international politics

Honk if you think I’m a giant asshole

New specialty license plate option being offered in Oklahoma: “For Sooners looking to show their terror-fighting pride while tearing up the asphalt,” writes one USA Today blogger. (h/t: TP)

The need for good research

The rush to put biofuels in our gas tanks has given people analyzing natural resources and conflict some work to do. How are European and American policy mandates to dramatically increase the use of biofuels affecting the places that grow biofuel inputs? It seems fair to say that little consideration has been given to the potential conflict and equity impacts of this surge in demand for palm oil, sugarcane, and corn.

After President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, which called for massive increases in biofuels, we heard stories of skyrocketing corn tortilla prices and resulting social disruptions.

Now we have stories coming from places like West Kalimantan, a remote region of Indonesia where the rush to plant palm-oil plantations is generating conflict with Indonesians who grow rubber trees and other crops on their small plots of land. The NGO Friends of the Earth Netherlands has a new report calling out the unethical practices of some palm-oil companies that clear existing crops first and make payouts (maybe) to the farmers who own the land later.

It strikes me that this particular link between natural resource management and conflict offers an avenue for addressing one of the traditional shortcomings of environment and conflict research.

Listen up

I thought, as a final post on Yearly Kos (about which I fear my posts are woefully inadequate — it really was a fascinating sociopolitical event, worthy of better analysis than I’m able to give it — read Ezra Klein’s wrap-up), I’d recap in somewhat more elaborate terms what I said at my global warming […]

Too many boats are fishing for too few fish

Here's a remarkable fact: Global fishery collapse is financed with tax money.

You already know that many nations are failing to enforce the laws that are essential to keeping our oceans healthy and abundant forever. Instead, they are presiding over a global ocean collapse. According to a report in Science, 29 percent of the world's commercial fisheries have already collapsed.

This is terrible news for the billion people who turn to the ocean for protein, the hundreds of millions of people who need the sea for a livelihood, and the countless extraordinary marine creatures that don't deserve to go the way of the buffalo.

Again

Kind of a good news, bad news story:

President George W. Bush has invited the European Union, the United Nations and 11 other countries to the September 27-28 meeting in Washington to work toward setting a long-term goal by 2008 to cut emissions.

Yet it turns out just to be a meeting full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: "But a senior U.S. official said the administration stood by its opposition to mandatory economy-wide caps."

A meeting aimed at (1) developing voluntary or aspirational targets, (2) for the long-term, (3) by 2008 [i.e. Bush's last year in office]. Three strikes and you are out.

Bush's last chance to be a small part of the solution rather than a large part of the problem came and went at the G-8 meeting, where Bush nixed an effort to set realistic and binding long-term targets.

The only interesting question that will be answered by this meeting is whether the media will be suckered into giving the President the one outcome he truly wants -- positive press coverage on climate change, an area of such catastrophic failure by this administration that it will probably ensure (even more than Iraq) that history judges Bush a failure.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Are we a nation permanently at war?

In his interview with Grist, Dennis Kucinich urged us all to recognize the connection between global warming and global warring. In that spirit, I thought I’d pass along an astute observation from Glenn Greenwald, who on matters of media and war/terrorism is without peer. About this quote from Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), a conservative member […]

Distributed power could have saved us some serious pain over there

Earlier this year, it was reported that residents of Baghdad could count on about five or six hours of electricity a day. Last week, it was reported that they could now count on about … one. The Bush administration’s response to this trend is paradigmatically Bushian: it’s going to stop reporting. Seriously: But that piece […]

The Middle East

NYT: The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq. Discuss.

Ante up

Colin Challen, a member of Parliament and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, has a good editorial in the latest issue of Science (sub. rqd). He makes a key point that is often missed in the debate:

Not only must we reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, we need a timetable that reduces the risk of positive feedbacks and sink failures that could lead to runaway catastrophic climate change.

We are "playing climate change poker," as Challen says, fighting not just to avoid the consensus prediction for climate change, but the plausible worst-case scenario, which is far worse. That's why even a 60 percent cut in emissions by mid-century may not be enough, and many are pushing for an 80 percent cut.

The entire editorial is reprinted here: