by Mark Weston | Nov 16, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
The humble headscarf has become a key symbol in the simmering debate over Turkey’s secular future. In August this year it nearly brought down the government when the army opposed Abdullah Gul’s presidential bid because of his scarf-toting wife. The liberal middle classes of Istanbul and Izmir cite the AK Party’s apparent support for the garb, which although seen on every street in the country is banned in public buildings, as evidence of its Muslim fundamentalist intentions.
I spoke to a number of these critics when the AK Party first came to power in 2002. They predicted that it would try to turn Turkey into an Islamic theocracy. Even though the party’s manifesto promised to uphold secularism, its murky past persuaded the urban elites that it was lying. The party’s leader Tayyip Erdo?an, for example, was once locked up for inciting religious hatred in a poem he read at a public meeting. The offending verse? “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks.” Nothing too vindictive in there, you might think, but he deliberately omitted a verse praising the army (who are a sensitive bunch) and his final stanza, “our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom,” is admittedly a bit scary.
Turkey looks no more Islamic today than it did five years ago, however. The headscarf is still banned in schools, universities, the courts and government offices (Tayyip doesn’t even take his bescarved wife to official functions). The country has taken steps to get into the EU (despite the latter looking increasingly like an exclusively Christian club). And the generals – the staunch defenders of Ataturk’s secular legacy – remain powerful. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Lots of gossip in Whitehall about Sue Cameron’s piece in the FT the day before yesterday:
Oh dear! No one in Whitehall expected Gordon Brown to revert to type so quickly. He has been in Number 10 less than six months but, to the horror of civil servants, he has already hunkered down and cut most communication with the rest of government. Insiders say that no papers, no ideas and no decisions are getting through the barbed wire – only announcements from the leader that have been discussed with no one outside Mr Brown’s inner circle.
As a result, the corridors of power have become the corridors of impotence. Whitehall teems with unhappy cabinet ministers who have not been consulted or even informed about proposals that concern them – little details such as the date of the Budget, troop withdrawals in Iraq or the cancelling of the general election.
Equally significant yet unnoticed by outsiders is the impact on officials who find they are as much out of the loop as ever they were in the days of Tony Blair. With their ministers sidelined, their own expertise – and sometimes months of work on new proposals – is being ignored.
Their mood has shifted markedly from the welcome they gave Mr Brown in the summer. They feel he has reneged on his promises of a return to a more open, listening government. Criticism among the permanent secretaries, Whitehall’s college of cardinals, is swelling.
This is a story that Brown can’t afford to allow to run…
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
I was about to pull together some of the main threads in the IEA’s 2007 World Energy Outlook (executive summary here), but Martin Wolf beat me to it in yesterday’s FT, so here are a few of his highlights from the new report:
If governments stick with current policies (which the IEA calls the “reference scenario”), the world’s energy needs will be more than 50 per cent higher in 2030 than today, with developing countries accounting for 74 per cent, and China and India alone for 45 per cent, of the growth in demand.
Fossil fuels are forecast to account for 84 per cent of the increase in global energy consumption between 2005 and 2030.
Some $22,000bn (a little under half of 2006 world gross product) will need to be invested in supply infrastructure, to meet demand over the next quarter century.
In the IEA’s own words, “a supply-side crunch in the period to 2015, involving an abrupt escalation in oil prices cannot be ruled out”.
Sitting straight yet?
For me, two big themes stand out in this year’s outlook. The first is the oil markets, which remain extremely tight. The overall figures for global production are not keeping pace with the increase in demand; Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute argues that they show “a pronounced loss of momentum in the growth of oil production” over the last few years. In 2004, the total was 82.90 million barrels of oil a day (mb/d). This rose to 84.15 mb/d in 2005, and then 84.80 mb/d in in 2006. In the first ten months of this year, output has fallen back slightly to 84.62 mb/d.
Naturally, none of this has been lost on analysts who support the peak oil argument – an increasing number of whom now claim that the peak was passed some time between late 2005 and early 2007. Their attention has in particular focused on a report from the Energy Watch Group, commissioned by the German government, which concluded that:
world oil production … peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.
