This my friends is good. Perhaps formulaic and cynical (the Guardian mentioned Rick Rubin, which is kind of obvious) but that doesn’t take anything away. Totally Utah Phillips.
Tags: gil scott-heron
I know I’m sick of seeing Gerry’s beard every time I load up keepfaking.it. So here’s something much more disturbing. But it looks so pretty.
Tags: coal
“Successfully employed by the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the nineteenth century to describe deviations in astronomical measurements, the Bell curve or Gauss model has permeated our scientific culture, the economy and the self-image of modern society in general. It is more than a technical description. It shapes our thoughts. We think in terms of Gaussian distributions. The problem, however, is that measurements of uncertainty using the bell curve fail to take into account or attach any importance to the possibility of abrupt peaks or discontinuities. Employing such a measurement procedure in world risk society would be like concentrating completely on the grass and ignoring the (gigantic) trees. But in fact the occasional and unpredictable large deviations, even though they are seldom, cannot be dismissed as ‘outliers’ because their cumulative effects are dramatic.
“Traditional instruments of risk management concentrate on normal procedures and regard extremes as inconsequential. This approach is misleading in world risk society, which necessitates a turn towards a non-linear approach: the exceptions that only apparently confirm the rule must be the primary focus of attention.”
- Ulrich Beck in Risk Society
(a big up for discrete mathematicians everywhere)
Tags: bell curves, insurance, Ulrich Beck
Photo (cc) infomatique
Growing up a couple of hundred miles south of “The Troubles” in Ireland during the 80’s had its vagaries, which at this now twenty year vantage point, can hardly be believed, if recalled at all.
Whilst the closest we ever came to their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns was the deplorable Dolores (who incidentally didn’t get much closer herself), we were of course witness to the media battle front. A battle conducted using the deadly weapons of voiceover. In their wisdom, the British government declared that like errant Victorian children, Gerry, Martin and the rest of their Sinn Féin/IRA cohort could be seen but not heard. Picture the scene, it’s the morning after the night before. Another tit-for-tat nationalist/loyalist killing (translation: straight-up murder) and UTV or BBC Northern Ireland is looking for a quote of either condemnation or abhorrence from Gerry or Martin. Well, they weren’t going to get it. No, Gerry would wag his beard up and down with some animated affectation, but all we in TV land would hear was a passionless fob-off and some gibberish about Ian Paisley being neither a real doctor nor authentic reverend. Whatever.
[One suspects all of this may in fact have been a result of intense Westminster lobbying by the Ulster Voiceover Artists union (commonly referred to as the UVAu), but we have no proof of this whatsoever. ]
We are remided of this over the festive period whilst reading some more World at Risk
. Beck proposes a simple thought experiment relating to “global terror” [yes cringe, cringe]. What, asks the German sociolagist, would be the result of a worldwide media boycott of the flash points of global terror. You know, a total worldwide ban on reporting the latest antics of underpants arsonists (do you see what we’ve done there) or shoe bombers. We’ll leave you alone to answer that one.
For Beck argues that it is the now ever present anticipation of terror incident, rather than the incident itself that is the goal of this 21st century terrorism. And it is the “glamour of terror staged in the West which transform terrorism into a power drug.” Beck goes on, when dealing with the discources of global subpolitics, to suggest this power drug is now the developing world’s best narrative in which to fight economic globalization. Certainly the only one in which the media industrial complex of the West will pay constant attention to. Take away that attention and perhaps we’ll get some interesting results.
Tags: bbc, Gerry Adams, Global Terror, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, terrorism, Ulrich Beck
Re-photo (cc) Anthony Mayfield
Within the climate change mitigation discourse, a war effort is often called for. WWII is cited by some as the only time during the history of industrialization that a societal/productivity shift of the order of magnitude now required has happened. But we want to look at a slightly different point in history. Just like post-punk was an altogether better sound than punk itself, the post-war effort (in both Germany and Japan) has plenty of interesting lessons for us when it comes to the subject of societal change.
Let us consider for a brief moment the issue of social capital in post-war Germany and Japan. These countries had just been whooped ten shades of blue, millions dead, and in Japan, two nuclear craters. Understandable if the local populaces felt a bit put out and distrustful of the Allies restructuring plans. Yet the economic turnaround in each country was nothing short of miraculous. Now, we’re not going to get totally reductionist on this, there are plenty of reasons, common and independent, why the original Axis of Evil managed to get back on its feet, but one nugget provided here by Francis Fukuyama stands out in this decade old paper originally written for those friendly folk at the IMF.
Apart from religion, shared historical experience can shape informal norms and produce social capital. Both Germany and Japan experienced considerable labor unrest and conflict between workers, managers, and the state in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis and Japan’s military rulers ultimately suppressed independent labor unions and replaced them with “yellow” ones. After their defeat in World War II, the democratic successor regimes opted for a much more consensual approach to management-labor relations that produced Germany’s postwar Sozialmarktwirtschaft and Japan’s lifetime employment system. Whatever their current dysfunctions, these institutions played a critical role in allowing the two societies to return to growth after the war, and constituted a form of social capital.
What did these institutions do? They bound society. They allowed trust to develop, crucially between workers, so that an honest day’s pay was not going to be wiped out by either hyper-inflation or schemes dreamt up by the occupying powers. An honest day’s work was rewarded and society could get back to rescuing cats from trees and whatever else they do on the banks of the Rhine.
Of course that’s not all Frankie has to say but he goes and ruins his nice ideas with a little apology for Globalisation right at the end, that’s to be expected we suppose. And while we’re on the subject, it’s 2010 and you know what, we’re still not at the end of history buddy!
Back to climate change. Post COP15, there’s a big argument that with the failure of our governments, it is time civil society, and business, stepped up to the mitigation plate. The job they have to do is huge and in order to do it they’re going to have to create even more social capital than was mobilized during the late forties and fifties in Germany and Japan, for without this social capital, the job for CSOs will be next to impossible. But the great thing about social capital is that much like economic capital (i.e. cash), surplus capital can be banked and transferred to those that need it most. Think about a trusted NGO. Let’s say the Red Cross. Over the last century the Red Cross has done a big job in warzones and natural catastrophe areas. On a whole, the world trusts them. When they come looking for money (and trust) in times of peace we happily supply. And when the shit hits the fan they’re ready financially, and in terms of trust, to get to the heart of the action.
Enter the likes of 10:10, a concept keepfakingit endorses so much we went and joined the company. If civil society organisations like 10:10 are to win the day in this battle, you had better believe they are going to have to become the Goldman Sachs of social capital, using every trick in the book to first-off generate that capital, then bank it, and have it spent in the most efficient way possible to cut emissions. Organisations are going to have to work together, and use additively created radii of trust to bring more and more people under their umbrellas of social action. This means building layers and layers of trust (thus social capital) across real life social networks, both horizontally and vertically. Horizontally from nuclear family to nuclear family, through communities, schools, businesses and clubs. Vertically through neighbourhood watch schemes, councils, religious orders and up and over international borders.
This is hugely ambitious, it has to be. And here at keepfakingit we think there’s a chance it may work.
Tags: 10:10, civil society, climate change, COP15, francis fukuyama
One of the strands of thought coming from Copenhagen lays the blame of a lack of fair and binding deal at the feet of the internal US political system, namely the US Senate.
This has brought keepfakingit right back to March and a speech we saw one of our academic heroes, Larry Lessig, deliver to the SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Lessig, who has worked for a decade on copyright law in the US, speaks of classic tobacco science as it now applies to climate change and in particular the health industries in the US. His thesis is that money poisons trust. But that the cesspool of corruption is not the same as it ever was. The dynamics of money and access have changed dramatically in the past 15 years.
He believes legislators’ integrity is actually higher today than any time in the Senate’s history. The corruption he speaks of is a ‘good souls’ corruption that has come from systemic faults . Senators are spending 30-70% of their time on raising money for their own, or their party’s re-election. And this opens up the cracks for the lobby industry.
