Mark Lynas writes passionately and accurately at the current corruption of leadership on climate change.
New Statesman - Our leaders are steering us into the abyss
My response is that this is to do with us aiming our messages at the wrong people. The question that bears most strongly on all of this is who is facing the abyss the most. That is where the strongest political pressure-base can come from:
Johnathon Freedland, one of the few journalists out there with a good grip on global goings on, calls for optimism for lefties worldwide, in the face of a drubbing in Europe:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Dont be fooled by Europes mood. Globally, the left is reawakening
My comment was that the need for left wing thought globally is certainly there:
There is an obvious risk of revolution world wide. When people have nothing to lose they will take to the streets. If global warming goes above 2 degress there is a good chance of poor people starving all over the world due to a hike in food prices. This trend is already emerging with biofuels.
The left’s big problem has been one of scale: Corporations have gone international, but Unions, and politics have not, hence Blair’s surrender to globalisation.
But social problems are global too, and that is catching up on us. It is currently only the left that is campaigning for a global politics to reign in this ludicrous inequality, and so provide support to the weaker parts.
There is a very interesting article on Open Democracy, where bean counters have looked at various forms of assymetric warfare (between state and non-state actors, with radicaly different levels of power and resources) and, from the way they have gathered and treated their data set (caveat emptor), they have found that non-violent revolution is more effective:
Madrid11.net | Does terrorism work?
This is pleasing to me, considering the bashing I took for making a stand against violent methods as the best way for the Palestinians to respond to Isreali occupation and ethnic cleansing.
New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen
Oh my God! Nick Cohen has written something I agree with.
It is always instructive to actually get close to people and understand how they view the world. We have a name for it among the liberal lefties, it is called Anthropology. But Nick is right, people in North London have a tendency to prefer “natives” in far flung fields, and that is strange.
But this is not an English Phenomenon. I sit here in India observing the same thing: Urban Indians coming to visit the village that I am living in, and finding it hard to understand the locals. This is a fairly general phenomenon.
As is the emphasis on place amongst the general population. Baggiani has attempted to understand this, because his philosophical pragmatism takes him past worshipping ideas as abstracts, and draws him to understanding how ideas are found in practice, in people’s lives.
But Nick, you are not so far from Islington really, you are also an urban intellectual idealist really, you signed up to the Euston (North London?) Manifesto, out of a belief in Democracy as an ideal. You supported a war to support such an ideal. How very urbane of you to put your idealism above the lives of [working class] others.
The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.
The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.
Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045
Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return
The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.
It seems that Cheap Flights are Proliferating around the world:
Branson has plans to open up routes to Asia
Whilst low fare airlines enjoy huge growth in across Asia
In the UK Sian Berry Bemoans the way ministers are incoherant over flying
Blair effectively says keep on flying to everyone
Whilst Plane Stupid point out that all this is, well, ridiculous, and not really helping things very much.
It seems that everyone is pointing at each other. Blair says that the Chinese will make up for any British cuts in emmissions in a couple of years, whilst India and China point out that their per-capita emmissions are much lower than for OECD countries, and that their people surely want a taste of the pie.
There is a big debate about environmental justice underlying this (how much of the world’s resources does each person get to use?)
So when are we going to see a global convention that limits aviation? Aviation is not a part of Kyoto. The EU emmissions trading scheme does not seem to limit flying very strongly (the Plane Stupid people make that pretty clear.)
So the question is, where is the binding global agreement to limit aviation going to come from?
New Statesman - The economics of conquest
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.
If this heating picture is anywhere near right, then Africa and India are in for a very, very rough ride.
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