An Israeli human rights group released video footage last night showing an Israeli soldier firing a rubber-coated bullet at close range at a Palestinian man who had already been detained, blindfolded and cuffed.
The Palestinian, who had been involved in a demonstration in the occupied West Bank village of Nil’in on July 7, was injured in the toe by the shooting. He was treated by army medics and released, according to the rights group, B’Tselem.
The video clip, which is just over a minute long, was filmed by a 14-year-old Palestinian girl from her home in the village and passed on to B’Tselem.
Although plenty of people see the Guardian’s George Monbiot as an irritating gadfly (see also Gideon Rachman’s amusing account of what it’s like to work with him), I’ve long taken him seriously on climate and scarcity issues; his book The Age of Consent, in particular, contains a really excellent attempt to think through what will happen to world trade in conditions of resource scarcity.
So it was with interest that I saw on his blog that he’s officially Changed His Mind on post-Kyoto climate policy. Like me, George has for a long time been an advocate of C&C – under which countries agree a global ceiling on greenhouse gas concentrations (e.g. 350 parts per million of CO2), figure out the level of global emissions each year that will keep us below it, and then share out the tradable permits to that ’emissions budget’ on the basis of convergence to equal per capita rights by an agreed date, like 2050. But no longer. Here he is in the Guardian on 1 July:
After reading the proofs of a book by the independent thinker Oliver Tickell, to be published this month, I have changed my view. In Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse, Tickell slaughters my favourite ideas(8). He shows that there is no logical basis for dividing up the right to pollute among nation states. It gives them too much power over this commodity, and there is no guarantee that they would pass the pollution rights on to their citizens, or use the money they raised to green the economy…
Instead Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations – running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example – rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.
Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.
In some ways, I can see the attraction too. For one thing, Oliver Tickell’s proposed approach (which you can read more about here) retains C&C’s most important attribute: it starts from where we’re trying to get to, through a quantified, binding ceiling on GHG concentrations. None of the usual crap about “aspirational long-term goals” here, then.
I suspect it’s also true that it would be methodologically far easier to cap the emissions of a few thousand refineries, cement works, coal mines or power stations – the ‘upstream’ end of the production life cycle, in other words – than it would be to cap national emissions, given that totalling an entire country’s emissions involves tracking hundreds of millions of different activities (e.g. the gas I’ve just used to cook my lunch).
But while the methodological / policy end of things does look easier under Oliver’s Kyoto 2 proposal, the politics look very much more difficult. For one thing, think of the developing country equity dimensions, which China and India showed so clearly at the G8. Oliver’s proposal effectively tells Chinese steel companies that they’ll have to compete against Japanese steel companies for emission permits in an open auction – a process that in effect takes no account of their developing status, and hence does away with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Good luck with securing agreement to that.
Secondly, allocating emission rights to states may indeed entail no guarantees that these states will then pass emission rights on to their citizens, it’s true. But the fact of the matter is that it’s those states that must negotiate any global deal – and those states that must enforce domestic level compliance with the global deal, even if the deal is done as Oliver wants it to be.
All in all, Oliver’s is a smart idea – especially its focus on a relatively small number of sites – but it’s hard to see it as feasible…
Cory at BoingBoing and Alex at WorldChanging sat down for a coffee together last week and started brainstorming about life after the apocalpyse. Cory says:
I noticed that while there’s a whole ton of stories — and people who emulate them — about heavily armed survivalists bravely holding off the twilight of civilization after the Big One, there are damned few stories about super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together. I even came up with a name for it: the Outquisition; the opposite of the Inquisition — missionaries who come to your town to remind you of how awesome it can all be, leave behind a bunch of rad, life-improving systems and tools, and generally get on with the business of being happy, well-fed and peaceful.
Alex wrote up a great post about this and 24 hours later, some WorldChanging readers created Outquisition.org. I’m not sure what they’ll do there, but in my dreams, they’re off building a non-secret society of emergency-preparedness Nice People who think that the response to catastrophe isn’t lifeboat rules and militias, but humanitarian aid and kick-ass tools.
What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.
Interestingly, all this has generated a torrent of debate on the comments section, with rural people cocking a number of eyebrows at the idea that urban folk will sally out to rescue them. One of the more gentle responses suggests that
The thought that a bunch of city folks could come out to the country and teach the farmers how to do their job is comical. Ideally it would be a two-way system with both sides contributing to the conversation. The farmers would be able to teach the city folk how to farm to grow their own food, while the city people would bring their particular skill set to the table.
On the other hand,
You know, maybe the city folk DO know more about some things than the farmer might. If the farmer has been dependent upon hybrid seed he must buy every year, because the seed produced by his crops is sterile, and the fertilizer he must buy is petroleum based and no longer affordable or even available. Some “City Person” showing up with non-hybid seed and plans for a DIY manure composter that produces burnable methane gas and, as a byproduct, high quality organic liquid fertilizer, well that “city Person” just might be that farmer’s personal saviour.
The whole comments section on the WorldChanging post is worth a look: a very lively and informative discussion.
Gordon Brown’s blunt call on Brits to stop wasting food marks an interesting moment in the food prices debate.
