Really interesting inside story from the Copenhagen summit, by Mark Lynas.

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

(...)

China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

(...)

After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

Time to make bigger waves and better rocks. Read the whole thing.

Politiet har blitt et våpen mot demokratiet i Danmark

Dansk politi fortsetter et etter hvert veldokumentert mønster av politisk motiverte aksjoner mot politisk aktivisme i angrepene på klimademonstranter. Sadistiske og voldsforherligende trekk er også begynt å tydelig manifestere seg. Johan Reimann, som er sjef for Københavns politi, burde ta tak i dette som sin første prioritet, men det ser ut til å ha forverret seg i den siste tiden, også under toppmøtet.

Jeg leser dette som en forlengelse av den politiske utviklingen i Danmark, og en manglende politisk styring av institusjonen politiet, har ført til at en ukultur har spredt seg.

Som vanlig er det Politiken som er stedet å gå for oppdatert og grundig dekning av situasjonen:

"Med 968 anholdte og maksimalt 13 sigtelser peger alt på, at alt for mange uskyldige mennesker blev anholdt", skriver Politiken i et sitat fra Amnesty International.

Man har den ordningen som går under navnet "Lømmelpakken" som gjør at man kan holde folk fanget i 12 timer dersom det er mistanke om at de kan komme til å gjøre noe kriminelt. Amnestys jurist Claus Juul uttaler, i den forrige artikkelen, at "massive præventive anholdelser kan være et problem for forsamlings- og ytringsfriheden i Danmark, fordi det kan afholde folk fra at deltage i fredelig demonstration af frygt for at blive anholdt."

Juul underdriver: Det innebærer selvsagt at man de facto ikke har noen forsamlingsrett eller ytringsfrihet i Danmark. Dersom politiet når som helst kan stanse en demonstrasjon har politiske aktivister ingen muligheter for å uttrykke seg fredelig. Det er ikke minst politisk svært farlig, fordi det øker risikoen for militant aktivisme -- slik det gjorde i Tyskland på 70-tallet, noe som førte til Baader-Meinhofgruppen.

Inntrykket av en truet ytringsfrihet og forsamlingsrett -- i det hele tatt av et demokrati under press -- forsterkes av at politiet har begynt å bortvise fotografer og journalister fra demonstrasjonene, blant annet med slag og spark mot fredelige fotografer som roper "PRESSE!". Politiets talsmann går rett i en orwelliansk dobbelttale i sin kommentar til Politiken.dk:

»Foreviser I et gyldigt pressekort er det værsågod, så må i komme inden for politiets afspærringer. Også selv om det er til fare for jer selv«, siger talsmanden.

Men det måtte fotograferne ikke i går - for eksempel da de ville dokumentere de mange anholdte som sad og frøs [i sin egen urin, utendørs i desember. bloggers anm.]?

»Vi kan simpelthen ikke have jer til at rende rundt indenfor sådan et område - det ville være det rene ragnarok. Vi kan ikke have i stikker mikrofoner i hovedet på demonstranter, som sidder og er anholdt«, siger Lars Borg.

Se fotos her av den ekstremt uoversiktlige situasjonen, der man blant annet ser to fotografer som blir eskortert med makt langs en i all hovedsak tom gate. Det er skikkelig Ragnarok.

Politiets talsmann blir videre spurt av Politikens journalist:

Alle jeg har snakket med samstemmende siger, at I er blevet voldsommere og mere restriktive i forbindelse med klimatopmødet. Hvad vil I gøre ved det?

»Jeg kan simpelthen ikke genkende det«.

Det er litt sånn jeg har det med Danmark.

Tab dump 16-11-09 (though really not so much a tab dump as three-four blog posts in one)

First off, Andrew Corsello's blistering and sublimely, viciously angry takedown of Ayn Rand. It is at least ten thousand characters too long, and not so much an article as a 26.000 character rant, but it is readable, funny, immensely satisfying and it makes a good point when it connects the dots between Randian uncritical thinking and the clusterfuck of the global economy. Highlights include this wonderfully obtuse letter to the editor from Alan Greenspan, literary critic and bigtime randroid, on the occasion of Atlas Shrugged being panned in a review.

