Politics

Responding To A Red Alert

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Another reason to subscribe to Bill McKibben’s newsletter:

How Not to Act in an Emergency

Forget AI–we need some human intelligence

We’re getting right to the nub now.

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:

Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.

The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.

Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully: Continue reading →

Dismantling Regulation

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Bins of squid waiting to be packaged in Cape May. In a good week, Mr. Bright said his boats can bring in $100,000 worth of herring. Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times

You can read the story or click the photo of William Bright below right to hear an explanation of how his case may be the end to regulation as we know it.

A Fight Over a Fishing Regulation Could Help Tear Down the Administrative State

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday over whether to overturn a key precedent on the power of executive agencies.

On a blustery fall morning in southern New Jersey, the weather was too rough for the fishing boats at the center of a momentous Supreme Court case to set out to sea.

William Bright, a fisherman in New Jersey. He is the lead plaintiff in a case that could undermine the power of executive agencies, a long-sought goal of the conservative legal movement. William Bright, a fisherman in New Jersey. Photo: Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times

A herring fisherman named Bill Bright talked about the case, which will be argued on Wednesday and could both lift what he said was an onerous fishing regulation and wipe out the most important precedent on the power of executive agencies, a long-sought goal of the conservative legal movement.

As workers cleaned squid and the salt air whipped over the docks, Mr. Bright, who has been fishing for 40 years and whose family-owned company is one of the plaintiffs, said he recognized the impact the case could have. Continue reading →

The Alternative, Reviewed

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Nick Romeo has a new book coming out, and the Guardian recommends it, tentatively. It is up to all of us to answer the reviewer’s doubts through our choices and actions:

The Alternative by Nick Romeo review – moral substitutes for the free market model

A survey of the global alternatives to the current economic system makes for an enlightening, inspiring read, but you’re left wondering why such initiatives have failed to take hold

Anti-capitalist street art in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Photograph: Soma/Alamy

I wrestled with how to approach this review. On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism. There is an ache for better – for more just ways of organising the way we work and adding more meaning to our lives. Continue reading →

The Irony Of Patriotic Fervor

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There is an interview with Jill Lepore discussing this book to the left, which I link to below. It got me thinking about an earlier post I wrote about having read April Morning and The Hessian in my teens and my brief encounter with their author Howard Fast. That post was primarily a thank you to the librarians who got me interested in reading. I knew from the return address on the letter he sent me that Mr. Fast lived on my same street, a five minute walk from my home. I enjoyed that fact because I enjoyed the two of his books that I had read. But I never saw him after the library lecture.

Who I did see frequently, because he drove an easily identifiable red convertible Cadillac, and also lived close by, was Roy Cohn. Yes, that guy. If you know a certain bit of mid-20th Century history, the bit called the Red Scare, you might understand my first glimpse of irony. I had learned that Howard Fast was punished early in his career for his political beliefs. By the time I knew who Roy Cohn was I knew he had something to do with that punishment, directly or indirectly. What I found ironic, as a teenager, was that Howard Fast was influential on my sense of why patriotism exists; and Roy Cohn, a self-proclaimed protector of American values, made me fear patriotism. I always wondered if they knew they lived so close to one another. History does not seem to have recorded anything about that. The interview by Julien Crockett below reminded me of that irony of patriotic fervor I sensed in my teens:

The Hold of the Dead Over the Living: A Conversation with Jill Lepore

“I WROTE THESE essays during a period of terrible, tragic decline in the United States,” historian Jill Lepore writes in the introduction to her new essay collection, The Deadline. Wide-ranging and often provocative, the essays cover the past decade of “political violence, endless vicious culture war, a series of constitutional crises, catastrophic climate change, and a global pandemic.” In short, “a time that felt like a time, felt like history.” Continue reading →

Rishi’s Wrong, Skidmore’s Right

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Chris Skidmore said he could ‘no longer condone nor continue to support a government that is committed to a course of action that I know is wrong’. Photograph: Chris McAndrew/UK Parliament/PA

We rarely applaud those on the right side of the political spectrum when it comes to environmental issues. Most have been on the wrong side of history with regard to climate change. When one stands up and challenges the status quo, applause applause:

Chris Skidmore resigns Conservative whip over Sunak’s oil and gas licence plan

Former minister also resigns as an MP, which will trigger byelection in his Kingswood constituency

A former Conservative minister has announced he is resigning as an MP in protest at the party’s dash for oil and gas, setting up an awkward vote for the prime minister on the issue on Monday and an even more difficult byelection within weeks. Continue reading →

Mike Hulme’s Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Reviewed

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Nicholas Clairmont reviews the book in this publication we have recently been following:

Warm Planet, Cool Heads

A new book warns against pushing all the world’s problems into the climate bucket.

