28 September 2007
Climate Change: Evasion Replaces Denial
By Gwynne Dyer
When denial fails, try evasion. Almost all the climate change deniers, even President George W. Bush, now allow the forbidden phrase to pass their lips, but that doesn’t mean they have really accepted the need to do something about it. The preferred tactics now are distraction, diversion and delay.
That’s why the US government held a mini-summit on climate change last week just two days after the United Nations held a one-day summit to prepare for the December meeting in Indonesia that must set the targets for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the period after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol expires. The Bush administration, which refused to ratify the Kyoto pact, doesn’t want any hard targets at all, so the name of the game is sabotage.
“Each nation must decide for itself the right mix of tools and technology to achieve results that are measurable and environmentally effective,” Mr Bush said. In other words, there should not be negotiated targets for actual cuts in emissions, with penalties for those who do not meet them. “By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem,” said the US president. “And by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it.”
What he proposes to do about it is to host another conference next year to “finalise the goal” (but not a mandatory goal, you understand) and discuss ways of attaining it. Then there could be another conference in 2009, and another in 2010….
Evasion and delay. The aim is to prevent the Kyoto accord’s 144 signatories from setting hard targets for deep emission cuts, or at least to provide a plausible political shelter for governments that oppose mandatory cuts but need to look like they are fighting climate change in the eyes of their own peoples. That shelter, which is now called the Asia-Pacific Partnership, was set up last year, and last week it gained a new recruit: Canada.
The six existing members are the United States and Australia (huge emitters of greenhouse gases that never joined the Kyoto process, and until recently were climate change deniers); China, India and South Korea (Kyoto signatories that, as developing countries, were exempt from emission limits under the existing treaty, but fear that they would face limits in the next phase); and Japan (which accepted a Kyoto target for 2012, but has no hope of meeting it now without heroic efforts). Together, they account for half of the world’s emissions.
The new member, Canada, is a big emitter that committed itself to reduce emissions under Kyoto but made no effort to reach its target. The fault mostly lies with previous Liberal governments, but the new Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is a former climate change denier who is seeking a way to welsh on the commitment. A large majority of Canadians support Kyoto, so he needs political cover, and the Asia-Pacific Partnership might give him some.
The Bush administration has thus succeeded in splitting the world in two on the climate change issue. An overwhelming majority of the 39 developed countries have agreed to get back below their 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions by 2012, and will meet their targets (usually about 5 percent below) or at least come close. A few rogue industrial countries have shunned the Kyoto process entirely or missed their targets very badly, and they have now joined with the most rapidly developing countries (whose emissions are soaring) to subvert or evade the next phase of cuts.
It’s exactly what you would expect in any large undertaking that involves many different countries, and there’s no point in getting upset about it. The only question is how to get past it.
Australia will probably join the post-Kyoto process as soon as Australian voters have dumped Prime Minister John Howard, a serial climate change denier who looks certain to lose the election later this year. After six years of intense drought, Australians are losing their scepticism about climate change. So are Americans.
Seventy percent of Americans now identify climate change as a major problem, and in the face of the federal government’s obstructionism many states are pressing ahead with their own greenhouse gas reduction programmes. As California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who has committed his state to deep cuts) said at the UN summit: “California is moving the United States beyond debate and doubt to action..What we are doing is changing the dynamic.”
An even bigger problem is the Asian giants, China and India, whose hopes of achieving full developed-country status depend on historically unprecedented economic growth rates. They will not abandon those hopes while other countries still live in lavish consumer societies. So how can they be persuaded to accept emission controls?
With great difficulty, but it is their climate too. The deal will require the old industrialised countries to take even deeper cuts in their emissions in order to leave the emerging ones some room to grow. It must also involve technology transfer and direct subsidies from the old rich countries to help them switch from CO2-intensive technologies for power generation (like two new coal-fired generating stations in China each week) to cleaner ones.