Some stats. Since Bill Clinton left office the number of lobbyists has doubled and their daily rate has doubled. Using the laws of simple economics, Lessig notes that if the number and value of lobbyists is rising, they must be becoming more effective. He also notes how nobody, on the right or the left, has any interest in changing this system.
Whether you want to blame the EU, China, Obama or indeed the Senate on the failure of Copenhagen, Lessig’s points here are eminently valid. To keepfakingit’s mind this is the biggest, most important political issue in the US today. Lessig does a simple cost benefit analysis on the lobbying industry and the cost here is trust. Ultimately Lessig calls for a ‘Declaration for Independence’. How? Through citizens funding.
Pascal’s Wager is ofter referred to by climate change activists; if we’re right we save the planet, if we’re wrong, we change society for the good anyway, win-win. The situation is exactly the same in the US Senate. To take on big coal, big oil and all the other big lobby groups funding tobacco science we need institutional change. And if we get it there are a lot more benefits, for both the right and left of the political spectrum, than simply a chance to ‘meaningfully’ tackle climate change.
I can’t find a video but here’s some audio that turned up on mediatedhumanities.org.
If you have 45 minutes at all this Christmas, listen to this.
Here’s the audio of the Q&A:
There’s more info on Lessig’s campaign at http://change-congress.org.
In the spirit of festive cheer, and acknowledging it is the best time of year for repeats, Keepfakingit has decided to look back over some of the less serious moments of the past couple of years on our website. Here’s a guaranteed highlight, the Irish Pork Crisis episode of Trash Blanc TV. We still can’t believe we were kicked out of the Ritz when filming this.
This reminder was inspired by @parisreview. An important lesson in life.
Tags: Cian O'Donovan
This is one of the best interviews Franny did all week. We grabed Mark Lynas as he was leaving at a huge all night session. And Tony Juniper is in there too with his analysis of a long and depressing COP15.
Too busy working on the #stupidshow today to post any reaction or analysis on this morning’s non-agreement.
Here’s a screenshot that sums up some of the issues we’re facing as a society, and one of the many reasons COP15 has been so spectacularly unsuccessful at putting a binding agreement on the table.
BTW, tonight’s StupidShow has some great analysis from Ed Miliband, Prez Nasheed, Vicky Pope, Tony Juniper and Mark Lynas, who hadn’t slept in three days, and spent most of the night in the war room with Obama, Brown, Merkel and 20-something other world leaders.
Tags: climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, stupidshow
‘Don’t buy clothes for six months. Then you can buy some of mine.’
It’s always refreshing, but all too rare to hear an A-List fashion icon say something sensible, and be anyway self aware, but Vivienne manages to just about pull it off. Brilliant.
That’s not quite true, but never letting fact get in the way of alliteration is one of keepfakingit’s most closely held maxims. The artists of course were two of the Stupid Show’s guests this evening. Thom Yorke and Vivienne Westwood. While neither have the capacity to gets us the FAB (fair, ambitious and binding y’all) treaty we need, we think both represented to the max.
We’ll have some YouTube here just as soon as its ready.
In other news from around the town, here’s Hillary Clinton’s speech from earlier.
Whatever.
Keepfakingit’s good friend @jamieandrews had this to say, hard to disagree.
Two other issues. First off, it looks like we’re making some progress on REDD. The forestry expert, Stupid Show pundit and 100% hero that is Danilo Mollicone looked like a pretty happy man this evening. If all goes well he believes he has a $25bn per annum commitment on the table. You go D! Of course that’s contingent on the larger scale deal getting done.
Unfortunately that’s about it on the good news stakes. We’re down to only 300 civil society representatives left in the Bella Center meaning NGOs and CSOs are now all but totally locked out. We had a leaked UNFCCC doc that probably wasn’t as big news as the bloggosphere thought it was. It simply stated that if we go ahead and sign what Annex 1 wants us to, we’re looking at 550ppm carbon dioxide and 3 degree warming by 2100. But you know what, we already knew that.
No, the real issue here is that with just over 24 hours to go, this is where we’re at yo.
On the show tomorrow we’re going to have a couple of pieces on the inequality that’s been on display the last fortnight. Despite the optimism and hope shown by our guy Thom earlier, keepfakingit would contend that this conference of the parties is over, and we’re going home. However, once we get over ourselves, we absolutely need to examine, from a science, activist and civil society perspective, how we step up to the plate in the next 6 months. It’s damage limitation time. It looks like we’ve lost a battle here. And while we can blame our politicians and accuse them of not being leaders, you know what, one gets the feeling more people give a shit about Tiger Woods. Let’s think about that one over the next 24. It’s going to be a late night tomorrow so we’re getting some rest. And maybe a drink.
Tags: bullshit, climate, climate change, climatechange, clinton, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, hillaryclinton
Just in from cycling, metro-ing and running around Copenhagen with the #stupidshow team (BTW we have Vivienne Westwood and George Monbiot on the show tonight, 8pm CET). We took in most of the march, until it got to Bella, and I’ll post some photos here. It was just kicking off when keepfakingit had to move so not much to report. We did see a very professional ’snatch’ of an activist from the middle of the crowd by some local police. But other than that not much had happened up until we had to leave to get footage back to the the studio.
Lots going on now though, both inside and out. The NGO access issue has truly fallen apart. We received a mail from Nick Berning of FOE US in the last hour. It’s published in full below and is quite upsetting.
We’ve also this morning seen the mass walkout by the people’s assembly. This was the first big non-sanctioned action of the COPinside the Bella Centre and timed to coincide with the action out side the conference centre. It illustrates the total frustration being felt by those on the insiders right now.
Just in case keepfakingit’s mother is reading this we won’t say that Canada are still acting like total fucking c***s. But they are. Seriously Canada, you have elected some bad people, and have not elected some even worse oil lobbyists. Sort your shit out.
Targets and financing are still the big two issues. But they always have been, so that’s telling you nothing at all. There are some sideshows going on that have produced some interesting initiatives, the sub-national governmental meetings, The E20, the Billion Trees campaign. But these mean absolutely compared with what’s on the table downtown at the Bella Centre.
Finally, if there are signs in the mainstream media that this thing can be pulled out of the fire at the last minute, don’t believe a word of it. This isn’t the World Cup final. There’s not going to be a last minute goal. Our reading of the situation right now is that as the prime ministers and presidents get into town tomorrow and Friday the priority for delegates, or certainly those from the developed world, is posturing.
***** UPDATE 15:20 from Steve Kretzman, Executive Director, Oil Change International at the TckTckTck FreshAir Bloggers Center in Copenhagen
Okay, here’s that FOE mail
We’ve been sitting here for two hours now, about 50 Friends of the Earth representatives, all with accreditation and secondary badges, who have been refused admission to the conference. We are sitting in the registration area, between the registration/credentials desks and the photo desks.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer came out and spoke to us awhile ago and said he wanted to resolve the situation. A few of our representatives have gone to talk to UN officials while we sit here, but our lack of access remains unresolved.
Initially there were a lot of reporters, but the UN has now cordoned us off and closed access to media.
The UN still has yet to give us a coherent reason for our having been denied access. We have been given different explanations by different officials: (1) we are a security threat or (2) there was no more room inside. It’s hard to see how the “no room” explanation makes sense, as they continued to allow other NGO observers to enter even as we were denied access. And as for the security threat, we’re a bunch of policy wonks and youth activists who have been participating in the negotiations every day for two weeks.
We’ve had both a member of the Norweigan and a member of the Canadian parliament come speak to us to lend us their support while we’ve been sitting here
One of the key roles Friends of the Earth has played at the conference has been to advocate for climate justice and the interests of the poor countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis but will feel some of its strongest impacts. Negotiators from those countries are tremendously under-resourced here. For example, I’ve worked with negotiators who have no media officers (I do media work) to help them communicate their position. They are totally outgunned by the massive delegations of the rich countries, and now thanks to the UN’s decision to exclude us, they will have even less support inside the Bella Center to fight for a fair agreement. It’s really shameful.