Mike Hulme, a Cambridge professor of human geography who has served on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and holds a certificate for his contributions to that body’s climate science from when it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, is no climate denier. And yet time and again in his new book he is at pains to preempt the charge that, actually, he is. “Again, don’t misread me,” he writes at one point, “climate kills and climate change is real.” Elsewhere in the book he describes human-caused climate change as a “scientifically well-established fact.” So why the anxiety that readers will say, as he anticipates, “you sound just like a climate denier”? Continue reading →

Corrupt Cop

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Illustration by Isabel Seliger

Ever wondered what the Cop in Cop1-28 means? The answer is not nearly as interesting as how it came to be that a country whose lifeblood is oil is hosting Cop28. Petrostates have been biding their time, gaining momentum, and now have corrupted the Cop system from within. Weekend reading, Thanksgiving edition, from Elizabeth Kolbert, explains the stakes:

The Road to Dubai

The latest round of international climate negotiations is being held in a petrostate. What could go wrong?

Cop1 was held in 1995 in Berlin’s International Congress Center, a massive, metal-clad complex that looks like the set for a dystopian movie. Around nine hundred government delegates attended the weeklong negotiating session, along with about a thousand observers from non-governmental organizations. Daimler-Benz brought some electric cars to show off, while young activists brought a steamroller, to convey their opposition to cars. Delegates were invited to take a trip along the River Spree in a solar-powered boat. Continue reading →

Really, Poland Spring?

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Tristan Spinski

We all need drinking water. Those of us lucky enough to have good quality water from a public source can avoid bottled water, but still too many need or want what Poland Spring sells.

The New York Times deserves high praise for this series on water abuses, especially Hiroko Tabuchi‘s reporting on Poland Springs and its parent company’s practices:

Inside Poland Spring’s Hidden Attack on Water Rules It Didn’t Like

The BlueTriton bottling plant in Poland Spring, Maine, this month.

When Maine lawmakers tried to tighten regulations on large-scale access to water, the brand’s little-known parent company set out to rewrite the rules.

When Maine lawmakers tried to rein in large-scale access to the state’s freshwater this year, the effort initially gained momentum. The state had just emerged from drought, and many Mainers were sympathetic to protecting their snow-fed lakes and streams.

Water trucks filling up at a Poland Spring facility in Lincoln, Maine.

Then a Wall Street-backed giant called BlueTriton stepped in.

BlueTriton isn’t a household name, but its products are. Americans today buy more bottled water than any other packaged drink, and BlueTriton owns many of the nation’s biggest brands, including Poland Spring, which is named after a natural spring in Maine that ran dry decades ago.

Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill. Continue reading →

US Supreme Court’s Extreme Tilt

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Relentless and Loper Bright have been brought before the Supreme Court with the same all-but-explicit goal: to make it more difficult for the federal government to protect the public. Photograph by Jemal Countess / UPI /Shutterstock

Courts with politically appointed jurists can tilt to an extreme, as we see now at the highest level in the USA’s judicial system. Even as the environment needs more protection, the infrastructure for providing it is being dismantled (thanks as always to Elizabeth Kolbert):

The Supreme Court Looks Set to Deliver Another Blow to the Environment

Two upcoming cases take aim at the government’s power to regulate.

Last week, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that’s nominally about herring. Arguments will be heard this winter, in tandem with a case that the Court had agreed to hear earlier, that one also ostensibly about herring. In both cases, though, the Justices have much bigger fish to fry: what’s really at issue is the fate of federal regulation. The stakes are enormously high, and, given the Court’s predilections, the outcome seems likely to undermine still further the government’s ability to function. Continue reading →

Rishi Doubles Down On Awful

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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing last month that the U.K. will delay the phaseout of gasoline and diesel cars. JUSTIN TALLIS / POOL VIA AP

When leadership is most needed, the special relationship between the UK and the USA should count for something, but so far no sign of the USA pressing back on the UK’s awful reversal on their already tepid recent leadership on climate. We knew that leadershsip was lacking in the UK. The Orwell-worthy podium messaging in the photo to the left says all you need to know about efforts to obfuscate, but read Fred Pearce‘s account in Yale e360 anyway:

Demonstrators in Edinburgh protest the government’s recent approval of drilling in the Rosebank North Sea oil field. PRESS ASSOCIATION VIA AP IMAGES

Why Is Britain Retreating from Global Leadership on Climate Action?

