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An enemy that’s just an idea can never surrender

If the executive branch was trying to distract attention from Osama Bin Laden's latest taped message and the NSA spying scandal with this "eco-terrorism" business, they failed pretty miserably. When Gonzalez and Mueller took questions, only the final two were about the Milk Jug Brigade.

QUESTION: On the environment and eco-groups, how big a blow is wrapping up these people that you've got indictments against -- how deep do you think the support goes for these kinds of acts?

MR. MUELLER: If you read the indictment and you see the listing of the actions that have taken place at the hands of this group over a period of time, you get some understanding of the impact of this investigation and this indictment. In terms of identifying and arresting those who were principly responsible for something like 17 -- over 15, as the Attorney General pointed out, acts over the last few years in this arena. So, I think it's fair to say it was a substantial blow.

A blow to who, though? To what? Membership in the Earth Liberation Front seems to require one thing: Saying so. These fruitcake hippies said they acted in the name of ELF, but how is throwing them in jail a "blow" to ELF? It's not like ELF is an organization with upper management you can remove. It's just a name. Any angry malcontent who wants to can claim to act on its behalf.

The ELF is an idea, not a gang. Now that the federal government has made it famous, I'm sure it will begin attracting a broader array of malcontents, one of whom eventually will be willing to injure another human being, and then we're off to the races.

It's not coincidence that this administration has declared war on an opponent which can by definition never be defeated, can never surrender, because it is an abstraction. The war will last in perpetuity. So when Gonzalez starts pushing for special "wartime" powers on behalf of the FBI and ATF, he will in effect be working to permanently expand the powers of the executive branch. That is, after all, his one true mandate from his bosses.

Witness:

More shadowy enemies

I'm looking over this "eco-terrorism" stuff. Some stray thoughts.

Why always "shadowy"? Can we find a new adjective for our bogeymen?

Is this what shadowy means?

Who is the leader of the ELF?
This is what has caused problems for law enforcement trying to put an end to the group's activities. There is no Osama bin Laden of the ELF [ed: Yesima bin Burnin?], there are no "lieutenants," and no hierarchical structure at all. It may even be a misnomer to call the ELF a "group."

This misnomer has nonetheless been deemed a "vast eco-terrorism conspiracy." It earned a press conference graced by both Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Gonzales thanked law enforcement at all levels for "their continued determination to help protect Americans from the threat of terrorism, both foreign and domestic."

Foreign. Domestic. Hey, it's all the same stuff.

But what distinguishes setting fire to buildings with crude milk jugs full of gasoline from simple crime?

Gonzalez's formulation was careful: They "worked together with extensive planning to influence the conduct of government and private businesses through the use of coordinated force, violence, sabotage, intimidation, and coercion."

Mueller stuck to Rumsfeldian koans: "But terrorism is terrorism, no matter what the motive."

To me that sounds uncomfortably like "terrorism is whatever the hell we feel like calling it, including maybe ... yeah you, the shifty-eyed guy in the back. You a terrorist, chump?" But maybe I'm just paranoid.

Why Tom Friedman makes a dubious green.

My man David Roberts has been quite impressed by the recent writings of NYT uber-pundit Thomas Friedman.

Friedman is a crude but effective writer, and I'm glad to see he's enlisting his thunderous arsenal of platitudes in service of conservation, etc. Undeniably, he makes some good points.

But I fear that the world's problems are a bit more complex than can be dreamt of in Friedman's neoliberal philosophy. The hyper-globalized system of trade that he breathlessly champions may itself be too energy intensive to be sustained -- even by "green" energy. Why should the global south gear its productive capacity to producing for the northern countries? Why should the U.S. essentially outsource its working class thousands of miles away to China?

I don't reject global trade. But I think wise public policy minimizes it, not subsidizes it at every level. I'd like to see a national-level pundit who champions local culture, who calls on governments and NGOs to bolster it where it flourishes. Among the many benefits of gearing local economies to produce mainly for themselves would be much less energy-intensivity.

And by no means would such pronouncements have to be couched in the dour, anti-hedonist terms that tend to characterize enviromentalism. If production were geared to be local, people would generally eat and drink much, much better.

Press wonders why press doesn’t do a better job

In an Op-Ed in Wednesday's Washington Post, David Ingatius muses whether, in the press's collective posture on global warming, "we are all but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind."

Setting aside for the moment issues such as his overly generous -- and blame-diluting -- usage of the royal we, and the question of why someone as well-placed as he is doesn't decide to do something about it, I'd like to muse a little myself about the best way of writing about global warming.

