by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2007 | Global system
Gideon Rachman’s amusing piece in the FT today about conspiracy theories brings to mind the little visited but nevertheless glorious section of the US State Department website given over entirely to conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Our friends at Foggy Bottom have graciously spent hours diligently rebutting a veritable galaxy of theories, ranging from old favourites (President Bush was behind 9/11!) to various newer theories that may come as a shock to you (the US created AIDS as a bioweapon!).
Top marks for innovative public diplomacy. But it does rather overlook the obvious point: if you think that the US is behind an evil global conspiracy, why on earth are you going to change your mind on the basis of a press release from the State Department?
(Conversely, anyone who’s read Bob Woodward or Ron Suskind’s books lately would find it completely incredible that the US could muster sufficient inter-agency cooperation to conspire to make a cup of tea, never mind take over the world.)
PS. Note that there’s no rebuttal on the site of the CIA bumping off JFK. Or any denial that aliens landed at Roswell. Coincidence? You decide…
by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America, South Asia
As the US-EU bidding war hots up over what should replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, expect to hear plenty more about the ‘AP6’ – or, to give it its full title, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (official website here). The AP6 group of countries (the US, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea; Canada is reportedly also considering signing up) are all devotees of an approach based on technology partnerships and voluntary targets as an alternative to mandatory targets and timetables.
Of course, all of the countries involved are keen to demonstrate that their voluntary approach can generate real results; unsurprising, then, that the US State Department issued a chirpy press release last week headlined “Asia-Pacific Group Achieving Climate Results Through Partnership”. But there’s a small problem. The key part of the State Department press release is its contention that:
[The AP6 partnership] together with the diffusion of clean technologies to other regions could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 23 percent in 2050 compared with what would otherwise have been the case, according to a 2006 study by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resources Economics (ABARE).
Sounds great, right? Only until you follow up the reference and take a look at the ABARE report itself, where “what would otherwise have been the case” turns out to be a whopping global increase in emissions between now and 2050: from around 8 gigatonnes of carbon equivalent (GtC-e) today to around 23 GtC-e in 2050.
So what the AP6’s touted 23 per cent reduction below business as usual really means is that global emissions in 2050 of about 17 GtC-e rather than the 23 GtC-e that would supposedly have happened otherwise. In other words: even according to the AP6’s own best case scenario, global emissions grow by more than a hundred per cent between now and 2050. It’s not looking like a lean, mean alternative to targets and timetables just yet…
by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2007 | North America, UK
Most coverage this morning of the Bush-Brown summit at Camp David stresses the extent to which both men were at pains to defuse any perception of a bust-up. But Benedict Brogan (the Daily Mail’s political editor and one of the best bloggers around on UK politics), who has been travelling with the Brown party, has a slightly different take in a series of posts on his site. He reports:
As he races back to the airport in another sirens-blazing motorcade, Mr Brown will be entitled to congratulate himself on the way his first visit to the US went. Much of what he wanted to achieve was presentational: he and his officials sweated the imagery of the Camp David visit, and I hear there were grim faces in the White House contingent when they discovered Mr Brown planned to read a fairly blunt statement at yesterday’s press conference. “It was designed to be uncomfortable, and it had to be done,” one British source told me. Desperate to cling on to British support as Iraq implodes around him, Mr Bush was willing to tolerate just about anything from his guest. He now knows that he will get plain speaking, rigorous formality, and little else. In exchange, he talked up Mr Brown’s personal qualities, and offered that Britain is also America’s “single most important strategic relationship”.
Another subtle shift picked up on by various US foriegn policy Kremlinologists: Bush too said that the US-UK relationship was “our most important bilateral relationship”. As the FT noted, “…the usual formula is to say ‘there is no more important relationship’ than that between the US and Britain – a form of words that can include other partners.”
Practically zero coverage of the Brown visit on the US blogosphere, though.
by David Steven | Jul 31, 2007 | Conflict and security
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins first described the idea of ‘brittle power’ in a book published twenty-five years (!) ago. Modern energy systems, he warned, were highly vulnerable to shocks, ‘easily shattered by accident or malice.’
In a recent interview with the excellent Grist magazine, Lovins describes his efforts to promote a more resilient energy system in Iraq:
Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq] and there’s a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S. political authorities on the grounds that they’d already given big contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.
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by David Steven | Jul 30, 2007 | Conflict and security
According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