To the editor:

"Atlas Shrugged" is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

Alan Greenspan

Corsello comments:

It's a remarkable letter for two reasons. The first, of course, is that Greenspan wrote it; a line can be drawn from that letter to the wholesale deregulation of the American economy, to the invention of hydra-headed derivatives and credit-default swaps, and finally to the collapse of the financial and housing markets.

I recently made an offhand remark about how Rand had a way of reaching nice, likeable, intelligen but maybe involuntarily celibate young men and turning them into horrible people. Morsello really captures this process. And the article ends, orgasmically, with this outburst:

Fuck you, Ayn Rand.

Fuck you for turning some of the most open and interesting people I ever met into utopian dickheads.

Fuck you for injecting them with a sneering sense of superiority, and with the tautological belief that anyone who didn't "get it" was a jealous know-nothing—which, ipso facto, only proved that superiority.

In the very last paragraph, you learn why the author is so angry. It's a nice payoff.
*
A fabulous interview with climatologist Stephen Schneider on climate skepticism. He also makes some really well-argued points along the way about both the injustice of the climate problem, and more importantly the entire scientific process itself. How it works, and why the climate skeptics are arguing in bad faith.

You talk about subjectivity, but isn’t science supposed to be objective?

No. Science is truthful, which doesn’t necessarily mean objective. How can science be objective about the future? How much data do we have for 2100? Try zero. We have data for 2009 and previous years. We take that data, analyze where we think it’s high quality, analyze where we’re not so sure of the quality, show how well the data explains multiple phenomena from the past, and ask how closely related those phenomena are to the future.


(...)

Once we build our climate models, we must always make a subjective judgment, because it is going to be a prediction outside the realm of direct verifiability. We have to be able to predict whether this is a potential catastrophe for humanity. We can’t just hang around and wait.

In your book, you suggest a kind of continuum: from objective data to subjective determinations based on the data, and then to value judgments.

Right. What to do about what we know--that’s a question of values. But it’s values informed by science. In 1973, I got a call from the Council on Foreign Relations wanting me to talk about policy. I told them that if we’re using the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our tailpipe wastes, and it’s going to cause change that could harm agriculture, ecosystems, ice sheets, and sea level, then maybe a smart move would be to slow down the rate at which we pollute. That’s a value judgment, and I’ve been making them from the beginning. I’m a very risk-averse person and I worry much more about the planetary life support system than the bottom line of the coal industry.

How then do you defend against charges that you’re an activist?

I am an activist. I want the world to be a better place, and I define specifically what I mean by that: If one group, the rich, benefits from an activity like dumping their waste in the atmosphere and the other group, the poor, are hurt by it and don’t get much benefit, that’s an inequity. Therefore, in my value system, that’s a higher criteria for action than aggregate dollars. I don’t have aggregate dollars as my moral principle. I look at who’s responsible. But I never say that without admitting that those are my values. So, that’s activism.

What’s the difference between being a climate-change skeptic and a denier?

Every good scientist is a skeptic. In fact, I would argue that every good citizen is a skeptic. We have to learn to discern, and listen to the quality and logic of an argument.

Read the whole thing.

*

For the Norwegians:

Bergens Tidende har flere interessante artikler i dag om gatevold og unge frustrerte menn som er verdt å lese. Ikke minst fordi den tar opp spørsmålet om integrering og sosial kapital – for første gang på lenge ikke som et etnisk/kulturelt spørsmål, men som et sosialt spørsmål, som vi kan behandle, avgrense og møte med sosiale, politiske, økonomiske og pedagogiske virkemidler. Ikke som noe abstrakt, fremmed og fjernt. Denne serien med artikler er noe av det mest tankevekkende jeg har lest om norsk integrering på flere uker, og innvandring nevnes ikke med et ord (bortsett fra når det er snakk om innvandringsfiendtlige miljøer).

Monbiot's blog

George Monbiot, of whom I'm a fan, finally started blogging at the Guardian. I've been waiting for this. In fact, I don't really see how I could have missed this since I visited his website just a week or two ago.