While Britain has long been a leader in cutting emissions, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is now implementing a stunning reversal of climate-friendly policies, with new plans to “max out” oil production. Business leaders have joined environmentalists in condemning the moves.

In 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to take a stand on fighting climate change. Continue reading →

Really, Rishi?

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image: reuters

As a non-Brit, I spared the world my opinion on the own-goalness of Brexit, and the follow-up own-goal of electing Boris Johnson. Not my circus, not my monkey. But as a speaker of the English language, among other reasons, I have always cared about and paid attention to the civic affairs of the UK more than I do those of many other countries. I was reflexively optimistic with the baton passing to Rishi Sunak. He could not possibly be as terrible as his two immediate predecessors, right? In some ways right, but in the way that matters most to the entire world, shame on him. The Economist weighs in heavily, as does the New Yorker’s correspondent in the UK, the great Sam Knight:

Photograph by Justin Tallis / Getty

Rishi Sunak’s Self-Serving Climate Retreat

The British Prime Minister has rolled back the country’s policies on reducing emissions. To what end?

Since Rishi Sunak became Britain’s Prime Minister, almost a year ago, in the middle of a national financial breakdown, his premiership has been defined by trying to make things go away. Continue reading →

Stop Digging

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A man cools off by a fountain during a heat wave in Seville, Spain, on July 10th. Photograph by Cristina Quicler / AFP / Getty

It is difficult to imagine, from where I sit in cool weather in the mountains of Costa Rica’s central valley, what that heat would feel like. But it is not difficult to imagine all the possibilities for doing something about it. When you are in a hole that you do not want to be in, stop digging:

Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action?

The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.

We’ve crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they’re important, because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront. Continue reading →

About That Rocking Chair

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There’s been no enormous hurry in Washington to do much about the greatest threat that humans have ever faced. Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty

Thanks, as always, to Bill McKibben for a perspective on otherwise difficult-to-make-sense-of events:

Looking at the White House Through Wildfire Smoke

This week, elected officials can see for themselves why they must get serious about climate change.

I’m sitting on a rocking chair just outside the White House fence on Thursday afternoon, and I can more or less make out the seat of American executive power through the haze. In the morning, the local government announced that the air-quality index for the District of Columbia had reached Code Purple (“very unhealthy”), because of the level of particulate pollution, which has never happened before. Continue reading →

Brazil’s Amazon Complications, 2023 Onward

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On the road from Novo Progresso to Baú Village.

We are always thankful to Jon Lee Anderson for his illuminations on complicated places, such as Brazil:

Dulce Sousa, a resident of Novo Progresso, agrees with the former President Jair Bolsonaro that local residents should be free to profit from the forest’s resources.

Who Can Save the Amazon?

Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, promises to keep miners and loggers from destroying the rain forest. On the ground, the fight is complicated.

The Brazilian Amazon is riven by two long highways, in the shape of a cross: the BR-163, which extends more than four thousand miles from north to south, and the Trans-Amazonian, which runs twenty-four hundred miles from east to west. The roads were carved from the jungle in the nineteen-seventies, to open the wilderness to settlers and development. The effects have been calamitous. As colonists flooded in, the human population in Brazil’s Amazon has quadrupled, to nearly thirty million. Continue reading →

Unwanted Plastic Renaissance

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A worker at a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, readies bags of Covid-19 waste for treatment, December last year. Photograph: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

The plague of plastic has zombie-like revivification capabilities:

How the plastic industry turned the pandemic to its advantage

With its products proving indispensable to combatting Covid-19, the plastics business is reinvigorated. What will it take to bring this major polluter to heel?

