by Richard Gowan | Jun 15, 2010 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, Off topic
North Korea’s team put up a creditable performance against Brazil in their World Cup game today. I’ve been keeping an eye on the North Korean news agency to see how they cover the game, but there’s nothing there yet. Still, the arts news is engaging:
Light Comedy on Road
Pyongyang, June 14 (KCNA) — The light comedy “Echo of Mountain” has been performed in different areas of the country. The light comedy, recreated by the State Theatrical Troupe, is honored with the Kim Il Sung Prize.
The light comedy is based on painstaking efforts of farmers in a mountainous area to boost grain output and turn their village into a beautiful place good to live in, and their worthwhile life.
It, originally created early in the 1960s, still enjoys a great popularity, making the people deeply aware of their mission of the time.
After seeing the performance Jang Min, 47, a department director of the North Hwanghae Provincial People’s Committee, told KCNA he had realized that if officials failed in their duties, any good idea or intention could not be materialized.
Yun Chun Hwa, 40, chairwoman of the Management Board of the Chongsan Co-operative Farm in Kangso District, Nampho City, said the performance gave her the truth that only those working hard to realize high aims and ideal could be pioneers of the time. And she vowed to reap a rich harvest this year.
Ji Jong Ho, 50, a chief furnaceman of the Chollima Steel Complex, said that the performance representing people of the Chollima era made him deeply conscious of what he should do in the building of a thriving nation and that he would work hard with high aims and ideal as the heroes of the light comedy did.
Sounds hilarious! But then again, I suspect most citizens of Pyonyang would be mystified to learn that people in the West still go to Robin Williams movies…
by Alex Evans | Jun 15, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
Later today, Barack Obama will give his first televised address from the Oval Office. He didn’t do this on healthcare reform, and he hasn’t done it on the economy – so the fact that he’s doing it for Deepwater Horizon is a pretty clear indication of the political stakes on the issue. As John Dickerson at Salon observes, “a presidential speech from the Oval Office usually falls into one of two categories: The commander in chief is responding to an immediate crisis, or he is trying to change the dynamic of an ongoing one”. This is clearly the second kind. But what will he say?
Well, Newsweek’s handy guide of what to watch out for is a good starting point, and doubtless they’re right that the address will conclude with a call to action on getting an energy bill moving on the Hill. But the really big question is: will he use tonight to reopen the push for cap-and-trade legislation, as “senior Democratic officials on Capitol Hill” have been telling Ed Luce at the FT among others?
Admittedly, the politics don’t look auspicious, given how many Democrats are opposed to the Kerry-Lieberman bill (at least 11, apparently), and the fact that moderate Republican Lindsey Graham fell away back in May.
But on the other hand, Obama’s backed into a corner. He’s been wholly on the defensive over the 55 days of this story, caught in an unwinnable battle to seem more angry every time he visits Louisiana. Plus he’ll be painfully aware of the potential for a hurricane to multiply the story by ten at any moment, by showering the southern United States with black rain. All the while the midterms draw closer.
So, Obama badly needs to grab the initiative and set a much more proactive agenda. At the same time, he needs to flush the Republicans out, and paint them as being the party of big oil (something he hasn’t managed to do yet). At present, ironically, the Republicans stand to benefit from public ire over the Administration’s response to the disaster – despite the paradox that they’re more enthusiastic about further deepwater drilling.
Simply banning deepwater drilling is unlikely to cut it. Remember, deepwater production is forecast by the IEA to account for 40% of global oil demand by 2020. If the US pulls the plug, and other OECD countries follow suit, then that just multiplies the energy security problem without doing anything to solve it – a fact that Republicans would presumably pounce upon.
At this point, the potential political logic of cap and trade starts to become a little clearer. If Obama can successfully present America’s choice as one between cap and trade on one hand and deepwater drilling on the other, and paint the GOP into the latter corner, then thhe’d have pulled off a smart manoeuvre indeed. It would make prospects for international climate policy quite a lot brighter, too. As John Dickerson concludes,
Having approached the bold move, we’ll learn on Tuesday night just how committed the president plans to be. (…) In various contexts, Obama has said he’d rather do the right thing than win re-election. Aides say that applies to this issue. If that’s true, then he’ll be speaking about energy legislation at least one more time from behind his desk. The question is whether that final speech will be in two years or six.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Influence and networks
American anti-Muslim wingnuts are, needless to say, having a field day over plans to build a mosque and community centre two block away from Ground Zero.
But at a recent protest organised by SIOA (‘Stop the Islamization of America’), there was an exquisite moment of irony. Two arabic-speaking men, who were set upon by the protestors and had to be rescued by the NYPD, turned out to be Egyptian Christians – who’d come to join the anti-Muslim protest.
Full details from Mike Kelly:
At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.
“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.
“Get out,” others shouted.
In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.
“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.
But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.
“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
One of the many strands of discussion at a Ditchley Foundation conference on climate change last week was the vexed question of how public opinion shapes the political space open to leaders on climate. There were many furrowed brows on this, not least given that the polling numbers on climate change are all heading the wrong way, all over the world – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the combination of the recession and media coverage of ‘climategate’.
My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.
Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)
Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.
The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!
So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.
But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.
We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media. We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing. And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.
But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts – not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
What do countries do when they run out of oil? That’s the question posed by Oxford University’s Joerg Friedrich in a fortcoming journal piece in Energy Policy (already available here). Friedrich give three examples of strategies taken by countries facing this very issue in the past, which go like this.
First, you can opt for predatory militarism, where Japan before and during World War Two provides his case study. According to Friedrich, “the spectre of future resource shortages had played an important part in shaping Japan’s imperialist strategy ever since the end of World War One … when an American oil embargo became imminent, in 1941, Japan pre-emptively attacked the US and radicalized its war of conquest in order to gain access to the oil supplies of the East Indies”.
A second strategy, he reckons, is totalitarian retrenchment, which is what North Korea did after the Cold War. “When subsidized deliveries of oil and other vital resources from the Soviet Union were disrupted, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ reacted in a shockingly reckless way. Elite privileges were preserved in the face of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans dying from hunger.”
Third, he offers what he calls socio-economic adaptation – which, he argues, is what Cuba successfully achieved when faced with the same challenges as North Korea. While the end of subsidized deliveries from the USSR presented a massive challenge here too, “there was no mass starvation comparable to North Korea. Instead, Cubans relied on social networks and non-industrial modes of production to cope with energy scarcity and the concomitant shortage of food. They were actively encouraged to do so by the regime in Havana”.
It’s an engaging analysis, and worth reading the whole thing – and I absolutely share Friedrich’s concern about the risk of hugely damaging zero sum games as resources get scarce.
But as with many other peak oil analyses, I hesitate about the implied assumption that the answer to peak oil is necessarily local. I’d love to hear Friedrich’s take on what might an internationalist approach to managing increasing resource scarcity might look like. Cuba’s hardly the best case study for examining that, of course, given that it also faces the small matter of a US trade embargo. But it’s still a big – and largely unexamined – question.
