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.

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.

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.

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

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…

• COAL is the BIG ISSUE – Need to start cutting it NOW.
• Energy demand is going up with GDP. This has to stop.
• We need Nukes and we need CCS and we need them now.
• Sorry guys, 1% GDP is not going to take our problems all away.
• Biodiversity is bigger than climate change. We might solve climate change, but by then 50% of all species on the planet will be KIA.
• Why the fuck are politicians BORROWING money to support unsustainable GDP growth. Stop N.O.W.
• Carbon taxes, all EU countries will have them within five years.
• And while they’re at it they’ll be taxing carbon on the borders too. Take that China-import-export market.

Now, if you’re still interested, go read the good professor’s book.

Image: some rights reserved by Dom Dada

Nature magazine continued their Darwin season of talks in London tonight with a panel discussion entitled What Price Biodiverstity?.

The top caliber speakers were Professor James Lovelock, independent scientist, author of “Revenge of Gaia”. Michael Meacher, MP (Labour) & former Minister of State for the Environment and Sir Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University. Not a joker amongst them. I’d also add the the quality of questioning from the floor was second to none, quite refreshing at these sorts of things where one can usually expect some variety of rogue element to attempt a hijacking of proceedings.

I only found out only this morning about the talk via @zzgavin on Twitter, and have time but for some brief notes here before getting on with the rest of my evening. The entire discussion took place in the context of one larger and one (debatable) less significant event. Climate change and the recession. But doesn’t (shouldn’t?) every conversation right now take place in that light.

So in no particular order:

Tiskell on the state of the biodiversity conversation: Talking about climate change is [relatively] easy, about biodiversity is much harder. We don’t even have the value system to measure it and the common man on the street simply can’t understand it. They won’t understand what we are losing until there is a cataclismic biodiversity event.

There was general agreement that the global conversation on protecting biodiversity was at least five years behind that of climate change. An example of this, in the UK we have the Stern Report on Climate Change and even a Climate Change Office. We have nothing similar to start combating the threat to biodiversity.

Meacher on our current value systems: These current systems have led to a belief that “only nature that can be made profitable should be preserved”. That’s the dangerous result of putting economic value on biodiversity

Lovelock on carbon trading schemes: Totally disastrous. As a result of carbon trading, less efficient coal stations in east Germany are producing MORE co2. These permits have been either given away of sold too cheap. Why didn’t we charge polluters, not give them credits. Carrots instead of sticks.

Tickell on industry: [they] wants to do the right thing and they will if they are given clear limits in which to operate in. Heads of industry aren’t oblivious, they know there are serious problems in the world but they want to know where they stand. [Political] leadership has to show the way here and TRUST that they can do it and we wasn’t this change.

Tickell on biodiversity in agriculture: Agriculture shouldn’t be a market activity. The market is set up to measure short term gain. It does that but does not record the long term damage industrial agriculture in particular does to land resource. Agreculture should be a community activity, enriching all around it.

Meacher on the subject of biodiversity value: even if we can come up with a bio-diversity index instead of GDP to give us a quantitive measurement of human activity, how do we make this measurement operative. How do we make companies change their business plans to fit this. How do we tie it into government budgets.

He mentioned in fact a sustainability index he had presided over in the Department of the Environment that never got anywhere because nobody had any . Meacher verged between accute peceimism and optimism at times, which struck me as sounding odd coming from a career politician. He was convincing when explaining his belief that we are now on the brink of a new world economic, environmental and cultural order.

Lovelock being the oldest and at times sounding the wisest got to round off the evening. He did so clearly, directly and without hesitation when asked if it were possible for a biodiverse Earth to survive.

Time, he said, is the biggest barrier to halting biodiversity decline and climate change. We are so far down the path that the goals of 2040 and 2050 that our institutions have set will be far too little too late.

There’s two massively important movements taking place right now in Britain, here are some important connections between them. I’ve already written a little about the Digital Britain interim report but more importantly Charles Leadbeater has written a lot and put it all together in a handy portable pdf. Download it here.

The original report either isn’t aware of, or Lord Carter, it’s author, didn’t have the balls to ask some big questions. Leadbeater does. There’s far to many to list here, go read the document, however I will highlight one important conclusion.

It strikes me, as it has done Leadbeater, that the government on the one hand is proposing what they think is an ambitious drive to take the UK’s new media industry and infrastruture forward into the next quarter century. Yet they don’t want to involve us, the public. Moreover, they patently don’t trust us.

Reading Digital Britain one cannot help but feel the government finds the opportunities for people to self-organise through the web all too unsettling for its more technocratic, controlling tendencies. Digital Britain conveys none of the excitement that many young people feel about the world of semi-structured free association that mutual media is creating. This interim report, written behind closed doors in an era of open communications, is little more than piece of space filling to persuade us the government has a vision for the future when in reality it seems to have none, at least not yet. (A model of what can be done, even in government, is the parallel The Power of Information report, which is fully of exciting recommendations for how government can open up its information for citizens to use in novel ways. )

The government say that the UK must be allowed compete with the most advanced nations on Earth and to do this we must have an advanced IT infrastructure. But to use an advanced infrastructure, to create an advanced infrastructure, we must have entrepreneurs, thinkers, dreamers and digital literates. And they must be given tools and those tools imparted with trust.