Anyway, the man already writes a huge amount of thoroughly researched column inches, but I've always suspected him of being well-suited for this kind of writing, with his focus on sources, fact-checking and processual writing. I look forward to following his blog.

I recently linked to a series of videos with people who were in the climate destruction business. Now I see he has a follow-up to his interview with the CEO of Shell Oil.

linkage for 11-11-2008

Krugman on Roosevelt, the New Deal and Obama.

*

Disturbing, haunting photos from the war in Congo.

*

Great op-ed piece by Al Gore on climate change and what the Obama administration can do. I like the ending:

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.

* 

Pre-election profiles of Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

* 

Long piece in the New Yorker on the psychopath. Who is he? Does he even exist? What are the diagnostic criteria? What is happening in their twisted little brains, etc.

* 

Best article I've seen so far on the financial crash of Iceland.

Overnight, people lost their savings. Prices are soaring. Once-crowded restaurants are almost empty. Banks are rationing foreign currency, and companies are finding it dauntingly difficult to do business abroad. Inflation is at 16 percent and rising. People have stopped traveling overseas. The local currency, the krona, was 65 to the dollar a year ago; now it is 130. Companies are slashing salaries, reducing workers’ hours and, in some instances, embarking on mass layoffs.

“No country has ever crashed as quickly and as badly in peacetime,” said Jon Danielsson, an economist with the London School of Economics.

It contains the mandatory-in-all-articles-about-Nordic-countries mention of Vikings. 

Green Mosh Pits

A fun idea for sustainable energy capture: recycle the energy of people dancing. It's actually not a stupid idea. Dancing releases a lot of kinetic energy into the floor, and if you know a lot of people are going to be moving around, you can rig up induction pads to get them to, say, power the lights where they are. You could probably do something like this in lots of places - roads, maybe? You'd just have to have some method of putting the power back into circulation.

the floor will have a give of one centimeter, enough to generate 5 to 10 watts of electricity per dancer. SDC estimates the eco-club will require about 2,000 people moving at once to keep the place bright.

The move isn't one born purely of ecological altruism. Even as environmentalists are better known for tree-hugging asceticism than night club hedonism, the Dutch are -- like most Europeans these days -- anxious to do their part for the environment. A survey conducted by SDC last year found that fully 66 percent of Dutch clubbers would be willing to dig deeper into their wallets for a green night out. Enviu -- which is also helping the port in Rotterdam, Europe's largest, reduce its emissions -- could do worse than starting in the clubbing capital of the Netherlands. Over 10,000 people go out in the city each weekend.

In a more serious vein, here's a concise and sensible plan for making electric cars viable.

(via metafilter)

Radio is cleaning up the nation

So I'm at work but I had to share this with someone (typing on my lunch break, obviously!):

I'm listening to my Launchcast internet station (which I should stop doing - they are pushing new songs I'm uninterested in hard, and obviously because it's new material that the record companies are trying to sell) and every now and then a commercial comes up, but I don't really listen to that very hard. But suddenly I notice what the woman is saying:

It's a commercial for a company called (I think) Esurance. She's going on and on about how seriously they take the climate crisis, and how Esurance customers are just so climate-friendly because they are saving all this paper, see, because they have all their documents online! "The road to a better tomorrow starts here", she says, all chipper, like. She's all about saving the rainforest.

The road-metaphor turns out to be apt: it's AUTO-insurance they're selling. That's AUTO as in cars. As in exhaust fumes. As in American cars, because it's a US company. That's the US as in the world's largest emitter of climate gases, with over one fifth of all carbon emissions, despite having only 1/50th of the world's population. And yes, that's cars, as in the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the US, providing roughly a third of total emissions, second only to coal-burning power plants.

Astroturf® - for the Greater Good™

Interesting moral dilemma in the comments to the preceding post. Let me explain.

First off, there's a word you should know, if you don't already. It's Astroturfing. Astroturfing (internet venacular) is defined by Wikipedia as "a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising that seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass AstroTurf, initially developed for the Houston Astrodome."

Like most people engaged in honest open debate the usual internet muckslinging, I hate astroturfing. I hate it with a cold fury most people reserve for Adolf Hitler or their income tax returns*. These people are the scum of the Earth and they are wrecking the public sphere for all of us hard-working, honest debaters.

