Red, Green, and Blue

After a campaign that resulted not only in victory, but in the transcendence of Barack Obama to something beyond a political figure and the elevation of David Axelrod to membership in the Rove/Carville College of Cardinals in American political life, the White House has not had much time to bask in victory’s glow. The economy remains in the tank, Afghanistan is drawing more frequent comparisons to Vietnam, and the health care and climate change fights have been taxing.

Yesterday, Obama hopped a plane to Denmark for a whirlwind Scandinavian tour where it was thought that his presence and pitch might push Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics across the goal line. Instead, ChiTown did not make it out of the first round of balloting. Safe to say that if the White House knew that, Obama would not have made the trip. The failure marked the first - and probably last - time that a sitting US President schilled in front of an IOC selection committee.

The miscalculation is a familiar one. Just after Labor Day, POTUS addressed a joint session of Congress to drive home his point on the urgency of health care reform happening this year. Now barely into October, the only Senate health care bill thought to have a chance on the floor emerged from committee with no bipartisan support. And, as October begins it is clear that if any health care reform bill is signed in 2009, it will not include the now notorious “public option.”

In both cases, the White House made the decision to put their guy out there, but - evidently - no one counted the votes beforehand. The situation is eerily similar to the early administration flubs in the appointments process (i.e., the Daschle false start and the Judd Gregg quagmire). Any good party whip knows that you do not bring a bill to the floor until you know how the roll is going to be called.

As a result of Denmark, Obama winds up wearing a piece of a defeat that was inevitable and it was not even his fight. The Chicago Olympics story is clearly being played up for everything - and more - than its worth by the Right, but it is worth considering why - given that the Chicago bid was circling the drain - Obama let himself get dragged down with it?

When the call came asking for his support, White House staffers should have told the Chicago team to spend 48 hours having coffee with everyone who held a vote, and bring back their tally. If it looked close, then Obama has a tough call to make. But, if they cannot bring back a straw poll or if they bring back numbers that show the Windy City being blown away, then the White House has an easy answer: “love to help, but…”

As the world closes in on December’s big UN climate change conference — back in Copenhagen — it begs the question: is the White House strategy informed by good ground-level information on where other parties sit? Clearly, that strategy includes putting pressure on reluctant Senators with the prospect (read: threat) of EPA regulation of emissions in the absence of comprehensive legislation, even something as watered-down as Waxman-Markey. The upside to handing things off to Lisa Jackson is that it may force the hands of some of the upper Midwest Dems Obama needs to get to 60. And, even if it is not enough of a prod to move a bill through the Senate, it allows Obama to fly his flag in Copenhagen.

But, what if they are not close to 60? What if the lever is not the right one to swing the votes they need. Based on their recent due diligence, it is difficult to say whether the White House even knows where their votes are, who can be swung, and how. That said, should they roll the dice with an EPA plan? How will the inevitable backlash inside the US look on the global stage?

Strong political interests are already lining up against the idea of an executive power move on carbon, and with a lot of Dems looking more vulnerable for the mid-terms in 2010, you have to wonder if the move does not just paint Obama back into a corner and have allies running in the other direction on climate change.

On the campaign trail - in spite of Reverend Wright - Obama earned the gloss “No Drama Obama.” A little less than a year into his tenure as President, the shine is wearing off.

Flickr photo by RobBeer.

Just as it seemed that differences over contentious issues regarding the next climate treaty were ironing out and all parties moving ahead with a common agenda, the developed countries, US in particular, threatened to stall negotiations until developing countries pledge equal emission reduction measures.

According to new reports, American negotiators demanded that there should be similar mitigation obligations for developed as well developing countries. The demand was strictly against the unanimous decision to draw distinction between capacities of developed and developing nations to reduce carbon emissions taken at the Bali Climate Conference in 2007.

Developing countries, led by India, opposed the demand in one voice and forced the American negotiators to back down.

United States’ stance came as a surprise given that officials from the Obama administration have been in constant talks with various developing countries and that these talks have resulted in many developing countries agreeing to voluntary emission reduction plans. It was that since the carbon output of most developing countries is much less than that of developed countries and that they are not technically and financially equipped to take up bold mitigation measures a clear differentiation between mitigation measures taken up by the two parties. Read the rest of this entry »

About ten weeks from now leaders from nearly 200 countries will meet in Copenhagen to discuss the next climate treaty. During the last two to three years governments around the world moved to and fro over contentious issues like funding, technology transfer, intellectual property rights and emission reduction targets. As the world started to look for a replacement of the Kyoto Protocol, the start was slow with no sign of urgency even as the UNFCCC recommended a 25 to 40 percent reduction in global carbon emissions by 2020.

But the change at Washington brought a colossal change in the pace of global climate negotiations. The United States had played a vital role in formalization of the Kyoto Protocol but never ratified the same which created a gapping hole in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. With the failure of Kyoto Protocol acknowledged by almost all it is clear that the we cannot afford to repeat the mistake committed in the past. United States’ commitment to act boldly and swiftly has become the make or break issue for the next climate treaty. Read the rest of this entry »

Protests from the tiny and good-tempered to the large and tragic this week, starting with the small and apparently ineffectual.