That will be one of the most difficult political bargains that has ever been negotiated, but the prospect of global disaster may help to concentrate people’s minds.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 10. ( “The new…some”; and “Australia…Americans”)
20 April 2007
The End of the “War on Terror”
By Gwynne Dyer
The “Axis of Good” is starting to crumble. It is several months yet before British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s promise to retire falls due, but already his current and former cabinet colleagues are trying to put some distance between themselves and his most disastrous legacy, the invasion of Iraq. This is causing some embarrassment to his American and Australian partners in crime, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister John Howard. (Only those three countries actually shot and bombed their way into Iraq, although lots of others showed up later for a while.)
It started in New York on Tuesday with Mr. Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary in the Blair cabinet and a contender to be deputy prime minister or foreign secretary when he goes. Benn revealed that the British government had told all its diplomats to stop using the phrase “war on terror” last December, because “we can’t win by military means alone. And because this isn’t us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.”
It was a dangerous phrase, Benn continued, because it imputed power, organisation and common purpose to “a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world. By letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength.”
It was a small act of rebellion, but a significant one, for Prime Minister Blair’s own website still uses the phrase “war on terror” a mind-numbing 154 times. Blair’s official spokesperson, asked about the discrepancy, replied tight-lipped: “We all use our own phraseology.” And it was significant that Hilary Benn made his speech not in Britain but in the United States, where it would cause maximum offence to President Bush, the originator and most frequent abuser of the offending phrase.
Blair’s loss of authority over his own government was underlined the following day in Australia, when Helen Liddell, the British high commissioner (ambassador), was asked about Benn’s remarks. “Phrases like war on terror, these are tabloid slogans,” she replied — and went on to say something that must have caused Prime Minister John Howard great annoyance.
For four years, ever since he sent Australian troops to invade Iraq, Howard has insisted that they are there to fight terrorism: “Iraq is not a diversion from the war on terror, it is the front line and we must face this reality,” he said in 2004. And he has been repeating that ever since, together with the embellishment that Australia’s troops have to be on that front line because defeat in Iraq would embolden terrorists in South-East Asia.
This summons up an intriguing image of potential South-East Asian terrorists checking each night for news from Iraq as they hover on the cusp of a choice between life as a terrorist and a career in accountancy, but their actual motivations are probably a bit more complex than that. What’s interesting is not that John Howard is wrong; it’s that the British high commissioner in Canberra said he was wrong. Ambassadors don’t normally do that.
Helen Liddell was a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2003 when Britain took the decision to join the Bush administration in invading Iraq, and she spoke with the certainty of one who knows where the bodies are buried: “We have never seen Iraq as part of the war on terrorism. Certainly at the moment we are engaged in a war on the streets in Afghanistan, in Iraq against terrorism. But our raison d’etre for our involvement in Iraq has not been about terrorism.”
The real message of these events is that the new British cabinet that is installed this summer after Blair leaves office, presumably under the prime ministership of Gordon Brown, is not going to be tied by Blair’s dogmas and Blair’s commitments. Australia may soon be America’s ONLY remaining significant ally in Iraq.
But there is another message, too: words matter. The “war on terror” was an extremely pernicious concept that led its purveyors down some very strange pathways, because both words were misleading.
“Terror,” or terrorism, isn’t a thing you can have a war against. It is a paramilitary technique, equally available to Tamils in Sri Lanka, Islamists in Algeria, and Catholics in Northern Ireland. You use police and security measures to track down the terrorists, you deploy political measures to eat into their popular support, but unless and until they end up (like the Tamil Tigers) with political and military control over a large piece of territory, “war” is an irrelevant concept.