Also –
Re the entry way more generally: appears that access to the conference has been almost completely shut down. We have a very clear view of the front doors and the security area, and people come through only very sporadically.’
Best,
Nick Berning
Friends of the Earth U.S.
Tags: angry, climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, December, democratic, Denmark, environment, excluded, police, protest, protestors, snow, stupidshow, Wednesday, winter
Our French here at keepfakingit isn’t nuanced enough to give you a full word for word translation of the end of his Klimaforum speech. But we don’t think it’s needed. José Bové (MEP!) clearly leaves nothing on the table during a typically fiery delivery. And we have no doubts he had a tractor load of cow shit in the green room just in case he needed to illustrate his point a little further.
Tags: climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, Green Party, José Bové
After arguements over the text of any potential agreement itself, physical access to the Bella Centre is becoming a key issue on the ground here in Copenhagen. As they say, if you’re not in, you can’t win. And it’s not the big guns who aren’t in, it’s you and me, civil society. More to the point, the NGOs whom the UN have deigned to represent us.
At this point you may be saying to yourself, ‘ah, but why do all these civil society orgs need to be there anyway, just let the political delegates get on with it.’ The answer to that is enshrined in the text of the Rio Declaration. Go check Principle 10:
Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings,
including redress and remedy, shall be provided.
The role civil society has to play here is immense. And we’re being cynically and structurally locked out. Yvo de Boer has today taken responsibility here (trying to track down reference), but that’s not a lot of good to the scores of people who have traveled around the world to take part in proceedings.
Here’s a YouTube clip of yesterday’s queue. It took four minutes to shoot, walking the full length of the queue. We had members of the Stupid Show team wait seven hours in temperatures that fell to zero degrees.
The most galling part of this situation is that it’s going to get worse as the week progresses.
Here’s an overview from @ApolloGonzales:
1) Number of passes
- Tuesday and Wednesday 7000 observers will be allowed in the building as per the current allocation of secondary passes
- On Thursday the allocation will be reduced to 1000 observers only.
It is not yet decided whether this will be done on a tertiary pass system, or by stopping anyone else coming in once 1/7 of any
organizational accreditation has been reached
- On Friday the allocation will be 90 in total
2) Access to the plenary room
- On Tuesday 450 people will be allowed access to the plenary room
- On Wednesday and Thursday it will be 300
- On Friday it will be the 90 accredited people The allocations will be decided by the constituency focal points. [keepfakingit: 90 people! This is going beyond a joke]
3) Booths
At some point all booths in the NGO area will have to come down. It is not yet decided when that will be but likely Wednesday or Thursday [keepfakingit: What the fuck!!! The UNFCCC has had years to plan this. How can they not have this figured out yet]
4) Other space
- The secretariat is speaking to Danish Radio which has big offices nearby the Bella Centre about possible use of their space to transmit what is happening in the meetings
Tags: climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, NGOs, queue
Here’s the state of play after yesterday’s sessions in the Bella Centre.
Tags: ageofstupid, climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, interviews, NGOs, recording, stupidshow
President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. Photo (cc) Matthew McDermott
Keepfaking it just about caught the end of the 350 / Bill McKibben / Mohamed Nasheed rally at Klimaforum last night. Wow. Nasheed is now being talked of as a true rock star of the green movement and it’s easy to see why. He has a personal political biography that’s straight out of a Disney movie, he knows how to work a crowd and he’s got some great speech writers on his team. Big thanks to 350 from where I’ve lifted the transcript below. It’s worth noting the relative simplicity of the language, yet the complexity of the issues Nasheed is clearly not afraid to confront head on. Any why should he be, along with Tuvalu and Bangladesh, the Maldives are first under the climate change bus.
Keepfakingit is always a little weary of the reductionism that leads us to turn numbers such as 350ppm and two degrees into sacrosanct targets. The reality is that the societal change we need is way beyond digestible pseudo-scientific soundbites. But in the hands of a leader like Nasheed maybe these numbers work. If they are used to construct a larger, more inclusive framework. More on this thought a little later in the week.
Mr McKibben, fellow environmentalists, ladies and gentlemen,
Four years ago myself, and many fellow activists, sat in solitary confinement in Maldivian prison cells. We sat in those jail cells not because we had committed any wrong. We sat in those cells because we had deliberately broken the unjust laws of dictatorship. We had spoken out for a cause in which we believed. That cause was freedom and democracy.
There were times, sitting in that prison, when I felt more alone than you can imagine. There were times when I started to believe the doubters, who said the Maldives would never become free. Sometimes it felt like the doubters were right. The dictatorship had the guns, bombs and tanks. We had no weapons other than the power of our words, and the moral clarity of our cause. Many democracy activists like us had vanished, forgotten by history, their struggle a failure.
But, in spite of the odds, we refused to give up hope.We refused to listen to the voices of doubt and discouragement. We refused to be swayed by those who could not see that change was on the way. And we were right to stand up for what we believed.
We won our battle for democracy in the Maldives. I stand before you today as the first democratically elected President in the history of my country.
The path to democracy in the Maldives was not straight-forward. It was bumpy and full of turns. But we were determined that no matter how difficult the terrain, we would reach the end of the road. And we succeeded in our cause.
Four years later and a continent away, we meet here to confront another seemingly impossible task. We are here to save our planet from the silent, patient and invisible enemy that is climate change.
And just as there were doubters in the Maldives, so there are doubters in Copenhagen. There are those who tell us that solving climate change is impossible. There are those who tell us taking radical action is too difficult. There are those who tell us to give up hope.
Well, I am here to tell you that we refuse to give up hope. We refuse to be quiet.We refuse to believe that a better world isn’t possible.
I have three words to say to the doubters and deniers. Three words with which to win this battle. Just three words are all I need. You may already have heard them. Three – Five – Oh. Three – Five – Oh.
Three – Five – Oh, saves the coral reefs. Three – Five – Oh, keeps the Arctic frozen. Three – Five – Oh, ensures my country survives. Three – Five – Oh, makes a better world possible.
I am here to tell you that down the road in the Bella Center the Maldives team is fighting to keep Three – Five – Oh in the negotiating text.
They need all the help they can get from you. Please keep supporting them.And the good news is that we are now part of a growing bloc of nations, all committed to keeping Three – Five – Oh as the central guiding goal of our global survival plan.
These nations need your help and support too.I am not a scientist, but I know that one of the laws of physics, is that you cannot negotiate with the laws of physics. Three – Five – Oh is a law of atmospheric physics. You cannot cut a deal with Mother Nature. And we don’t intend to try.
This is why, in March, the Maldives announced plans to become the first carbon neutral country in the world. We intend to become carbon neutral in ten years. We will switch from oil to 100% renewable energy. And we will offset aviation pollution, until a way can be found to decarbonise air transport too.For us, going carbon neutral is not just the right thing to do. We believe it is also in our economic self-interest. Countries that have the foresight to green their economies today, will be the winners of tomorrow. These pioneering countries will free themselves from the unpredictable price of foreign oil. They will capitalize on the new, green economy of the future. And they will enhance their moral standing, giving them greater political influence on the world stage. In the Maldives, we have relinquished our claim to high-carbon growth.
After all, it is not carbon we want, but development. It is not coal we want, but electricity. It is not oil we want, but transport. Low-carbon technologies now exist, to deliver all the goods and services we need. Let us make the goal of using them.
Let us make the goal of reaching that all-important number: three – five – oh.
We believe that if the Maldives can become carbon neutral; richer, larger countries can follow. But if there is one thing I know about politicians, it’s that they won’t act until their electorates act first. This is where you come in.
History shows us the power of peaceful protest. From the civil rights movement, to Gandhi’s Quit India campaign; non-violent protest can create change. Protest worked in the struggle for democracy in the Maldives. And on 24 October, we saw how protests across the world put Three – Five – Oh firmly on the Copenhagen agenda.