Ineffective Canadian protest

On Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell claimed that the oilsands mine that it operates at Muskeg River in northern Vancouver, Canada, was still running at full speed, despite the second day of environmental protest by Greenpeace activists who had arrived at the mine on Tuesday and prevented the operation of a super-sized dumper truck and a hydraulic mining shovel.  The protest is intended to show that the utilisation of Canada’s oilsands desposits is a contributor to worsening climate change.

Fatal Peruvian protest

In Peru, the government has acted on the financially troubled and environmentally challenged Doe Run Peru smelter. Their response to the closure of the site has been to give the operators a 30-month extension on their previous environmental clean-up deadline.  Production was halted in June, when banks cut off finance to the operating company: U.S.-based Renco Group. Now Renco says that it expects to obtain new loans and restart production now that 30 months have been added to the October deadline. If the plant reopens, around 20,000 jobs could be saved, but La Oroya will remain one of the most polluted towns on the planet for some time to come as spokesman has said Renco requires three years to undertake the clean-up. In unrest at the plant this week, one policeman died and at least three others were injured as protesters demanded the government reopen the smelter.

Polite Scottish Highlands protest

In the Scottish Highlands, a village of 270 persons has managed to obtain a 283 signature petition against proposed quarrying at Muir of Ord. Ord is famous for its distillery which produces whisky and several local businesses have lodged protests on environmental grounds. The entire 140-member Conon Fishings Syndicate has demanded safeguards for salmon fishing, and the Glen Orrin fish farm fears it could be at risk from flooding and reduced water quality. A local fruit farm has said the quarrying will have a detrimental effect on its business and adversely impact local wildlife. These protestors say this adverse effect on local business would counteract potential economic gains from the quarry which will extract sand and gravel from a 22-acre site over a 15 year licence period. Local wildlife like otters, ospreys and red kites may also be affected as their habitats are damaged, especially round local rivers.

Highlands photograph author’s own

The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.

City Zoos linked to disease outbreak

Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily.  Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.

However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.

Youngsters most at risk of harm

The concern is partly that very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults.  But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.

One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands.  It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.

City Farm photograph author’s own

After spending some time bringing together Israel and Palestine for a handshake photo-op in New York, President Obama turned his attention to a problem that may prove equally daunting: global cooperation on climate change.

In his first UN appearance since taking the Oval Office, Obama staked a lofty position for the US, promised that the US is “determined to act,” and that the US “will meet our responsibility to future generations.” Chinese President Hu Jintao matched Obama’s rhetoric, pledging that the Chinese would commit to a host of progressive steps around renewable energy and emissions reductions, but also cautioning that developing economies like China’s “should not … be asked to take on obligations that go beyond their development stage.”

The summer saw a lot of pre-positioning in advance of Copenhagen, and with today’s UN General Assembly marking the beginning of a series of mini-summits in the lead-up to December’s big climate change conference, the volume on those announcements will only increase along with their frequency and grandeur.

Still, with Obama facing an uphill battle on domestic climate change legislation and China hiding behind their “developing” status, Copenhagen is threatening to become little more than a public relations event with little real concerted action. The US will have to avoid making the push for global leadership on climate change into a new breed of arms race that would find Obama and US policymakers at a significant disadvantage against the Chinese in the following ways:

Paying Lip Service is Costly – China, India and other developing countries want the US-led West to subsidize their carbon reduction efforts. If the West balks and no comprehensive global agreement emerges, the US could still find itself saddled with costly commitments made in going toe-to-toe with China as a demonstration of leadership and willingness to cooperate. For example, at the UN, President Jintao made the headline-grabbing promise to plant enough new trees in China to cover the area of Norway. Jintao also promised to get China to 15% renewable energy within 10 years, a much more ambitious timeline than any US plan. While it may not represent the kind of economy-crippling commitment that China fears will result from a global agreement, these programs will be costly, and Obama has his hands full just trying to pay for health care.

Democracy’s Dilemma - Not only is Obama hamstrung by health care, an increasingly troublesome war in Afghanistan, and an economy that is still teetering; but, he also has the mettlesome matters of bipartisanship, political pressure and budget restraints. While a strongly Democratic House could barely pass a weakened climate bill, Jintao and the Chinese have a one-party system overseeing a command economy that gives the Chinese a lot more adaptability as circumstances dictate in Copenhagen, in the world press, and on the geopolitical landscape.

The World Won’t Grade on a Curve - The Chinese are already crying foul over efforts to stifle their economy for the sake of climate change action and the world community is not expecting much from the world’s fastest growing economy and most voluminous emitter. Commitments like those above are enough to make a splash and convince the world that China really is trying. By contrast, Senators from Obama’s own party are refusing to discuss the prospect of domestic climate change legislation unless it includes trade protections. That kind of opposition in his own party makes a lot of his words ring hollow while the Chinese will certainly be able to deliver on whatever proposals they float. There are no handicaps in this game, so even if they overshoot on a much lower standard, the Chinese promise to steal Obama’s thunder.