And that’s the other word that’s a problem. By calling it a war, the Bush administration conditioned the American public to expect invasions of whole countries — and then delivered them. Whether the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq actually increased the “terrorist threat” to the West is still a contentious issue among military experts and strategic analysts, but they certainly didn’t diminish it by much. It’s a lucky thing that the threat is still so very small.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3 and 7. (“It was adangerous…strength”; and “This summons…do that”)
22 February 2007
A Quick Fix
By Gwynne Dyer
Astonishingly, it was Australia’s Liberal government, so deeply sunk in climate change denial for so long, that took the radical step of banning incandescent light-bulbs. But then, Prime Minister John Howard faces an election later this year, and Australia has been suffering from the worst and longest drought in its modern history, so the electorate has been getting worried about climate change.
Severe drought is the main predicted effect of global warming in the temperate regions of the globe. Australia is already the most arid of the world’s inhabited continents, and speculation has been mounting that the current drought may portend a drastic fall in the country’s ability to grow food. A political gesture was needed, and the light-bulb industry is a lot easier to take on than the coal industry.
The gesture is cynical, but it is also amazingly effective. As Australia’s Environment Minister Bill Turnbull pointed out, “If the whole world switches to these (fluorescent) bulbs today, we would reduce our consumption of electricity (worldwide) by an amount equal to five times Australia’s annual consumption of electricity.” In other words, it would be like turning off all the lights, fans, televisions, computers, fridges, ovens and air conditioners in Japan, and most of the industrial machinery as well. That is a quick fix that would really make a difference.
The incandescent bulb was invented 125 years ago, and has changed little since. Only five percent of the electricity it consumes is converted into light, with most being wasted as heat, but it still accounts for the vast majority of the bulbs that light homes and workplaces around the world. The compact florescent bulb that should have replaced it long ago uses only one-fifth as much electricity, and lasts ten to twenty times as long.
Compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive, and early ones gave a cold white light that many people did not like (but that has been remedied in newer models). They cannot replace spotlights, candle bulbs, or halogen lights, and they are trickier to recycle. But they could replace 99 percent of conventional incandescent bulbs in a year or two (since the latter burn out so often), and the average country’s electricity consumption would immediately fall by about two percent. Domestic electricity bills would fall by around 15 percent.
It’s a cheap, quick, one-time fix, but we need such fixes, because the situation is much worse than the experts thought even five years ago. What we do in the next ten or twenty years will make the difference between a 1.5 degrees C hotter world and a 3 degrees C hotter world in the 2060s and 2070s. [See below] That is probably the difference between great discomfort and inconvenience on the one hand, and global famine, global refugee flows and global war on the other.
Climate change is cumulative, with the greenhouse gases we emit today hanging around year after year to distort the climate further, so quick fixes are not to be despised. Even if the tipping point has finally arrived in terms of public attitudes towards climate change, it will take years to translate good intentions into global treaties — and a one percent cut in emissions this year is as good as a two or three percent cut in 2015. Changing the light-bulbs is something we can do this year.
There are other quick fixes that could offer comparable returns. Just banning all electrical appliances whose “standby” function consumes more than one watt of power would cut global CO2 emissions by an estimated one percent. (The “standby” function means that the appliance comes on right away, rather than warming up for a few seconds first — but current “standby” programmes use up to 10 watts of power.)
Similarly, two measures would cut aviation’s contribution to the emissions problem by up to one percent. One would be to tow departing airliners out to the end of the runway, rather than have them start their engines up about half an hour early and get there under their own power. The other would be to create continent-wide air traffic control systems with a single fee structure, thus ending the nonsense of flying around the more expensive countries (there are thirty separate national air traffic control systems in Europe) to save on fees, at a cost of 6-12 percent higher emissions.
We have to do the hard stuff, too, like figuring out how big developing countries like China and India can continue to raise their living standards while the world as a whole cuts its emissions, but even with the best will in the world that is going to take time. We need to get started on the easy stuff right now.
So here’s to Fidel Castro (who started switching Cuba to compact fluorescent bulbs two years ago) and to Hugo Chavez (now doing the same in Venezuela) and to their comrade-in-arms John Howard in Australia. And lawmakers in California and New Jersey are also proposing a ban on incandescent bulbs. Virtue flourishes in the most unexpected places.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9 and 10. (“Similarly…now”) NOTE: Fahrenheit users substitute 2.5 degrees and 5 degrees F.