My message to you is to continue the protests. Continue after Copenhagen. Continue despite the odds. And eventually, together, we will reach that crucial number: Three – five – oh.In all political agreements, you have to be prepared to negotiate. You have to be prepared to compromise; to give and take. That is the nature of politics. But physics isn’t politics. On climate change, there are things on which we cannot negotiate. There are scientific bottom lines that we have to respect. We know what the laws of physics say. And I think you know too.
The most important number in the world. The most important number you’ll ever hear. The most important number you’ll ever say. These three words: Three – five – oh. (Three – five – oh) (Three – five – oh).
Treehugger have a good write-up here.
Tags: 350, Bill McKibben, climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, NGOs
One of the jobs Keepfakingit is doing here in Copenhagen is assisting on The Stupid Show, a nightly news and opinion programme coming live from inside the Bella Centre. And on it there’s a segment that goes by the name of Piece of the Action. That’s the bit I’m involved in, scouring the streets of Copenhagen looking attempting to bring you a picture of the unbelievably diverse crowd that’s in town for the COP.
Here are some pics from the shoots.
Certainly the theme for Saturday in Copenhagen, if not Sunday as well, was mobilization. 100,000 marching from the city centre to the Bella Centre, location of the climate change conference, was impressive. More impressive was the diversity of the crowd. Both the international mix and range of organizations represented was phenomenal and in our experience unprecedented (we deal with this particular issue elsewhere).
While it led the mainstream news, to concentrate on the Copenhagen march is to miss the point of what is occuring around the world. According to the wonderful people at 350.org, over 3,000 actions took place globally. Take a couple of minutes to check out some of the media on their site. It’s easy for passionate NGO types to overplay these kinds of actions; 50,000 people marched in London last week for The Wave, In isolation that represents a medium sized UK demo. But add that to what’s going on in 100 or so countries within the past seven days though and a scale emerges. A scale that because of its distribution is easy to miss and easier still to ignore.
We saw Dieter Helm this November in London claim, perhaps correctly, that climate change had yet to produce a real political movement, that traditional politicians had yet to be given a mandate by their constituents. Reasons for this are legion, and it’s more than we have time for tonight to go into. However, around COP15 a light is being lit, and that light is illuminating individuals, communities and even whole nations (Tuvalu, the Maldives et al), who previous to now have not had a mainstream media cycle to jump onto. So a question for us in the NGO and media world is this: how do we turn this spotlight into that mandate Helm referred to? What do we do, and what to we tell Tuvalu to do between now the end of COP15 and Bonn, the next time we can reasonably expect international climate change negotiations to figure on front pages.
Another question then emerges. Yes we can keep shining the light, but sooner, not later, we have to throw the torch to our policy makers and let them run with the lamp. I’m recalling here a recent late night dicussion wiht @jamieandrews and @danielvockins. On whom, we asked ourselves, do we concentrate our efforts. Who are the tradionally invisible policy advisors to government and opposition we need to get to. And crucially, what do we give them for the win. For the language we need to communicate with is that of winning and losing in policy and media cycles. That’s what’s going to get the attention of the latter day Alastair Campbell’s, particularly in the UK and particularly five months from an election.
Back to COP15. 350.org and their like have done a huge job connecting the disparate dots all around the world. Using Copenhagen as the center of a web which brings in strands from all over. We all need to keep joining these. This isn’t about Copenhagen. It’s about giving all those who took part in actions over the past 48 hours the ability to mandate their leaders.
BTW, Keepfakingit will be moving on to the numbers beat Monday as the negotiations start to intensify.
[I'll link this up later, too much to do now]
Tags: climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, NGOs
Keepfakingit has been in Copenhagen roughly 36 hours now. It’s the weekend and certainly today, Sunday, there seems to be an intake of breath and an easing off of negotiations ahead of the oncoming storm of the final few days. Will we get a deal? Probably. Will we get a deal that puts us on that gold paved pavement towards a low carbon future? Your guess at this stage is as good as ours. Whether we do or not though there are some seismic shifts taking place in the way civil society’s representatives are tackling climate change.
This is exemplified perfectly by the choice of Mary Robinson as one of the lead speakers at the vigil outside the Bella Centre Saturday. Robinson as former Uachtaráin na h’Éireann (president of Ireland), represents, to some small degree, the world of politics. Robinson as former UN High Commissioner for Refugees represents a UN insider who knows how the system works and climbed to a top level post. And here’s the interesting part. Robinson as Honourary President of Oxfam represents not only a huge NGO, but a social development NGO that now recognizes climate change as the biggest issue facing it and its ilk today.
In Mary Robinson we have someone who spans three hugely important stakeholder groups at COP15. Politics, civil society and those mysterious people in the middle who are trying to tie it all together and broker a deal. The convergence of these groupings is more than timely, it is vital. That the likes of Oxfam, ActionAid and others are now focusing their collective attention on climate change in such a manner represents a big boost to that process.
However, this isn’t enough. Without meaning to be cynical, Oxfam have not eradicated developing world hunger. So as well as smarter NGOs working in unison we need more cross-over figures like Robinson. Imagine the like of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown leaving Downing street and shunning the JP Morgan directorship for an international role running , who surely has lots of time on his hands that he isn’t
And speaking of former politicians who have seen the (green) light, here’s a poem from Al Gore. Good man yourself Al.
Tags: climate, climate change, climatechange, COP-15, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, environment, Mary Robinson, NGOs
This was shot yesterday, not a great interview, Klein looks bored at times, but good points at the top and bottom. First on NGOs’ lack of realism. Klein makes a good point on NGOs as well as politicians having reason to upsell successful negotiations.
Second, on a more interesting note, what is becoming apparent at the gathering in Copenhagen is that NGOs that have traditionally focused on social development and aid, really are starting to embrace climate change as the most important issue on their collective tables.
The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) kicks off in Denmark’s capital city tomorrow. And I won’t be there. Until Friday. Here’s some background as to why keepingitfake.com will be in town, and what we’ll be doing when we’re there. And before you ask, yes, we’re going by train.
There will be 15,000 delegates at the ‘Glastonbury of Climate Change’¹ with a straightforward mission: save the world from ourselves. Well that’s the idea. No doubt there will be plenty of coal lobbyists, developed world special interest groups and lots of other nefarious characters there trying to spoil everyone’s fun. But let’s pay attention to the good stuff.
First off the KFI itinerary. We get into town late on Friday and we’ll be staying across the water in Malmö*. Mornings we’re going to be pounding Copenhagen pavement with @danielvockins filming segments for The Stupid Show, a daily internet TV show brought to you the Age of Stupid team. More details on that later in the week. Providing we manage to stay out of harm’s way there’s a tonne of things to be doing in the afternoon. We’re still trying to sort accreditation for the Bella Centre where the actual negotiations are taking place. TckTckTck are running a bloggers/media centre nearby in any event so that’s going to be HQ for the week.We’ve also promised a colleague a short video for kids. That scares us more than the toughest Danish police tactics (YouTube).
KlimaForum is the global civil society fringe event running in parallel to the main event. It will seek to influence proceedings across town. Whether it does or not it has some big hitters in attendance and be a focal point for non-delegates in town for the 12 days. Timetable here.
It’s impossible to say at this stage what the day-to-day mix is going to be at the Bella Centre. We know the world leaders fly into town on the 18th but what, if anything, they’ll have to talk about remains unclear. Provisional negotiating are supposed to be finished by the 15th but we’re a long way from getting a short form document ready for high level debate so that’s unlikely.
Future:Media:Change lists four media hubs on which you can follow all the action. As if Keepfakingit.com won’t be able to keep up.
Special shoutout to oneclimate.net. The full social/multi media experience.
Here’s some background on the science which should in theory be supporting the whole thing. If it wasn’t for clowns like this.