– –

This basic mistrust of us the people is the reason the Convention on Modern Liberty not only happend this weekend, but was much needed. What could have been another umbrella demo by the SWP and their ilk has the potential to be a real political movement. Here’s why.

Henry Porter quotes David Cameron in today’s Observer. Scarily I agree with him:

“When academics look back on Labour’s time in power,” he said, “the erosion of our historic liberties will surely be one of its most defining, and damning, aspects. Things we have long thought were part of the fabric of liberty in this country – such as trial by jury, habeas corpus with strict limits on the time that people can be held without charge, the protection of parliament against intrusion by the executive – have been whittled away.”

And Nick Clegg from the same article is a little less dramatic but a little more on point:

“We are the most spied-upon country in the developed world, with a million innocent people’s DNA on a criminal database, more surveillance cameras than anywhere in the world, parents snooped on by council officials checking up on where children spend the night, and ceaseless attempts by government to limit our freedom of expression. That’s why the work of the Convention on Modern Liberty is so important in highlighting the liberties we have lost and inspiring a new alliance in Britain to take our freedoms back.”

Both of these quotes go back to the trust issue. Nobody highlighted this issue better than Philip Pullman in his address to the convention. If Clegg highlighted the problems above, Pullman took the higher road and asked us what sort of society we WANT to live in. For if we don’t know the answer to that what have we got to complain about and what have we to aim at.
Courage, virtue, intellectual curiousity, modesty and honour are five big optimistic virtues that are pulled out and analyzed. You won’t find me arguing.

Just imagine for a moment a nation with the courage, with the modesty, with a simple wakeful clarity of mind that are so
near at hand, so easy to find, if only we knew. Imagine a government that trusted the people who elected it. Imagine agencies of the state that regarded the people’s privacy as something it was the state’s duty to guard, rather like the value of their money and the historic individuality of their town centres and their freedom to speak and write as they like. Imagine a nation that cherished these things as a kind of natural blessing, something obviously good that needed no justification, something like sunshine or kindness or clean water. Or honour.

Now what have these things to do with freedom and the threats to freedom we have been hearing about today? What has the virtue of delight to do with virtue of liberty. Everything. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion cannot sustain delight for very long; joy does not flourish in the garden of anxiety. The society these laws seem to be designed to bring about is one of institutionalised paranoia of furtive hatred and low-level panic, every scrap of delight and gladness we can find is a blow against that fear; every instance of civility and kindness we come across is a clean wind dispersing a foul vapour. Every example we cherish of imaginative play, of the energy of creation and of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science is a weapon in the arsenal and I say weapon, advisedly: we have a fight on
our hands. “I will not cease from mental fight”, said William Blake, and this is the fight he meant. The fight to defend, to restore, and to sustain the virtue which is not now but could so easily be, the natural behaviour of the state.

We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.

That really is a big concept yet one that you won’t find on the manisfesto for government of any of the major parties. At least not yet you won’t. That could change.

I don’t work for the government (they work for me). But if I did I’d have been at UK Government barcamp at the weekend. My good friend Faheyr was there though and his overview is must-read material if you, like me, are all about open government, killing abstraction and simple transparency. Go check it out now.

Sweeping away the old (by flashbak)

Nine times out of ten if I was asked to pick between an parliamentary and presidential democracy as an ideal way to govern a country I’d chose the former. From what I can see it establishes a closer bond between the electorate/community and the parliamentarian who represents them. It allows for a more representative government and cabinet. And the party in power acts as a natural ego check for the prime minister. In theory.

But yesterday was a great example of how a presidential style system can and should work. Out with the old and in with the new. The breath and breadth of fresh air rolling down the Mall was absolutely tangible. In one fell swoop America gets the clean start it is crying out for. And so does the world.

Looking at the parliamentary systems in the UK and Ireland leaves me with little hope for a clean out or clean up. Labour lose the next election and we get the Tories. Hardly something that will bring the spring clean fresh smell to Westminster and the country. And there’s no hope now I think of reviving New Labour, with or without Brown.

And in Ireland the situation is even more depressing. The Fine Gael as the main opposition offer no alternative vision for the country. Fintan O’Toole in yesterday’s Irish Times suggests they simply merge and get on with it leaving Labour as a proper opposition.

On the anniversary of the first Dáil, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who share an analysis of the crisis, need to form a unified government, leaving Labour, which does not share that analysis, to lead a coherent opposition.

That’s as sensible a suggestion as any other I suppose but not like likely to happen leaving voters in the British Isles with no hope of Obama-like change being led by our politicians. We’ll just have to implement the change we need without them.

Sarah's Law. Image: Schlomo Rabinowitz

I’ve been thinking about levels of abstraction in contemporary life a lot lately. Financial abstraction in the markets, production and distribution abstraction in the world of consumer goods and energy supply.
Here’s Andew Sullivan talking essentially about political abstraction in the form of our favourite Alaskan gal:

I’m doing this because Sarah Palin’s contribution is to introduce a new level of detachment from reality to our politics. After Bush-Cheney, this would be hard for anyone. But youbetcha she can.

This has been the pattern from the start of her career: a denial of reality combined with an almost unhinged and unlimited ambition. Since the press is barred from questioning her thoroughly, since we will never know how she responds to the long list of untruths she has told – from the smallest biographical detail to the biggest policy – all I can do is remind my readers of the record one more time before November.

Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.

The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of  love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.

Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure.  It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!

But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.

So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.

Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?

As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.

Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?