Not being a geologist, I won’t attempt to pass judgement on that claim. Many in the oil industry vehemently deny that a peak is anywhere close, and since peak oilers themselves tend to argue that the production peak will only be definitively discernable in retrospect, a few more years of falling production would presumably be needed before a peak could be called for sure.
But what the IEA’s new energy outlook really tells us is that you don’t have to be a peak oiler to be worried about the energy outlook. Although some investment in new supply is happening, it’s a long way short of the astronomical levels called for by the IEA. Take, for instance, Javier Blas’s excellent FT analysis piece today, which quotes the Secretary General of OPEC – which according to the IEA will account for a rapidly increasing proportion of global oil supply – as saying that its members have committed close to $120 billion in supply expansion projects.
$120 billion? Well, great. Only another $21,880 billion to go, then.
The second stand-out part of the report for me is the climate change part of the piece. Among the highlights that Martin Wolf picks out from the report:
Under the reference scenario, emissions of carbon dioxide will jump by 57 per cent between 2005 and 2030. The US, China, Russia and India alone contribute two-thirds of this increase. China becomes the world’s biggest emitter this year and India the third largest by 2015.
Even under the IEA’s more radical “alternative policy scenario” CO2 emissions stabilise only by 2025 and remain almost 30 per cent above 2005 levels.
Look at these figures in the light of the IPCC figures on emissions levels and stabilisation scenarios (here‘s the relevant section of the latest assessment report – you want table 3.5 on page 198). According to the IPCC, the ‘alternative scenario’ – with emissions peaking in 2025 – puts the world on course for a stabilisation level of around 590 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, and warming of around 4 degrees Celsius (though caveat recent data in Science about the risks of predicting temperature increase from concentration data). And that’s assuming a rapid decline in emissions after they peak in 2025. It doesn’t look good.
Wolf is refreshingly blunt – and right on the mark – when he says that on global warming, “despite the blather, nothing effective has been done or yet seems likely to be done”. And this is perhaps the most challenging element of the world’s energy outlook – not just the need to meet exploding demand for energy while slashing carbon dioxide emissions, but the fact that in order to pull off this extraordinary feat, the real heavy lifting is on the demand rather than the supply side of the equation. According to the IEA’s own projections, it’s energy efficiency, more than renewables, nuclear, clean coal and so on, that make the difference between the reference scenario and the alternative policy scenario.
The problem is, tackling the demand side is the hard part of climate mitigation – and domestic energy efficiency and road transport (as opposed to business energy use) are the really hard part. Changes of this kind are all about influencing the behaviour, values, assumptions and narratives of a very large number of people; technical policy fixes don’t go that far here. David and I will be publishing a paper next month, commissioned by the London Accord, on public perceptions of climate change, which has a lot to say on this area. There’s a lot of work to do…
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Global system, Influence and networks
Further to yesterday’s news about UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s big up to “my man Jay-Z”, we now have news of currency markets being shaken by rumours that Jay-Z is diversifying his FX holdings from dollars to euros. The BBC has more:
Wads of dollar bills are usually as much a part of rap videos as fast cars, diamond-encrusted jewellery and scantily-clad models. But in an apparent nod to the low value of the dollar, rapper Jay-Z’s new video Blue Magic features another currency. He is seen cruising the streets of New York in Bentleys and Rolls Royces (now owned by Germany’s Volkswagen and BMW) with a briefcase of 500 euro notes.
The Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Olson thus:
It’s sad that rap stars can no longer show their style with a good old $500 bills (featuring President McKinley) and now need to flash 500 euros (featuring some sort of suspension bridge). I don’t need the chairman of the Federal Reserve to tell me about the state of our economy. I just need Jay-Z, the new Alan Greenspan. I don’t blame Jay-Z. A stack of $50,000 in euros would equal $72,000 in U.S. currency. And you’d need 144 $500 bills to equal a stack of 100 500 euros. I don’t know if even Jay-Z has that large a money clip.