Lots of talk about numbers. Remember folks, some of these countries will try to confuse the issue by comparing carbon apples with carbon intensity oranges. So if you want to see how 17% reductions against 2005 levels compares with 20% on 1990 check out this great tool from Sandbag. And if you don’t know your IEA from Perfluorocarbons check this out.
Nick Stern, when asked last week by Dr. Mary Dengler what the two greatest barriers to a real deal at COP15 were, replied succinctly; trust and finances (video here). Let’s see how that pans out. He’s probably right.
With that in mind Nelson Mandela and his crew of oldies but goldies, the Elders, have sent letters to 192 heads of state laying down some serious smack. The Elders team includes Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson [big KFI shoutout and RESPECT to Mrs. R!!!]. Here’s the press release.
Lots of art and culture going on over the 12 days. Rethink Climate is doing a great job of pulling a lot of it together, short review with with photos here. Arts4COP15, put together by the RSA’s Arts and Ecology team, is also doing a great job. As mentioned right here a couple of weeks ago, Ghost Forest will be in town. With any luck keepfakingit will get in front of all of this stuff and blog it up.
The scale of Twitter activity coming from the Bella Centre and environs is going to be truly epic. Here’s some a nice handy list I’ve put together. If you want to be added to this list gimme a shout.
Okay, that’s the brief overview. We’ll be back during the week with more detail on the negotiations themselves.
* Big shout out to Billy and Cecilia who are opening their home to KFI for the duration. Thanks!
¹ Anonymous RHUL Lecturer
Tags: climate change, conference, COP15, copenhagen, Denmark, IPCC, nick stern, UNFCCC
Reading books cover to cover is something I’m not getting done at the moment. I may however persist with Ulrich Beck’s ‘World at Risk’. Handily enough Ulrich gets straight to the point on page one. Handy because I’ve not progressed much further yet.
A suicide bomber attack in which terrorists with British passports planned to blow up several passenger aircraft en route from Heathrow to the United States with liquid explosives did not occur during the summer of 2006… because British police, in cooperation with international colleagues, managed to intervene on time and arrest the suspected perpetrators. On 6 November, barely three months after the thwarted attack, a new EU-wide regulation came into force that imposes severe restrictions on the transport of liquids…
Beck’s points:
It seems our politicians, their policy advisers and the special interests who keep the whole show on the road can at a turn twist a threat, a risk, into a full risk discourse. With little debate and even less implementation friction. For the love of god. I’ll spell this out. A blown up plane takes down maybe 500 people. Do 10 simultaneously and maybe you nail 5k. That’s hardly a Book of Revelations style threat to the species. Like climate change.
Okay, here’s my point; Stern, Hansen, Gore, the IPCC, the clowns at the UEA and everyone else on the anthropocentric side of climate change are going to have to get real. We’ve got more science that we know what to do with. We’ve got millions of people around the world ‘campaigning’ on the issue. And we’ve got a big conference called COP-15 next week that is bringing just about everybody in the world with a say on climate change to the table. Yet never has there been the sudden and unilateral action on climate change mitigation equal in scale to that the small cell of potential bombmakers have had on the personal freedoms of airline travelers*. WTF!
Scientists can continue churning out data. It can be great data. It can be peer-reviewed by the finest peers in the land. Hell, we’ll even get Piers Morgan in to give it some showbiz sexing up. But unless someone (metaphorically) distills it into explosive matter capable of being hidden in shoe heels, it’s going to come to not a lot. At least not anytime soon.
It’s time to push this thing up a notch. How exactly may come to me when I get to page two of ‘World at Risk’. I’ll let you know.
–
A quick BTW, here’s the other Beck (and Hansen) in my life. I’ll take the sociology over the scientology every time but great tune nevertheless.
* I appreciate we should be making flying more expensive and uncomfortable an experience, but let’s just ignore that for the sake of this small blog.
Tags: Beck, COP-15, risk, risk society, rock and roll, terrorism, Ulrich Beck
“I was in a Bedford nightclub man saw a member of the group Take That.”
If there was any justice in the world this would be Christmas number one. There isn’t, and it won’t.
Here’s the official unofficial promo:
Tags: christmas number one, wiley
A really good post by Andrew Revkin on his NY Times Blog on the reaction of the scientific community to the UEA email story.
There’s two good sources here, the first an open letter from Judith Curry and the second some thoughts from Mike Hulme of UEA.
Both have been getting lots of reactions on blogs over the past 24 hours. Hulme’s comments in particular are worth noting:
“the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted.”
Clearly there has developed a gulf between the public space and even legitimate scientific study. And it’s becoming clear that it is this gap that is being exploited very successfully by skeptics of all sorts of hues. Of course, the PR disaster of a response by UEA to the whole ordeal has not helped.
Over a burrito last night on Brick Lane, a couple of non-climate scientists agreed. As long as the researchers at the big climate labs continue to even appear to be locking themselves and their data away, there is going to continue be distrust. That’s sure to lead to more trouble. I’m not sure what the answer is but there’s got to be a space between responding to every dumb request for models and data and ignoring skeptics altogether. Climate scientists must get back on the front foot in dealing with this issue.
Another interesting point by Hulme concerns the politicization of science and structures under which we are tackling climate change:
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
This isn’t the first call for a more well-rounded successor to the I.P.C.C. It will be interesting to see where this argument goes post Copenhagen.
Tags: climategate, COP-15, dot earth, mike hulme
I was at Angela Porter’s Ghost Forest installation outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. Brilliant. The 10 Ghanaian tree stumps really made an impression, not easy in such a space. Here are some photos and I’ve copied the official blurb below. Show’s over now but it moves on to Copenhagen in time for COP-15.
[BTW, hit the full screen on the bottom of the player below, they look a lot better that way.]
Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana.
The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Cop15 Climate Change Conference in December.
Ghost Forest is a carbon neutral project – following input from Climate Care, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset, see here for details.
Ghost Forest Art Installation – Trafalgar Square, London, U.K. 16-22 November 2009
Ghost Forest Art Installation – Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark 7-18 December 2009
Tags: Angela Palmer, art, COP-15, COP15, Ghana, london, rainforests
Think about this next time you’re blown away by some citizen journalism.
Some consensus building and optimism from the editorial in today’s Financial Times [registration wall].
They go on to wade in on the carbon tax vs emissions trading debate. No surprise where our neo-liberal friends come out in that debate:
In theory, a global carbon tax could do this. In the actual world, a global scheme of tradeable emissions quotas is the best solution. To work, such a scheme, which must form the core of any Copenhagen deal, has to meet three conditions: it must lay down a time-path for emissions cuts over several decades (to let businesses and households predict the net costs of such long-term investments as houses and power plants); allow for adjustments if – but only if – the science changes; and impose binding limits on all countries.
There’s a bit about the fairness of developing countries catching a carbon break and then some big numbers:
Selling unused quotas would, moreover, be hugely lucrative for poorer countries. At today’s European carbon price, yearly carbon emissions have a market value of more than €500bn, a figure which could increase significantly as the global ceiling took effect. The potential transfers from rich countries resulting from quota trading could easily swamp the €100bn per year the European Commission has estimated poor countries will need to tackle climate change.
Most countries seem to grasp the gravity of the challenge. If they can also see what is in it for them, a deal may yet be within reach.
It’s a bit late this evening for me to jump into the Stern Report to see if these numbers stack up but it’s a lot of money either way. I also think that last paragraph is crucial. We have a lot of heavy hitting economists on these issues right now. I have my doubts as to whether runaway CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be halted, not to mind lowered within a traditional western capitalism framework but it sure looks like these guys are going to make an effort.
Wow. Just out of a Prof Dieter Helm lecture at LSE. “Climate Change Policy, and why has so little been achieved”. To paraphrase Ted Theodore Logan, Dude laid down the smacketh in a most bodacious way. I didn’t see Nick Stern in the audience. He must have had advance warning of what was coming. Helm started with a growing tribute to his Lordship, how could he not, he was on enemy territory after all. But after calling him the most important economist in the UK right now, alongside Mervyn King, he proceeded to calmly, and very eloquently dismember Nick’s very own Stern Report.