12 February 2007
The Deputy Sheriff Speaks
By Gwynne Dyer
Some people are born with so great a talent for brazen effrontery that they have no choice but to become politicians. One such is Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, who intervened in the US presidential race this week to warn Americans not to vote for the Democrats in general, and Barack Obama in particular.
Obama, declaring his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that US troops should be out of Iraq by March, 2008. John Howard, who faces an election campaign himself later this year, seized on Obama’s remarks to restate his own fervent support for the Bush administration strategy that created the Iraq quagmire in the first place.
He said that Obama’s Iraq policy “will just encourage those who want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists in Iraq to hang on and hope for an Obama victory.” (Even in his mangled syntax, he sounds much like President George W. Bush.)
Thus far, however, Howard’s remarks remained within the bounds of normal political discourse. If some Australian voters believe that the invasion of 2003 did not already “completely destabilise and destroy Iraq and create chaos,” and that only a US withdrawal would bring about that outcome, then they are free to vote for Howard, and he is free to solicit their votes. He even stands a decent chance of winning, since the average Australian knows no more about the realities of the Middle East than the average Iraqi knows about Australian politics.
But then Howard continued: “If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.”
Never mind the usual guff about “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” as if that particular strand of Arab radicalism dominated the resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq — indeed, as if the “terrorists in Iraq” were a cause rather than a consequence of the US-UK-Australian invasion of the country. The point is that Howard was telling Americans how to vote, and foreign leaders are not supposed to do that.
Nobody in the United States will lose much sleep over Howard’s intervention. Indeed, most Americans are probably unaware that Australia still has a token troop contingent in Iraq, and don’t even know John Howard’s name. The White House will certainly not rebuke him for urging Americans not to vote Democratic.
Besides, it is far too late for Howard to admit that the whole Iraq fiasco was a blunder and still hope to survive politically. Like Bush in Washington and Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, he has nailed his colours to the mast (though it is far from certain that he will voluntarily choose to go down with the ship).
What is truly interesting is Obama’s response to Howard’s rant, and what it reveals about Australian defence policy. “I think it’s flattering that one of George Bush’s allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced,” Obama said. “I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr Howard has deployed 1,400, so if he is to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.”
Howard replied that the Australian deployment was a “very significant and appropriate contribution,” given the country’s small population. Really? The United States has about 300 million people; Australia has about 20 million, or one-fifteenth as many. So a “very significant and appropriate contribution” by Australia would be one-fifteenth of 140,000 troops (or 160,000, actually, since the United States is now sending another 20,000 troops into Iraq).
One-fifteenth of 160,000 American troops would be around 10,600 Australian troops, not 1,400. It’s all gesture politics and political posturing — but then, so is Australian defence policy in general.
The key turning point in modern Australian foreign policy was the realisation, some time in 1942 or 1943, that the British empire could no longer defend the country, and that the only big country that might be willing to assume that role was the United States. So the question became, and has remained, how to guarantee that the United States will come to Australia’s aid in an emergency, even if America’s own vital interests are not directly involved.
There is no good answer to this question, but it would obviously help if Australian troops show up to help whenever the United States gets involved in a war anywhere in Asia — and that includes the Middle East. However, this policy is too demeaning to national pride to explain clearly to Australians, so the various Australian military ventures abroad have to be explained in other terms — the “Communist threat” in Vietnam, the “terrorist threat” in Iraq. And the actual troop commitment is kept as small as possible, in order not to rouse public opinion against it.
Australians have fortunately never had the occasion to find out whether volunteering to be America’s “deputy sheriff” in Asia would really produce the desired US response if Australia’s own interests were threatened, but this notion remains at the heart of Australian defence policy. If the United States invaded Mars, Australia would send a battalion along to guard the supply depot.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4, 7 and 8. (“Thus…politics”;and “Nobody…ship”)