So far, policymakers have concentrated almost entirely on the supply side – specifically, with the need to increase food production by 50 per cent by 2030, in line with World Bank demand forecasts. (I worry that too much focus on the overall quantum of food produced risks obscuring the equally fundamental issue of who has access to it – but let’s leave that aside for now.)
What Brown’s emphasis on waste does is to give the demand side of the equation equal billing – a position it’s deserved all along, but hasn’t received from policymakers, presumably due to anxieties about implying that consumers may have to change behaviour.
The issue of food waste is a massive issue in its own right – the UK wastes 4 million tonnes of food a year, and the forthcoming Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit report on food says that up to 40 per cent of food harvested in developing countries can be lost before it’s consumed. But its long term significance may be as a bridgehead for opening up a broader front on demand reduction: as the food equivalent of energy efficiency, if you like.
Another of the battles in that front will be over biofuels – a major new source of demand for crops. The leak last week of an internal World Bank document showed just how significant biofuels have been: it argued that biofuels have been responsible for as much as 75% of food price increases – way more than the 30% previously estimated by the International Food Policy Research Institute. (The Bank’s 75% figure isn’t new – it’s been kicking around their HQ for at least three months – but its release now will definitely increase pressure on the US to reduce subsidies for corn-based ethanol.)
But what I think’s most significant of all about Brown’s new tack is that it makes him the first head of government to talk clearly about the elephant in the room with food prices: the fact that our diet in developed countries has a direct effect on the food security of poor people in developing countries. Waste may be the first stop – but the train line we’re on leads directly to the question of how much meat and dairy products we can consume without impinging on others’ fair shares.
Yesterday, 150 years ago, two papers were read out at the Linnean Society in London, one by Alfred Russell Wallace and the other by Charles Darwin, which first laid out to the world Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Darwin’s theory continues to have a profound influence on psychology, via the increasingly dominant theory of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) which, like a particularly aggressive turtle on the Galapagos Islands, is busy fighting off all competition and establishing itself as the alpha male of psychological theories.
Still, I have four main reservations about EP. Firstly, its tendency towards biological determinism. ‘Men naturally do this…it’s how men have behaved for thousands of years. Men hunt. Women stay at home. Men are polygamous. Women flirt and gossip’. Etc. Yes, our 200,000 year history may give us a predisposition to behave in a certain way, and I find it very interesting to explore our evolutionary history, but evolution has not yet finished. We are making it up as we go along. So examining how humans behaved in the past may not be as enlightening as thinking how we would like to, or should, behave today.
Secondly, how useful is EP for people suffering from mental illnesses? If someone goes to an evolutionary psychologist, say, with social anxiety, the psychologist may well say ‘social anxiety is adaptive. That’s why it’s survived for so long. So it’s not entirely a bad thing.’ Great! So the socially anxious person goes back to their flat and remains a bitterly unhappy recluse. Or the psychologist says ‘social anxiety comes about because there’s a mismatch between our primitive past, when we lived in groups of around 150, and our industrialized present, when we live in sprawling anonymous cities’. Great! So we’ll have to join a tribe in the Amazon jungle to be happy.
Thirdly, virtue for followers of EP really comes down to social skills. Thus Matt Ridley, a leading EP popularizer, writes in his book The Origins of Virtue : ‘What counts is not strength but social skills…The well-connected inherit the earth.’ The EPers tend to emphasize that humans have evolved incredible abilities to team up, network, make pacts, persuade, schmooze, back-scratch, and arse-lick. And this, to them, is the height of virtue.
They note that monkeys, also, possess these sorts of cooperative and social skills, only we possess them to a much greater degree. So really, we are simply clever monkeys.
But I think human virtue and wisdom are actually much greater than this, and that the EP account of virtue leaves a great deal out. It leaves out our ability to conceive of our own death. It leaves out our ability to imagine the whole stretch of time and space, and our tiny selves in relation to it. It leaves out the struggle, which has happened throughout human existence, to find some sort of common identity and unity with the universe, to find some principle or idea which does not die.
Monkeys don’t, as far as I know, go through this sort of long, hard struggle to find some unity with the cosmos. Humans do however, and this struggle is a crucial part of what it means for many people to be human. It has been right at the centre of what it means to be human for 200,000 years. But followers of EP leave it out.
Fourthly, and finally, followers of EP, like Herbert Spencer and the social scientists who followed Charles Darwin, love to use evolutionary theory to support their own right-wing, laissez faire politics and economics. Thus Matt Ridley, who wrote for the Telegraph , looks on the animal kingdom, and sees only little Thatcherites – struggling for status, making deals, learning to exchange and reciprocate.
At the end of The Origins of Virtue , he rises to a moving vision of a world free of state interference: "If we are to recover social harmony and virtue, if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state…Let international and national states wither…Let everybody rise and fall by the strengths of their reputation."
And what did Matt do next? He became chairman of a Yorkshire bank called Northern Rock, which borrowed way too much debt, then became the first victim of a bank run in Britain for a century, and had to be bailed out by the government, in the largest involvement of the state in the banking sector since the 1940s.