This was no Hallowe’en slasher. Helm is more expert a surgeon. He took aim only at crucial organs and arteries. He chose his spots and cut with the finest of Japanese steel.
For the second time in a week I listed as a speaker told his audience that we are now in the post-science phase of dealing with climate change. The science they have argued is good. Beyond repute in fact. Helm made the point that practically every university on the planet is currently contributing to climate change discourse, and there is remarkable consensus. We’ve passed 350ppm CO2 and are approaching 400 and 500. We all know what comes next. His point here was that the ‘we’ includes our politicians. A politician who now rejects the science of climate change finds himself on the lunatic fringe.
“So why the fuck has there been NO major policy advances in the past 20 years” Helm didn’t say. But that’s what he meant. If we can answer that question maybe we can start to chart a policy course through Copenhagen and beyond.
This begs the question from the Oxford prof, “what bits of economics are painful to policy process”. He spent the rest of the lecture laying some of these out.
–
Now for a word from standard economic orthodoxy.
GDP, given a growth rate of 3% per annum, will be 4x today’s GDP by 2100.
=> We’ll all be 4x “wealthier”
=> 2100 consumption will be 4x today’s consumption
Coal as a % of our energy source goes something like
25% today
28%
30% 2100
Ee-KKKKKK-er!!!!!!
And now back to our scheduled programming.
–
Paraphrasing Prof Helm:
PEAK HYDRO CARBONS IS A BULLSHIT PROPOSITION
We’re not running out of coal. Gas is ok. Oil will continue to be found, as the Arctic melts this gets even easier. Certainly we’re good for at least a century.
Ok, let’s fly through some more points.
Economists mix up manmade vs. natural capital.
There’s a one:one replacement value put on them
Sure there might be no more swallows flying north for the summer, but hey, I’ve got my iPod.
There’s a political truism. Tell your electorate a policy can be achieved cheaply. Fail. When the electorate realise the ruse you’re in trouble Mr. Politician. This is about to happen. Example: the argument that mitigation can be achieved for ~1% GDP.
The utility of tomorrow.
Is the utility of a person in 2100 equal to that of a person living today?
Sure about that?
How about people in 3100?
Fuck that. How about people today?
Does, for a politician/economist, a person in their own constituency have the same utility as some dude hanging in Jo’berg?
Stern argues yes to the above and uses those assumptions in his Economic Review. Bad Economist says Helm. You’re changing the game. While nobody would argue with the virtue of the model, around here, “shit ain’t like that. It’s all fucked up” (Ice-T). Modern society simply does not value us as equal. So why should modern economics.
Onwards. All our leaders are quoting the 1% GDP cost of climate change mitigation. Guys. GET REAL. It cannot be done for that low low price. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Get me?
[Sidenote here for the RHUL massive: Sustainable development is still playing this GDP/Policy game. It's not the rules of the game that need to change. It's the game itself.]
Helm at this juncture takes us on a history lesson, and in the process flattens the Kyoto framework. Framework?!?, what he meant to say was house of cards. An EU joint in the biggest of ways. The whole deal was setup to make the EU look good, and the “cuts” already achieved by Euroland are a mere sleight of hand. This analysis merely backs up postings made right here on Keepfakingit.com earlier this month.
Helm doesn’t leave it at that though. He contends that by signing up to Kyoto, the EU may have made matters worse than doing anything at all! The logic being that by offshoring CO2 to the dev world via dubious CDM deals, more hot air has actually been created than would have been in existence if, for example, all our coal was still made in Wales. As opposed to making it in China, where coal fired electricity is of a higher CO2 intensity, and it then has to be shipped all the way back to Llandudno for that great new PPP housing deal. To make a point here, and he was up front in saying he has no numbers to back it up, Helm puts it out there that G.W. Bush may have done more good than harm by keeping the US of A out of Kyoto. Big statement.
So where is Helm going with this? Well he’s about to flatten the EU ETS calling it a lobbyists dream and rent capture and rent seeking of the highest, or is that lowest order. The volatile prices produced are good for the traders (here that Clark?) but bad for long term investors as there is no long view on carbon price produced. The simple fact is the incentive to cheat here is Massive.
After offloading on his audience about ETS, 2020-20-20 is never going to get the time of day. And it doesn’t. Easy target for an economics prof though so no points there.
So finally to where we all want to get to. Copenhagen. Zero optimism here. Bottom line forecast:
US do nothing on 1990 levels
EU keep on keeping on. That is dress up dubious cuts as real progress.
India gets 4x emissions permissions.
China sets its stall out for 40% US, 40% EU and 1% GDP acquisition from each of the EU and the US. Think they’re going to get it? No. But that’s not really the point.
The only solution’s another revolution
I’m not sure how much of the above makes sense out of context but my notes look good to me. In summary, here’s what went down:
If Helm were at the helm…
Now, if you’re still interested, go read the good professor’s book.
Tags: climate change, co2, COP15, copenhagen, dieter helm, economics, ETS, EU, nick stern, Policy
Frank McDonald writes in the Irish Times that as the EU has grown, its moral strength on environmental issues has weakened. Our friends in the east it seems want to retain their “hot air”. Seems like it’s not the Polish plumbers we should be worried about, but rather the Polish plumbing.
[Hot air] refers to the tradeable bank of credits built up by Poland and others as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. Potentially, these assigned amount units (AAUs) – also held in abundance by Russia – are worth a fortune. But they could seriously undermine the international carbon market.
The compromise agreed by EU environment ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Wednesday said the unrestricted “banking” and use of AAUs at their full value to comply with commitments on emission reductions beyond 2012 would have to be “addressed appropriately” to ensure the environmental integrity of a Copenhagen deal.
Frankie Frankie also mentions poorer EU states’ unwillingness to pay for original members’ polluting past (that’s since ~1750 for those of you in the UK):
Poland, together with other former Soviet satellites, sees no reason why it should have to dig deeply into its own coffers to help other countries combat climate change. (It also wants to hang onto its carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations as long as possible).
Heads of state meet in Brussels to get this sorted. They then have some last minute talks in Barcelona in November. If they can’t find a solution by then it’s tough to see one coming in the pressure cooker that will be COP-15. And ff the EU can’t get their own yard into shape it’s hard to see what leverage they can assert over the US or China.
From the Guardian
I’m using the Trafigura / Ivory Coast / press gagging travesty of human decency as a case story tomorrow. It’s shocking how little attention this is getting in the main stream media. Here are my notes, I’ll add some opinion tomorrow.
The Guardian broke this in the UK so lots of links are from there.
Video
First off check out this video featuring Real Victims ® http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2009/sep/18/trafigura-ivory-coast-probo-koala
Ok, now for some background.
The Guardian publish this background on September 16th. Some highlights:
Trafigura trader James McNicol wrote from the firm’s Oxford Street office block: “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars … Each cargo should make 7m!!”
The plan was to buy a tanker load of dirty fuel, clean it on board, sell the good stuff and then Get rid of the slops.
Trafigura’s London head of gasoline trading, Leon Christophilopoulos, suggested a desperate remedy: a floating refinery: “I don’t know how we dispose of the slops and I don’t imply we would dump them, but for sure, there must be some way to pay someone to take them.”
The Probo Koala, was anchored off Gibraltar. Between April and June, it took three cargoes, each of 28,000 tonnes of contaminated gasoline [and cleaned them]. The Probo Koala’s spare tanks soon filled up with waste containing freshly created sulphur compounds.
The waste was shipped to Amsterdam where nobody would take it. So it set sail for the Ivory Coast. (Note: the Basel Ban, as well as the Bamako Convention, contains strict rules against the export of waste from developed to developing countries and according to Greenpeace clearly applies to this case.)
What followed was an environmental and human catastrophe.
