and the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law.
The Administrative Detention Order, which applies to the West Bank except East Jerusalem, allows military commanders to detain a person for a maximum of six months “for reasons to do with regional security or public security.” Commanders can repeatedly add six months of administrative detention, since there is no limit on extensions. The 1979 Emergency Powers Law allows the defense minister to detain a person for up to six months, like the Order, and extend the detention repeatedly six months at a time. It applies to Israeli residents, residents living in Israeli occupied territories, and residents of other countries, such as Lebanon. However, this law grants detainees more protections than the Order does. The 2002 Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law allows for the administrative detention of a civilian who directly or indirectly participates in hostilities against Israel or is a member of a force that does so. Under this law, persons can be detained for an unlimited period of time. This law is used to detain Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.
While the occupation is illegal and unjust, Israel, as an occupying power, has an international legal responsibility to uphold the welfare of Palestinians living under its control. International humanitarian law permitssome internment (or detention without charge or trial) in wartime but only “for imperative reasons of security,” according to Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Internment [detention] also has to be done on a case-by-case basis rather than implemented widely.
B’Tselem names the numerous ways in which Israel’s use of administrative detention violates its international legal responsibilities as an occupying power. One is its “[e]xtremely extensive use” in contravention of international law. “Administrative detention has become routine practice, rather than an exceptional measure,” according to B’Tselem. Relatedly, administrative detention is used as “an alternative to criminal proceedings” with authorities using it “as a quick and efficient alternative to criminal trial, primarily when they do not have sufficient evidence to charge the individual, or when they do not want to reveal their evidence.” Administrative detention also lacks due process as detainees “are not provided meaningful information on the reasons for their detention and are not given an opportunity to refute the suspicions against them.” Additionally, detention periods are repeatedly extended, which leaves Palestinians detained for several months to years without charge or trial. Israel has also used administrative detention against political opponents, including non-violent political activists. Finally, many Palestinian administrative detainees are held inside Israel.
In 1999, Israel’s High Court of Justice issued a ruling that prohibited interrogators from using methods of torture as a means of interrogation. Before that ruling, Israeli security forces regularly “tortured thousands of Palestinian detainees each year,” according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. In 1987, an Israeli government commission, headed by former Supreme Court President Moshe Landau, issued a report that provided a framework for Israel’s torture regime. The Landau Commission recommended Shin Bet interrogators utilize torture methods, namely “psychological pressure” and a “moderate degree of physical pressure,” against people suspected of “hostile terrorist activity.” It argued that “an effective interrogation is impossible” without some physical force.
Despite the High Court’s 1999 ban on torture, rights groups like the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) point out that the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet and other law enforcement agencies still commit acts of torture. The PCATI largely relied on testimonies from Palestinian prisoners and forensic evaluations. In response, the Shin Bet denies it commits torture and argues that its interrogation methods are not only lawful but save lives.
Methods of torture and ill treatment of Palestinian prisoners since 1999, according to the PCATI, include “sleep deprivation, binding to a chair in painful positions, beatings, slapping, kicking, threats, verbal abuse and degradation,” special methods like “bending the body into painful positions,” “forcing the interrogee to crouch in a frog-like position (‘kambaz’), choking, shaking and other violent and degrading acts (hair-pulling, spitting, etc.),” and psychological torture. Prisoners, some of whom are children, in solitary confinement often face “sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, permanent exposure to artificial light, detention in sub-standard conditions.”
The High Court’s ruling has loopholes for Israeli intelligence to circumvent the torture ban. One is the “necessity defense”, which, according to PCATI, “under certain circumstances, exempts interrogators who employ illegal interrogation techniques, including physical violence, from criminal responsibility.” Another is well-known the “ticking bomb” scenario, where torture is allowed to prevent an imminent threat, such as a bomb about to explode. PCATI argues that the government exploited this loophole to declare more detainees ticking time bombs and overstepping the court’s intended scope. PCATI also accused the Shin Bet “taking advantage of the fact that only sleep deprivation for the sake of deprivation is illegal, not sleep deprivation indirectly caused from an extended interrogation,” according to the Jerusalem Post.