So astroturfing happens quite a lot on the net. Typical astroturfing is when somebody creates a website or a discussion forum of some kind trying to create the impression that a whole lot of people are really interested and excited about Brand A or Movie B or Politician McC. One commonly used technique is to have somebody just dropping by a large number of blogs, leaving behind anonymous comments that usually start off with some unusually flattering compliment about your blog (because we should never underestimate the power of vanity). If you’re lucky, you get a sentence or two about the topic you have posted on. Then the post goes off the rails and starts talking about something completely different.

So in this case, I post on economic studies of organised crime and prostitution. Somebody comes in, compliments me, and then starts talking about climate change and linking to sites about climate change and tries to get a discussion going (to help the buzz, natch).

So the unique moral dilemma here is: I actually agree with this astroturfer. I think climate change is a huge issue that everyone – especially the Republicans – should get taken to the cleaners about. Agreeing with astroturfers has, in fact, never happened to me before. I have never encountered astroturfing that was not conservative, right-wing propaganda or commercial pap about some obscure product.

So here is my self-serving and evasive response:

See, now you're placing me in a difficult situation. You're obviously astroturfing, you're obviously just somebody clicking through blogs and leaving links - and btw you'd think you'd know how to make link tags, dude - but on the other hand, you're obviously doing it for one of the best causes there are. So do I

a. tolerate your comment, thus making me a hypocrite for accepting bad faith rhetoric (I am guessing you've never read my blog before) when I am in political agreement with the person making the statement.

b. delete your comment, thus infitesimally lowering necessary media exposure for one of the defining political issues of our time, and therefore possibly have cause to feel guilty about it.

or

c. make a long metaargument explaining how I actually thought this through, but decided to keep your comment after showing that I was aware that you made those links while in bad faith, said metaargument established only in order to reflect well on myself while also feebly trying to draw attention to the cause, despite the fact that I have also damaged the credibility of the followers of that cause. [I should have added: but leave you up under the pretense of having made an informative ”case” out of you.]

I think C. But see? See what you made me do? Couldn't you just behave like a real person and not leave those astroturfing comments with their habitual opening compliments about what a great blog this is and bla bla bla. It hurts the cause more than it helps it. Get in the fray and make some honest debate and spread the links properly, the way they should be spread.

* Note: not the income tax itself. We pay our taxes with Joy and Pride, citizen.

We're screwed: facts and figures for the apocalypse

The shorter Paul Krugman on climate change:

The US is our biggest problem. China is our second-biggest but fastest growing problem, Europe is our third biggest problem.

More statistics:

China:
1.3. billion people.
GDP: 10.17 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 3.84 tonnes in 2004, probably a lot more now, given the Δx on Krugman's graph. Maybe as much as 5?

India:
Population: 1.12. billion.
GDP: 4.1 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 1.20 in 2004. Their economy is the second-fastest growing major economy in the world, with an almost 10 % growth last year, so probably some big movement on this one as well.

United States:
Population: 301 million.
GDP: 13.13. trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 20.4

It looks to my haven't-done-a-statistics-course-in- 10 - years-eyes as if CO2 has a much stronger correlation with GDP than with population. If that's true, then that relationship is asymptotic. As China and India's GDP keep growing at respectively 9.5% and 11.1 % per year, their emission rates are at the cusp of gaining a much, much faster rate of change-for-the-worse.

I mean, I knew we were basically screwed when it came to India and China re: CO2. Just not how bad. (If I'm right.) Obviously, this doesn't tell us anything new, except to underline that there can be no fixing climate change unless the US, India and China are all onboard.

But I'm not a statistician, so I'm hoping that all this means is that CO2 emissions are not correlated to GDP at all, just a heap of other factors which are growing at a far slower rate.