The waste ended up being tipped all around Abidjan. It would have contained such unstable substances as mercaptans, mercaptides, sodium sulphide and dialkyl disulphides. Those living and working nearby risked burns, nausea, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death from contact with such compounds.
Thousands fell ill, the story broke locally and ultimately a case was taken against Trafigura:
As 31,000 Africans, many desperately poor, joined in an unprecedented group action for compensation organised by London lawyer Martyn Day, Trafigura tried repeatedly to give the impression that its ship had only pumped out ordinary slops from tank-cleaning: a completely different type of activity.
Trafigura settled with a £30m deal. That’s just under £1,000 per person involved.
The Guardian carry some details of the settlement here:
The settlement will cost Trafigura slightly more than 10% of its reported $440m (£270m) profits last year, and comes on top of the £100m the company had already previously paid the Ivorian government for a clean-up, also without conceding legal liability.
Hey, it’s like, 2009!
One of the big questions here is why is this only getting decent media coverage in the last month. The answer of course is lawyers.
This from the Financial Times:
The case cast an unaccustomed and uncomfortable light on a company that had until then enjoyed a low-profile existence as one of the world’s leading traders in commodities, including oil.
Trafigura has made heavy use of libel lawyers – including two defamation lawsuits and at least one court injunction – to combat coverage of the case, in which it continues to deny liability.
The company and Leigh Day & Co, lawyers for the Ivorians, reached their financial deal to settle allegations that the waste dumping had caused flu-like symptoms in people who were close to the site.
CSR: Letter to the Editor
This from the Guardian on 18th September.
The UN special rapporteur’s report on the conduct of Trafigura (Report, 17 September) raises serious issues about corporate conduct and accountability. Affected victims in Ivory Coast have waited long for an effective remedy. While acknowledging the nuances in a case like this, the company’s reported attempts to stifle the freedom of expression of civil society and the media have done a disservice to human rights and to all in business and beyond who have striven to improve standards.
John Morrison
Institute for Human Rights and Business
Is this kind of City-media-lawyer-we’ve-got-bigger-dicks-than-you shit even legal? We’re going to find out, Conservative Peter Bottomley thinks not.
According to (who else but) the Guardian, he told MPs he was reporting Carter-Ruck, to the Law Society, saying that no lawyers should be able to inhibit the reporting of parliament.
“I will be seeking their advice on whether it is proper for any lawyer to purport or intend to inhibit the reporting of parliament,” Bottomley told the Guardian.
“It is the job of the press to make aware to all what is known by a few. Any court action which inhibits that should be approved at a very high level, with full justifications, and in normal circumstances, should not be made in secret.”
And just to reassure us all, GB has called the case “unfortunate”. Yeah thanks Gordon. Just like how it’s going to be “unfortunate” you’ll be an ex-prime minister next June.
In terms of media discourse, the breaking of the court ordered gag is interesting. I’m not sure it’s altogether Earth shattering though. Here’s what Guardian supremo Alan Rusbridger has to say. Go read it yourself. I’ve got other things to worry about.
So the media were bound by the laws of the land and those that would abuse them. What about NGOs. As far back as September 2006 Greenpeace were all over this.. Here’s an interesting para from that press release:
One question is whether the wastes were entirely generated via on board operations. In a statement to the press the charterer Trafigura states that the caustic nature of the waste was from use of caustic soda as a detergent for tank washings. However given the rarity of using caustic soda to wash tanks that carry refined petroleum products, it is not unreasonable to consider that the waste could come from land based sources.
After the Ivory Coast government and Trafigura reached a deal on cleanup costs, but importantly not on compensation for victims or even an admittance of culpability, Greenpeace came back with more.
“One cannot do justice without knowing the facts in their entirety. At this stage, it would have been more appropriate to secure a provisional settlement with an advance payment, rather than one that closes the books definitively, especially when the full extent of liabilities have not yet been determined,” said Jasper Teulings, Senior Legal Counsel, Greenpeace International.
Although this settlement has no bearing on the legal rights of the victims of this disaster, it is feared that the victims will now receive little, if any, support from their government in pursuing justice.
“This Faustian deal may provide the Cote D’Ivoire the much-needed funds to deal with the clean-up, but it is by no means fair. Trade in hazardous waste is a serious crime under international law (2), and by agreeing to this deal, the President has signed away his country’s right to bring a criminal corporation to justice,” said Helen Perivier, Toxics Campaigner, Greenpeace International, “The ease with which international environmental laws are broken and questionable deals exchanged for real justice, painfully highlights yet again, that the international community creates laws but simply lacks the political will to implement and enforce them.”
And Greenpeace is continuing the fight to convict Trafigura of a crime. Something that has not happened anywhere yet. This from Reuters.
Trafigura for their part have a series of related press releases on their site. Headlines such as
“High Court confirms that Probo Koala ‘slops’ cannot have caused deaths, miscarriages, or other serious or long-term injuries”
and
“SETTLEMENT VINDICATES TRAFIGURA”
aim to tell their side of the story. No doubt Carter-Ruck will have signed those release off after careful inspection.
The ship
In a move straight from Radar, here’s four links from the past week or so. Keepfakingit says yes to the best.
A Liberal Defence of Money by William Davies in The Liberal. Davies throws some high-value grenades back in the direction of Chris Anderson and the Free brigade.
The COP15 Train is being organized by the Campaign against Climate Change to get you to Denmark for some mid-talks debate. All aboard from St. Pancras International Friday 11th December.
Penn Station, New York. The way it used to be. It cost too much to clean the windows…
NEF, The New Economics Foundation. The independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being. The aim, to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues.
Tags: links
I learned to knit last weekend at the Electric Picnic festival in the Irish midlands. The wool used was made from tents discarded at the end of the festival the year before. Check it out:
Or view the set here on Flickr.
Big shout out to Re-Dress and Cultivate who made it happen.
Not sure what A-List artists and pro-wrestling has to do with bears. Here’s what the WWF website says:
For over three decades, our army of sturdy panda collecting boxes stood outside shops and offices around the UK, but were all recalled in 2007.
Rather than recycling the lot, we got together with specialist curators Artwise and challenged top British artists to reincarnate them as innovative and memorable artworks, to communicate the importance of our work in a truly inspirational way.
“Back to nature” is not a trip to the country-side. It’s a total realignment of humanity’s place in the encyclopedia. That realignment, or rather that correction of a categorization that should never have happened in the first place is one of the core treatises of the Dark Mountain Manifesto. And within the manifesto is as strong a call to action for writers, musicians and artists of all hues, to embrace a new thinking of our place in the world as Keepfakingit has seen for an awful long time.
The Manifesto is the work of Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth. My involvement in the project is slight. I answered a crowd-sourcing call for funding over Twitter and donated a small amount towards the publication of the first edition. The attraction at the off was simple. Here’s a project that seeks to address climate change through a wholly fresh literary/artistic prism. At least that’s what the pitch said, and that was good enough for me and my PayPal account.
The meat and potatoes of the slim hand-stitched 18 page tome as I see them:
Thesis 1.
Civilization is built on little more than beliefs. As beliefs fail, so too does civilization.
Thesis 2.
We are not apart from nature, from the world around us.
Climate change is the ultimate clash of civilization versus nature. Things won’t be fine. We’re not even sure if we want it to be fine.
Thesis 3.
What if we looked down? We believe it’s time to look down.
Thesis 4.
Artists are the only ones who can uncouple mankind’s ego from the blinkered view that separates us from nature.
Thesis 5.
Ecocide demands a response.
So Hine and Kingsnorth clearly aren’t overly concerned with telling us to change the lightbulbs or put a brick in the loo. In fact they don’t give a shit about that sort of middle-class-doing-my-bit-to-waylay-my-guilt approach and I’ll warrant the organic field-reared Spring lamb on offer down at Waitrose isn’t top of their shopping list either.