Many have blamed politicians' failure to take global warming seriously on scientists' techno-prose and reluctance to make unequivocal conclusions concerning their highly complex research. A failure to communicate, if you will.

Ignatius deems Elizabeth Kolbert the best reporter on the subject, and I can't argue with that conclusion on the whole, except to say that in her latest article in the Jan. 9 edition of the New Yorker, titled "Butterfly Lessons," readers are treated to two pages of butterfly trivia, including no less than eight Latin names, before giving the reader any indication that the article is really about global warming, how it's killing butterflies, and how we're next.

Frankly, I'd like to see a page taken from the Bush Administration's 9/11 discourse: In every newspaper, a quote a day from a top scientist saying: "We're scared as shit. And you should be too."

Call me… Ishmael

Joan Root was gunned down in her house the other day. She joins Dorothy Stang, Dian Fossey, and who knows how many others on the long list of people who have gotten in the way of someone's paycheck.

I stumbled on a documentary of Chico Mendes while writing this. If you have high speed and an hour or so to spare, I highly recommend watching it. Rubber barons created a monopoly by enslaving people, who were in turn broken by British plantations, who were in turn broken by new technology -- synthetic rubber. The surviving workers (Mendes being the son of one of them) adjusted to life in the jungles -- after displacing the native Indians, of course. But, it wasn't until cattle ranchers displaced them that the forests in those areas of the coast were finally completely destroyed.

I have a favorite saying: The future cannot be predicted because the act of predicting it will alter it (in unpredictable ways). So here goes. I predict that the next wave of destruction, maybe the final one, will be biofuels, and it will be the ranchers' turn to be displaced. The average American consumes 10 pounds of coffee, 70 pounds of beef, and 4000 pounds of gasoline annually.

NYT columnist pleads for a gas tax

I've come to see it as my duty to relay to you the wisdom conveyed by the Mustache of Understanding, NYT foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, who remains cloistered behind the stupid Times $elect subscription wall.

Tom is on a tear lately (see here and here), playing up green issues in the world's most influential print venue.

Today's column: "The New 'Sputnik' Challenges: They All Run on Oil." Here's the good bit:

But the paper makes him look more pessimistic than he really is

The UK's Independent has positively wallowed in a week's worth of journalistic eco-doomsaying -- see Sarah's woe over the possible fate of plankton or Dave's dissection of James Lovelock's apocophilia, plus a few more dismal items we never even got around to Gristmilling.

Frankly, I think The Independent has been yanking our chains, because the only thing that sells as well as sex is death and destruction. And today it supplied chaos and old night courtesy of author Jeremy Leggett, who like Lovelock has a book coming out: Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis.

Leggett is an "early topper" -- a person who's "worked in the heart of the oil industry, the majority of them geologists, many of them members of an umbrella organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). They are joined by a small but growing number of analysts and journalists. The early toppers reckon that 1 trillion barrels of oil, or less, are left." As compared to "late toppers," who think there are at least 2 trillion barrels of oil left. It's not a minor point:

An assessment.

The UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was completed by 1,360 researchers from 95 countries and published last year; a five-volume coda has just been published that "outlines four plausible ways the planet could develop politically, economically, and socially by 2050, and the effect they would have on people and the environment." According to a CSM article:

By 2050, it estimates that the highly global approach - with liberal trade policies, and concerted efforts to reduce poverty, improve education and public health, yet respond reactively to environmental issues - could yield the lowest population growth and the highest economic growth. But the environmental scorecard would be mixed.

In a fragmented world that focuses largely on security and regional markets and takes a reactive approach to ecological problems, economic growth rates are the lowest and the population is the highest of the four pathways.

Two other paths, which place a greater emphasis on technology and a proactive approach to the environment, yield population growth rates somewhere in the middle, and economic growth rates that may be slow at first, but accelerate with time.

Huh. The title of the article is "Forecast for Earth in 2050: It's not so gloomy," but I, living in a highly reactive, security-focused, highly influential country, am skeptical.

Journalism and global warming

Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism puts out a journal called Nieman Reports. The latest issue is about news coverage of intelligent design and global warming. You can download the entire issue (PDF), or the section about global warming (with multimedia; without multimedia -- both PDF). I've only read a couple of the bits, but they're quite interesting.

(via Tim Lambert)

Interview with RealClimate scientists

An interesting interview with three of the science guys from RealClimate on DailyKos -- check it out.

(via Chris Mooney)