Guantanamo, U.S. global war on terror
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed shortly after 9/11, authorizes the President of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 terrorist attacks “or harbored such organizations or persons.” This bill gives the United States wide power to wage perpetual war around the world against alleged terrorist groups.
When the Obama administration entered office, it not only kept the AUMF in place, but expanded the bill’s scope to continue the global war on terror. The Obama administration interprets the AUMF to include “associated forces” – essentially co-belligerents – of al-Qaeda, even though the bill does not include those words. Last year, the Washington Post reportedthat Obama administration officials were debating whether the AUMF could be stretched to include “associates of associates” of al-Qaeda, including groups like al-Nusra Front in Syria or Ansar al-Sharia in North Africa. Thus, Obama has shifted the war on terror’s goalposts and continued its perpetuity.
The AUMF is the legal linchpin for the United States’ global war on terror. It justifies the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, kill-or-capture raids, extraordinary rendition, and drone strikes. But it is not the only legal measure for doing so. Last year, a week before President Obama’s national security speech, Obama administration officials told the Senate that even without AUMF, the government could use other laws to continue lethal operations against suspected terrorists, such as self-defense under international law. While both states engage in perpetual war under the language of “fighting terror,” Israel’s battlefield mostly extends to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while the United States’ is the entire world.
The Guantanamo Bay detention facility was opened in 2002, as the global war on terror began. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, it provided bounties to tribal allies and Pakistani security forces to capture anyone believed to be connected with al-Qaeda or the Taliban and send them to American forces. This led to large swaths of low-level fightersand guys at the wrong place at the wrong timegetting snatched up thanks to informants looking for money or scores to settle with their enemies. ASeton Hall study pointed out that only 5 percent of Guantanamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces, while 86 percent were captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and handed to the United States.
Presently, there are 149 men detained in Guantanamo. Of those, 79 are cleared for release, 37 are designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial, 6 currently being tried in military commissions, and 36 who could go to trial. However, Guantanamo chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins told reporters last summer that 20 could be “realistically prosecuted.”
Recently, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told Congress that the military intends to release six Guantanamo detainees to Uruguay – four of whom are Syrian, one is Palestinian, and the other is Tunisian. All six have been cleared for release for over four years. This would bring the number of detainees cleared for release down to 73 and total Guantanamo inmate population to 143. Meanwhile, the U.S. government deems the indefinite detainees too difficult to prosecute, as there is little to no admissible evidence against them (some was obtained through torture), but too dangerous to release. According to Martins, these indefinite detainees will remain in Guantanamo “until the end of hostilities” against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and “associated forces.” Thus making them prisoners of war in an endless war.
In 2012, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), sections of which allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens on US soil who allegedly “substantially supported al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces.” When Obama stepped into office, he pledged to close the U.S. prison in Guantanamo. But the other half of his plan was less advertised. In order to close Guantanamo, Obama’s original plan was to to move some Guantanamo detainees to an Illinois prison. Moreover, his administration decided, early on, to continue utilizing indefinite detention, much to the chagrin of civil liberties groups. However, Congress, particularly members of the Republican Party, fought against this plan not out of opposition to indefinite detention but because they did not want “terrorists” on American soil. This past May, the Obama administration’s legal team told Congress that if Guantanamo detainees “were relocated to a prison inside the United States, it is unlikely that a court would order their release onto domestic soil,” reported The New York Times.
Despite the fear-mongering of releasing “terrorist” from Guantanamo, according to a New America Foundation study, only 4 percent of released Guantanamo detainees engage in “militant activities against U.S. targets.”
Abuses in Guantanamo, according to a 2006 Center for Constitutional Rights report, include beatings, shackling, solitary confinement, sexual harassment and rape, sleep deprivation, medical abuse, and religious and cultural humiliation. Some Guantanamo detainees were detained in secret CIA prisons before arriving at the U.S. military prison in Cuba. An ICRC report on the treatment of 14 “high value” detainees held in CIA black sites revealed that torture techniques in the secret prisons included sleep and food deprivation, playing of loud music, waterboarding, beatings, stress positions, cold temperatures and water, prolonged shackling, threats, and forced shaving. Around 100 detainees were held in CIA black sites and themajority of them were tortured. More
Democracy & Good Governance 