And why should they be. The time for small actions is over. This Manifesto is about the big stuff. The fragility of our social fabric and how that fabric, due to the wear and tear being inflicted upon in by climate change is about to rip right in half.
Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad are both quoted on the way to the assertion that
Our civilisation is built on little more than the belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
And it is in the belief that mankind is apart from nature that the problem starts.
The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won.
So it is nature that will suffer the ravages of climate change. But as luck would have it we (humanity) are outside of that nature. Yes Katrina and her bad tempered companions will occasionally give us a good going over but we’ll come up with solutions, “solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius.”
In the Guardian last week George Monbiot debated Kingsnorth on the merits of this viewpoint. It’s a debate that every climate change activist should read, one which should, if only for a moment, make all of us who consider ourselves part of this movement question what it is we’re trying to prevent. Is it nature’s destruction, the destruction of our own civilisation or something else entirely? And isn’t even the term “nature’s destruction” rather missing the point if we are after all joined at the hip.
During the debate Monbiot accuses Kingsnorth of actively longing for the other Eden, the post-fabric-ripped Mad Max visage. After having re-read the Manifesto it is more apparent that Kingsnorth does indeed seem to come out in favour of the nuclear option. But what of it? As a society, a civilization, surely we must once in a while look in the mirror in an effort to see of what sort of stuff we’re made. And if we don’t like what we see what is wrong with having the balls to put another vision on the table.
And this is a crucial point. Those ascending the Dark Mountain would have us believe we’re scared even to do that, to imagine. In their words scared to “look down”. And scared the economists, the priests of mono-theism and the politicians should be because this reflection offers them only an end to their way of thinking, doing and controlling.
So to the Manifesto’s ultimate cry. Our “leaders” won’t allow us to look at ourselves with a clear gaze. They won’t allow us examine ourselves and build that metaphysical bridge back to nature, the logical response to a diagnosis that is writ large by the Manifesto.
But ecocide demands a response they proclaim.
That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilization itself? What gallery mounts an exhibitions equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?
We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.
[Checklisted as Uncivilised artists before their time are Robinson Jeffers, John Berger, Alan Garner, Wendell Berry, WS Merwin, Mary Oliver and of course, Cormac McCarthy]
This is the call for Uncivilised Art. Art that offers a non-human perspective. Being literary types Hine and Kingsnorth’s concern is writing in particular. They insist that this Uncivilised writing
comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation, but from somewhere on its wilder fringes… from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing.
Ah, so these guys are hippies in disguise, looking for this century’s Watership Down, or Call of the Wild. That’s the cynical conclusion, one which is fended off immediately:
It is not environmental writing, for there is too much of that already… it is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people…and it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.
The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing.
You can bring an artist to the Dark Mountain…
One doesn’t have to travel all the way down Kingsnorth’s Damascene highway of civilisation to appreciate the value of at least daring to look at the map. If we are to fight the almost unwinnable fight against the ravages of climate change we had better know what we want the win to look like. And it is the job of our artist to start painting what that looks like.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto may be be considered a preparatory sketch in this regard. If so, only one question remains, do our artists have the imagination to use it?
I’m involved in organizing a screening of Age of Stupid next Saturday 22nd August. 8pm.
Here’s the official blurb:
The Age of Stupid is the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? MORE
If you can come please do, it’s free in, we’ll have a cheap bar and the movie itself shouldn’t be missed.
It’s taking place on the roof of The Printworks, Ashwin St, Dalston (E8 3DL) and it will look something like this:
Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” is a trip down memory lane for anyone who has every got dressed up to go out and regretted it when they’ve seen the photos. And it should be compulsory viewing for 16 year-olds; this is how ridiculous you’re going to look in 10 years.
It’s also a superb work of cultural anthropology as art. From the Guardian music blog:
There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.
Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion.
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.
Tags: art, clubbing, disco, film, Mark Leckey, Northern Soul, rave
Nicholas Stern in his introduction to ‘A Blueprint for a Safer Planet‘ outlines as succinctly as I’ve seen it just why Copenhagen this December is the most important international conference so far this century.
The Copenhagen deal must be more ambitious [than Kyoto], more international and much stronger. We must agree not only on our ambitions but on the details of action; the timetable is very tight. It will not be easy, but success is vital to the future of the planet.
If we do succeed, we will have created the potential not only to provide a serious response to the problem of climate change, but also to unleash an era of internationalism which could make the world much better at dealing with some of the other important international issues of our time, above all the fight against poverty. If we fail, the confidence and trust necessary to create and sustain an international agreement may be destroyed and the confidence of investors and markets, crucial for the real decisions that will make the necessary changes, will be undermined. Furthermore, addressing many of the obstacles to development, such as water availability, agricultural production, malaria and Aids, will become much harder and more costly. We have to see the issues of economic development and of climate change as parts of a whole.
I’m going to be at the Reboot Britain conference in London on Monday.
Here’s the blurb:
It’s Time to Reboot Britain
An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely – this generation has to overcome them.We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.
But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?
Here’s my personalized schedule
Back to the Supply Chain Gang. I reread this Carbon Trust mini-white paper (Carbon footprints in the supply chain) this morning with a view to picking out the Open possibilities, as the term relates to supply chains.
Rather than a polluter pays approach the paper advocates an holistic view on the entire supply chain for two test cases, the Trinity Mirror produced Daily Mirror and three products Walkers Crisps produces. Let’s get some muck behind our ears and look at the spuds.
Walkers was encouraged to “own” the entire supply chain from start to finish. Broken into three stages this chain incorporates:
Crucially using this methodology Walkers is to take responsibility for the carbon in parts of the supply chain that it traditionally doesn’t own, e.g. the production of the actual potatoes.
So:
For each of the products, the full product life-cycle was analyzed, considering emissions from fuel use in raw material production and distribution through manufacturing and product distribution to disposal and recycling…
Suppliers and other supply chain partners were engaged to provide energy data…
The data gathered was used to build a mass balance map of the flows of materials and energy through the supply chain and to build a footprint of the life-cycle emissions for each product. These results were then used to identify opportunities to reduce emissions by changing process flows and by changing the way the supply chain is structured.
The report goes on to list lots of expected insights. In the case of Walkers it presents this rather interesting finding:
A key opportunity relates to the water content of the potatoes. The overall supply chain can save up to 9,200 tonnes of CO2 and £1.2m per annum by changing the way that potatoes are traded; Walkers can reduce the emissions from the potato frying stage by up to 10%.
…By changing the way potatoes are purchased, savings can be made by both parties.
Here’s how:
You’re seeing where this is going right.
Okay, so that’s a nice little standalone study. Join up the supply chains and look for efficiencies. Easy to do in this case, not so easy once we get exponentially bigger supply chains.
Imagine the pack of salt + vinegar crisps is part of a ready meal. The ready meal is served on a plane. And the flight is part of a package holiday to Lanzarote. How we begin to put all that together so that Thomas Cook can add everything together to find efficiencies. Something it probably hasn’t even countenanced doing yet.
We open up the chain. We expose the information to whoever can use it, or add to it. What next? Can we build a reward economy around creating new efficiencies? Can we introduce a self-learning algorithm to capture these efficiencies and migrate them to similar systems/chains? From a software engineering perspective the answer is undoubtedly yes. How about social engineering?
It strikes me that if some of this were to be done we’d be faced with a problem analogous to those Wikipedia and Flickr have answered so successfully. In Wikipedia’s case it’s giving ownership and trust to its team of non-paid admins, without which it couldn’t function. In Flickr’s case it’s allowing you, I or anybody add descriptive tags, metadata, to each and every photo.
So at last a planet saving use for the social surplus. But how do we engage. Why would a member of Clay Shirky’s gin-soaked masses want to “tag” an Open Supply Chain rather than edit a Wikipedia article or sort a Flicker archive? Figure that one out and we may have a business model here. So answers on a (creative commons attributed) postcard please.
Tags: carbon, co2, dinner, food, Open Supply Chains, spuds, supply chain