by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks, UK
You just can’t keep a good man down. You might think he’d want a rest after a decade as Prime Minister. You might suppose he’d have his hands full sorting out the Middle East. You might reckon he’d be busy planning his impending role as the next President of Europe. But – pah!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K9rVRuehGU]
Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would have the backing of China and America. The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.
He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer. “This is extremely urgent. A 50% cut by 2050 has to be a central component of this. We have to try this year to get that agreed, because the moment you do agree that, then you have something for everyone to focus upon. We need a true and proper global deal, and that needs to include America and China,” Blair said.
Mark Lynas has more in a Comment is Free piece published today. (Incidentally, if we’re still focused on two degrees C – as we should be, and as Mark certainly is in his CiF piece – then it’s worth noting right at the beginning that the IPCC says in its Fourth Assessment Report that to limit warming to between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees, then the global emissions cut by 2050 needs to be between 50 and 85 per cent. Hard to avoid the suspicion that we’ll need to be at the deep end of that emissions reduction range in order to come in at the low end of the temperature increase range.)
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | Off topic
…so here’s one of the best moments from series 1 of The West Wing:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Ni1vDb_u4]
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | Conflict and security
Last month it was Playmobil security checkpoints. Now we know what they were looking for… (hat-tip: John Robb).
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | North America
Foreign Policy points us towards this delightful gem from NY’s new governor as of a day ago, carried in New York magazine:
David Paterson just gave his first public address since Eliot Spitzer’s resignation yesterday. He made noises about “getting back to work” and the budget, talked about being black and blind, indicated he wasn’t planning any major changes to his predecessors more controversial policies, and became the first human being in government to express sympathy for Spitzer himself. “My heart goes out to Eliot Spitzer, his wife Silda, his daughters,” he said. “I know what he’s gone through this week. In my heart, I think he’s suffered enough.”
Paterson also displayed a rather awesome sense of humor. “Just so we don’t have to go through this whole resignation thing again,” one ballsy reporter asked, “have you ever patronized a prostitute?” Patterson thought for a minute. “Only the lobbyists,” he said.
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | North America
When I saw the headline of James Carville’s FT article today – “Time to halt America’s political hara-kiri” – my heart sank. Surely, I thought, not another sanctimonious counterblast from Team Clinton moralising about Samantha Power having the temerity to call their queen a ‘monster’.
Silly me. Duh – this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, after all: the man who met Paula Jones’ claims of sexual harassement by Bill Clinton with the succint epithet, “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find”.
So it should not surprise us that he’s appalled that Samantha Power had to resign. Rather like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Wag the Dog (“This is nothing! During the filming of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ three of the horsemen died two weeks before the ending of principle photography. This is nothing, this is nothing…”), Carville’s seen far worse than this before:
I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.
Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.
Near the end of that campaign, George H.W.Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.
It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.
So for heaven’s sake, he concludes: “Ms Power, come back to work. New York Times, get out of these candidates’ way and let them run for president. Everybody take a deep breath. And if somebody somewhere refers to their rival as a little pissant, do not sweat it. Nobody seems to even know what that is.”