There are only two reasons that the plastics industry will change, a polymer scientist once told me: war or legislation. Continue reading →

Justice For Dom & Bruno

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Dom Phillips (center), seen here taking notes as he talks with Indigenous people, reported regularly for the Guardian. Photograph by Joao Laet / AFP / Getty

Only one article by Dom Phillips in our pages, and not a single mention of Bruno Pereira seems wrong, to say the least.  As a rule obituaries are not our thing in these pages, but we have made exceptions. So this note by Jon Lee Anderson (author of the Leaky tribute), whose coverage of Brazil includes the early part of Bolsonaro’s destructive rule, seems fitting to share in support of the call for justice:

Bruno Pereira was among the many senior officials and veteran experts at FUNAI who had gained a reputation for a robust defense of the agency’s guidelines in the Javari. Photograph by Daniel Marenco

Two Murders in the Amazon

The disappearance of Dom Phillips and Bruno Araújo Pereira, and the crisis created by Jair Bolsonaro’s policies.

From the moment that Dom Phillips and Bruno Araújo Pereira vanished, on June 5th, in the Brazilian Amazon, there were suspicions of foul play. Phillips was a British freelance journalist dedicated to environmental issues, and Pereira, his friend and guide, was a prominent Brazilian Indigenous-affairs expert.

Photograph by Nelson Almeida / AFP / Getty

He was assisting Phillips with research for a book, tentatively titled “How to Save the Amazon.” Continue reading →

Adriatic, The Experience & The Book

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When I first set foot in Croatia more than two decades ago it was for a project to assist the country in defending the coastal areas from the pressures of mass tourism development. Within a couple of years I was doing similar work in Montenegro. Before too long we were enough in love with the region to make it our family’s home for a year.

So seeing this book about the future importance of the region, by an eminent scholar, is both heartwarming and concerning:

“[An] elegantly layered exploration of Europe’s past and future . . . a multifaceted masterpiece.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A lovely, personal journey around the Adriatic, in which Robert Kaplan revisits places and peoples he first encountered decades ago.”—Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. Continue reading →

Tamil Nadu, Rice, Identity

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In the early days of our posting here south Indian rice was a staple in our meals, and we knew that this now global foodstuff had a long history in other cultures. But it looks like the state neighboring where we lived may have found a clue to how much longer they have had rice in their diet:

An ancient rice bowl complicates the story of civilisation in India

In Tamil Nadu, archaeology is part of a contest over history and identity

Rarely can a spoonful of rice have caused such a stir. When M.K. Stalin, chief minister of Tamil Nadu, addressed the south Indian state’s legislature on September 9th, he celebrated a musty sample of the country’s humble staple. Carbon dating by an American laboratory, he said, had just proved that the rice, found in a small clay offering bowl—itself tucked inside a burial urn outside the village of Sivakalai, near the southernmost tip of India—was some 3,200 years old. This made it the earliest evidence yet found of civilisation in Tamil Nadu. The top duty of his government, the chief minister triumphantly declared, was to establish that the history of India “begins from the landscape of the Tamils”. Continue reading →

Obsessively Eliminating Protections To The End

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A sea bird is reflected in the water during low tide at Cardiff State Beach in Encinitas, California, U.S. October 17, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Blake

No special prognostication talent was required to know this was coming, if you have been paying attention for the last four years. Environmental, among other protections, have been gutted constantly since shortly after this administration’s inauguration in 2017. The only important question is how quickly some of these protections can be restored by the incoming administration:

Trump administration moves forward with gutting bird protections

The Trump administration moved forward Friday on gutting a longstanding federal protection for the nation’s birds, over objections from former federal officials and many scientists that billions more birds will likely perish as a result.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published its take on the proposed rollback in the Federal Register. It’s a final step that means the change — greatly limiting federal authority to prosecute industries for practices that kill migratory birds — could be made official within 30 days. Continue reading →

When A Company Says One Thing And Does Another

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Eric Schmidt being interviewing on Bloomberg in 2014. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

We usually introduce a story for context. No introduction needed (or possible) in this case, just thanks to the Guardian for sharing it:

The obscure law that explains why Google backs climate deniers

Company wants to curry favour with conservatives to protect its ‘section 230’ legal immunity

Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers

When Eric Schmidt was asked on a radio show in 2014 why Google was supporting an ultra-conservative climate-denying pressure group in Washington, the then chairman of the internet giant offered an unequivocal response: it was wrong and Google was not going to do it again.

Continue reading →