Conventional wisdom says you should never enter a land war in Asia. The same might be said for wars of words.

Flickr photo.

Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Thursday this week seems to have been a key day for environmental protest.

Chinese pollution protest

In Fujian Province, eastern China, villagers blockaded a road to protest against high levels of lead in the blood of their children. Local residents are convinced that the children’s excessive lead levels are the result of pollution from the  Huaqiang Battery Factory. Authorities have ordered China’s environmental protection bureau to increase oversight of the plant. The protest comes in the wake of several similar protests against industrial plants that have succeeded in getting polluting factories closed down.

Manure message

And in the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’. The protestors, all women, chose Clarkson because he has a sceptical attitude to climate change. Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear, a car programme, and has recently driven to the Arctic. In the past he has made inflammatory remarks about the effects of climate change, describing walkers who demand access to land as ‘urban communists’ and cyclists as ‘Lycra Nazis’.

New Zealand animal foods protest

And finally on the same day, 17 September, a New Zealand protest against palm kernel imports ended inconclusively.  The company, Fonterra, is a dairy supplies specialist and also a cooperative with over 11,000 dairy farming members in New Zealand.  Greenpeace claims there is both local and international concern about the nature of the palm oil industry globally and protestors chained themselves to the cranes of the ship delivering the imports.  Feed imports for livestock are an increasing contentious issue – Greenpeace says that corn and grain farmers in New Zealand have supported their action because their own products have been outpriced by cheap imported livestock foods and that endangered species are being further threatened by land clearance fuelled by the palm oil export industry. 14 protesters, charged with unlawful boarding of a ship, will be appearing in court next week.
New Zealand sheep courtesy of PhillipC at Flickr under a creative commons licence

After months of staunch resistance to mandatory emission reduction targets the Indian government has hinted that it is willing to consider a national legislation on voluntary emission reduction targets.

India’s environment minister Mr. Jairam Ramesh acknowledged for the first time that his country needs to take up bold responsibilities in order to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change. The proposed legislation could include emission reduction targets for the year 2030 for the most polluting and carbon intensive industrial sectors.

India has been against mandatory emission reduction targets putting forward two main arguments - one, its per capita emissions are among the lowest in the world and two, taking bold measures to reduce its carbon emissions would adversely impact its endeavor to eradicate poverty. The proposed bill would address both these issues and could serve as a path breaking legislation striking a balance between the economic and social costs and the mitigation measures. Read the rest of this entry »

The leader of one of Australia’s most influential unions has said that green jobs is a ‘dopey term’. Tony Maher went on to suggest that many of the environmental campaigns run in his country are ‘judgemental nonsense’ and that industries like coal and steel will have more impact on both prosperity and the creation of a low carbon future than people realised. As an example, he claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes would require vast amounts of steel and that this steel should be produced in Australia by Australian workers.

Union fights for blue-collar jobs, not green-tinged ones

Maher is President of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, a constellation of workers that might look odd in many other parts of the world where ‘green’ industries like Forestry have separated themselves from extractive industries by putting logging in with extraction and keeping woodland husbandry and tree surgery in with farming.  For over ten years, Tony Maher has spoken on behalf of the union, which states in its publicity material that it is the principal union for both brown and black coal mining. Brown coal is relatively recent in origin and falls between peat, which is still largely vegetable in structure, and bituminous coal. It is often known as lignite.

Many people feel that brown coal should not be extracted because it should be kept as a reserve for the distance future when it may have developed further and become more like bituminous coal or black coal, which is more consolidated, deep black in colour and burns more readily with greater fuel efficiency.

Union leader says more coal, not less, will be burned in 2050

It’s not surprising that a union leader representing coal minders should object to ‘green jobs’ but Maher went much further than simply protesting against the removal of blue-collar industries, he added that he thought that by mid 2050 the planet would be using twice as much coal as at present and that the recent protest at Hazelwood power station was ‘just silly’.

Hazelwood Protestors Get Direct

‘Switch Off Hazelwood’ the campaigning group that organised the protests claims a successful weekend’s protesting, with more than 300 people turning up over 12 and 13 September, to use such direct action tactics as the Bikezilla (a number of bicycles welded together to form a giant bike, which was impounded by police), the Ministry of Energy, Resources and Silly Walks, the wombat warriors and forming a giant windmill with their bodies.  The police say 18 people were arrested, the action group says it was 22 individuals who were arrested and then released on bail.

While protestors said that removing Hazelwood could be the first step to creating an employment-rich, renewable energy manufacturing region, Maher’s comments suggest that the opposition to renewable energy is entrenched in the old blue-collar industrial regions as a threat to well paid jobs, as well as being perceived as a threat to lifestyle. Maher added that Australia produced some of the best-quality coking coal in the world, which was used to make premium quality steel and that it was ‘silly’ to raise objections to industries that created a large amount of Australia’s exports.

Switch off Hazelwood: Starring the Wombat Warriors courtesy of Sean Bedlam at youtube