[Update: actually, ignore this post. CO2 emissions are obviously far more complex than a direct correlation to GDP. It also involves technological levels, energy production methods, degree of urbanisation, wage levels and so on and so forth. I was just really tired when I wrote this, and I didn't feel like just throwing all those facts and figures away after I had meticously dug them up after maybe as much as four or five minutes of googling and hyperlinking.]

the finest minds of our time at work educating the public

As I've said earlier, I've been reading George Monbiot's book Heat. It's a wonderful, informative, no-nonsense book, telling us in no uncertain terms that we have to change the way we live, and that many of the changes are going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable. On the plus side, less people will die from starvation and we might actually still have a functional ecosystem in 100 years. It's not a feel-good message, but it is what we need to hear and what we need to act on.

But even so, it's no wonder the climate-change message isn't getting through when you see the unbearable daftness with which it is handled in the mass media. Look at this YouTube clip of him debating the Heathrow camp with Labour MP Khalid Mahmood. At the end the interviewer says - I swear, this is a direct transcription:

Q: The government's chief scientific officer said that there is no bigger problem than climate change. Presumably you would think the terror threat is as big?

Mahmood: The terror threat is as big, but it's more immediate.

At which point the IPCC all showed up and the following scene took place:

IPCC: Are you crazy? As big? As big my ass.

(they thrash Mahmood and the interviewer with the IPCC report and the Nobel Medal for not knowing what they are talking about. Cries of "less people die of terrorism than all this other stuff, already to start with!", "we're talking global starvation, to begin with!", "and what's all this about a 'discussion' on climate change, there is no discussion on climate change!" and other expletives and insults.)

One wonders first how they sleep at night, second, exactly how ravaged the world would have to be in order for the press to start taking their moral responsibility to inform the public seriously. I'm starting to think more and more of the terrorism threat as a media phenomenon than actual violence. This isn't to say that terrorism isn't dangerous or real. Just that the figure terrorism has come to represent in public discourse as an absolute opposition to our civilisation is wildly disproportionate to its threat. The amount of resources and manpower being spent talking about and thinking about terrorism obscures the real problems killing people around the globe.

"These days what I do is say that 2+2=4"

Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist and writer. His columns in the NY Times are must-reads: always informative, educational and merciless. He is one of those rare pundits who also happens to be (gasp!) well-informed. His last column is on Gore and the Nobel peace prize.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Which is not exactly news, but the more well-informed, rhetorically skilled people say this, the better.

Many economists mention Krugman as a possible winner for the Nobel Prize in economics himself, incidentally.

Anyway, I think I might have mentioned that he also has a wonderful blog where he shares little bits and pieces of interesting information which lead into his columns, or in which he answers questions that arise after his columns have been published. A sort of way of continuing the debate in the backstage area.

Also, there's this video interview of Krugman. At one point he says that he worries about the state of democracy in the US: "What I worry about is that we'll keep the forms, but the reality will just erode. Like the Roman senate kept meeting for a long time after the country had become, in effect, a monarchy." He also talks about how there is no longer non-political truth. He says that most of what he does these days is saying that 2+2 = 4 and getting called an extreme leftist for saying so. Special bonus in the interview: he reveals that he is a science-fiction fan and that a fascination for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series led him into economics.

this just in: sign no longer arbitrary. Saussure spinning in grave major source of carbon emissions

I just learned via Crooked Timber that back in the 90s, the Republican "environmental" "plan" (basically repealing the Clean Air Act and delaying changes in emission standards) was headed up by two senators. Their names are - wait for it -

Delay (R-TX) and Doolittle (R-CA).

As one commentator on Crooked Timber puts it "I think it casts serious doubt on Saussure’s principle of the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’."

in which yr. correspondent digs the Nobel people

Al Gore! Excellent. I think when we think back to the tipping point of the whole climate change thing in popular opinion, more than we would like to think is going to come down to Al Gore and the movie.

But really, the Alanis-Morisette-ironic thing about Gore winning is the fact that he's actually winning it in quantum physics. As much as his work to stop climate change, Gore is winning the Nobel prize for that more peaceful, safer, happier parallell universe in which he not only won the 2000 elections but actually got to take office. The universe in which he was president on September 11th 2001, in which he didn’t invade Iraq, didn’t make his entire term about throwing out civil liberties, about making the world unsafe and unstable, about scorched-earth capitalism and ruining international relations and widening the gap between poor people and rich people and mostly not giving a damn.

I think I would have liked to live in that universe. No doubt some version of me does. Lucky bastard.