Writing on the Wall

The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
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I have just been very entertained.

Allen, my new Taiwanese-Canadian web-friend asked me to go look at the film Zeitgeist (Z)

So I did the unthinkable and threw myself into a conspiracy theory film. And I have to say it was really good fun, I was thoroughly gripped and entertained throughout, and learned some very interesting things, although verifying them is entirely another matter.

So I want to do a sort of film review of this web film. It is a film that attempts a global vision, and that is distributed on a global media, and so is probably worth debating as a form of emerging global public debate.

It is interesting how constructing myths these days so often takes the form of debunking other myths. Z takes this form, part I attacking Christianity, Part II attacking the official account of 9-11, part three turning explanatory and discussing the history and power of the federal reserve and of the banking elite that are standing behind it. The synthesis is that these banking groups have been triggering wars for profit for donkey’s years, that they are happily dumbing down the American public, and that they hope to produce a world government, totalitarian in its application of accounting standards.

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Jeremy Paxman’s is part of an old-guard in television journalism who don’t want to face up to a generational shift going in in the workings of the Fourth Estate. In his recent speech he bemoaned declining standards in TV news. He pointed out the importance of good content, and then dismissed the rise of digital technologies, clearly disliking the idea of the medium being the message.
For many, Paxman represents the best of the British critical media. The BBC’s head of News, Roger Mosey, cited him  (in an email exchange) as epitimising the BBCs role as par of a healthy critical Fourth estate. Paxman’s role as avatar of the critical media is so significant that the Guardian editorialised his speech: Comment is free: Televisions panic attack. But, however much we love Paxman, he probably represents the past rather than the future of the fourth estate, and here’s why…
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The Reith Lectures this year are given by Sachs. He’s an economist, and an American, but he actually seems sensible: He is having a good go at putting a picture together.

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 Summary

Also, the BBC seems to be wising up about open source and is offering the lectures as an MP3 podcast. You can even subscribe via iTunes!

Looks like parts of the mainstream are actually starting to wake up to what is going on.

Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering

What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor.

When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food.

This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse.

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If we take the viewpoint of the earth as the common inheritance of all of humanity, how good a use are we making of it? And what can we do to improve on this?

New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index

The Happy Planet Index from NEF seems to show we are not really using the earth very well.

They make the point that if we measure from the ultimate resources at our disposal (the natural environment) to the ultimate goals of humanity (defined in terms of long and happy lives) we are squandering the earth with the wrong kinds of political-economic models: Development is mostly going in the wrong direction.

Central American societies come out as the most efficient societies, in terms of happiness for natural resources, with the somewhat morose G8 resource guzzlers being nowhere near as effective.

So if we have some sort of idea, from this index, of what a desirable social model for the long-term wellbeing of humanity might be, what can we do to bring that about?

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New Statesman - The economics of conquest

New Year’s Resolutions for the world:1) Elected Global Representatives: So that the UN has a direct mandate from “we the people”2) Global Public Service Broadcasting, so that “we the people” have a meaningful forum for democratic debate at a global level3) Taxation on the global commons (most pressingly the atmosphere, but the seas, space, the internet, and knowledge / patents, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum come to mind, as does biodiversity exploitation) to fund this global shebang.

4) The ICC given powers to prosecute people who break international law, even if they are leaders of G8 countries.

5) Oh yes and stop televising state sponsored murders, it’s too depressing.

Richest 2 Percent Own Half the World’s Wealth - Yahoo! News

If the richest 2% own half the world’s wealth, and half the worlds population share less than 1% of the worlds wealth, how can economists and policy makers avoid dealing with equality as a social good?

Well one answer is to concentrate on absolute rather than relative poverty. If enough wealth can keep on being drawn into the economy, then surely it does not matter how rich the rich are, as long as the poor are getting better off?

But this is not a realistic proposition. You just have to look at the sources of wealth to see that this approach is running out of steam, since there is only so much new wealth you can draw into the world economy.

You can extract wealth from nature, but the current global environmental crisis suggests that we cannot keep expanding how much we do that forever. As that source of wealth dries up we have to start thinking about making better use of what we have, which partly means sharing it out more equally.

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Constitutions and revolutions are born out of discussion. A blog seems like a good salon for discussing a global constitution. But where should we start?

There has been quite some debate on such issues recently, much of it can be seen on the website Open Democracy. For instance, George Monbiot

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/George_Monbiot.jsp

and David Held
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/David_Held.jsp

have both put forward their ideas there.

What do we mean by ‘humanity’?
However both of their approaches seem to me to need a stronger initial focus, or philosophical starting point. They both seem to hinge around an emerging ‘human’ identity, born of a globalising moment, some sense of cosmopolitanism.

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