by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
When I was the IPPR’s energy research fellow, I always loved working with Dieter Helm – a total iconoclaust who’d infuriate the green establishment by poking holes in their shaky claims about how cheap it would be to sort out climate change. He could always get away with it for the simple reason that he knew energy policy better than they did. He was at it again last week in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our — and the planet’s — means.
This is not a welcome message for politicians to give to their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis. Not since the late 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, has such a massive restructuring of major economies been required. Nobody told the British or American people then that the challenge of creating a wartime economy was going to be cheap. They should stop pretending that the enormous challenge of decarbonizing the major economies can be done on the cheap, either.
Thank goodness for straight talkers. Absolutely. I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for every enthusiastic green who told me that the bad news is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are just round the corner and will be here in a few minutes, but that the good news is all I need do is remember not to leave my phone charger plugged in. People ain’t stupid. When the gap between the problem narrative and the solution narrative is that wide, they assume one of two things: that it’s already too late to solve the problem, or that the scale of the problem is being exaggerated in the first place.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, South Asia
While China is blocking websites in the hope of preventing news of security force brutality from seeping out, Xinhua is busy denouncing the Dalai Lama as a “master terror maker”. In fact,
The Dalai Lama and his clique have never for a day refrained from violence and terror. His childhood teacher, an Austrian, was a Nazi…
You have to be kidding. Hard to see how China’s going to make a success of the Olympics if this is the best they can come up with on media relations. Moises Naim looks pretty prescient in the light of his observation last November that when the world’s entire activist contingent descends on Beijing,
…the government will inevitably attempt to control and repress the activists. And that will be a new and frustrating experience for a centralized government that is not used to containing well-organized, media-savvy foreigners who work through highly decentralized, international, nongovernmental organizations that know how to mobilize public opinion to advance their causes.
Charlie Beckett, who runs the Public Media Forum at the London School of Economics, reports that the Chinese have been seeking his advice on managing the media better – though it’s not clear how they’d manage to effect such a sea change in so little time, even assuming they were inclined to.
It’s tempting to feel a sense of schadenfreude as China trips itself up over and over again while carrying the Olympic torch, given its appalling human rights record. But on the other hand, remember David Miliband’s observation when he spoke in China last month:
We will only resolve [shared threats like climate change and fragile states] through a new bargain between major states in the international community, embedded in our bilateral relationships, multilateral institutions, and not least the partnership between China, the world’s fastest growing economy, and Europe, the world largest single market. Isolation would be a disaster for that process and there is too much at stake. That is why my message to British people back home is simple. Do not boycott the Olympics, celebrate them instead.
The risk is that if China manages to cock up the Olympics as royally as she seems poised to, then at best it will make it harder to engage her on issues like climate change where there can’t be any solution without her. The world needs China to feel safe to come out of her shell – and this is the best prospect for long term progress on human rights record too (look at Burma, after all – hard to see many signs there of isolation being an effective driver of change).
At worst, of course, the Olympics could go bad at the same time as other chickens (like food inflation or a sharp economic slowdown) come home to roost too – and then all bets would really be off. As Naim commented last year,
It’s fair to say that the Chinese government probably had no idea what it was getting into when it applied to host the Olympics in 2000.
Update: some good reporting here from ITN.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbTsNu08Xqs]
But as Blake Hounshell notes, the LA Times reckons that China’s media strategy is working well for its intended audience – at home:
One key factor is a media strategy that, while still blunt and heavily reliant on censorship and propaganda, shows more nuance than usual for the lumbering Communist Party.
This last week the government has used something it traditionally viewed as a big negative, any suggestion that it’s not in total control, to its advantage by going large with print, still and video coverage of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and destroying their property.
Not only does this rather ironically paint the Chinese state and its massive police force as something of a victim, analysts said, but it also stirs up feelings of fear and anger among many Han, the nation’s majority population, that add a personal dimension to the riots.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific
Interesting to read the argument made today that China’s overseas diplomacy has in some cases – like Sudan – been “hijacked” by state-owned companies like PetroChina, that are alleged to have become “very powerful interest groups” in their own right.
Very interesting to see who’s making it: scholars at “leading Chinese think-tanks and universities in Beijing“, speaking in multiple interviews. As Richard McGregor comments, “China’s foreign ministry has not been critical of CNPC but the comments by senior academics in Beijing suggest substantial disquiet in official circles about overseas investments.”
by Jules Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
Lord Bell, PR guru and Tory peer, has plied his dark arts for some fairly controversial characters in the past – Augusto Pinochet, Boris Berezovsky, Michael Chernoi, even Margaret Thatcher – but even he might have his hands full with his latest project: spinning Aleksander Lukashenko, the iron man of Belarus and the ‘last dictator of Europe’.
Last week, Bell met with Lukashenko in Minsk, where the moustachioed strong-man asked Lord Bell how he could improve his image in the West.
Bell told the Moscow Times:
He would like his country to be better understood, and his successes to be better grasped. He has raised pensions and wages and would understandably like to shift the focus to these areas. Lukashenko doesn’t see why Belarus can’t be a friend to the West and a friend to Russia at the same time.
The fact is, Lukashenko is increasingly neither a friend of Russia’s, nor the West. Western countries dislike him for his iron rule of the country, his use of the KGB to crush the opposition and free press, and his provocative and belligerent treatment of Western diplomats in the past.
Russia, meanwhile, dislikes him for his obstreperousness towards the Kremlin (yes, he’s no more gracious with Russia), his embarrassing outbursts on the international stage, and above all his unwillingness to give them control of the transit pipelines through which Gazprom exports around 20% of its EU deliveries.
Russia is fed up with subsidizing Belarus’ state-owned economy with cheap gas. They started putting up the gas price in 2006, and now it looks like Lukashenko is feeling the heat.
Don’t write him off just yet, however. He’s still pretty popular with Belarus’ elderly population and farm-workers in State-owned communes, who for the last decade have staved off the harsh reality of a post-Soviet world by drowning themselves in cheap gas and state-produced vodka.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Ian Katz’s Observer interview with Jonathan Powell – chief of staff to Tony Blair throughout his time at Downing Street – was definitely worth a read, if for no other reason than that this was, incredibly, Powell’s first media interview since 1997. You get the impression that if Powell gave more such interviews, it might be quite fun:
“He would say the most outrageous things in meetings,” recalls one former member of the Blair inner circle. Powell does not contest the charge: “Sometimes I say things which are extremely plonkerish at just the wrong moment… which is one of the reasons they kept me away from the press. It would’ve been a complete disaster if I’d have talked to the papers.”)
You might think he’s just being modest. But try this delicious gem:
When Siobhan O’Hanlon, Gerry Adams’s late assistant, asks for a meeting with Blair during the Good Friday talks, Powell tells her his boss is in a meeting with Bertie Ahern, but “we could get rid of him”. O’Hanlon replies that there is no need and Powell, whose sense of humour frequently falls on the dusty side of dry, chips in that he did not mean “get rid of him in her usual sense”.
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