by Charlie Edwards | Jun 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
Should the Government publish details of reservoir flood plans for local residents and ‘persons likely to be interested‘? (Which I think is a reference to the emergency services)
Sir Michael Pitt believes so. The Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure, on the other hand, says that such information could show terrorists where an attack on a dam might have the most impact.
Here’s the problem. Last year record levels of rainfall nearly caused a Yorkshire dam to fail. Ulley reservoir, near Rotherham was very close to breaking. Below are some of the potential consequences of the dam bursting:
‘Water would have knocked out the main electricity switching station in the Sheffield area for an indefinite period, perhaps leading to a breakdown in social cohesion. A dam flood would also have destroyed the main 42-inch gas main serving Sheffield, which would have created a hazard to aircraft from the gas escaping into the atmosphere. All this would have been in addition to hundreds of deaths caused by a wall of water driving down the valley below the dam if it burst.
As the Pitt report points out, emergency services facing the crisis had no maps of potential inundation to work from and had to work it out themselves, identifying the areas most likely to be flooded and then planning an evacuation – all this took time and could have been done faster if the information had been available in the first place. But the CPNI is standing firm – publishing flood plans is just too much of a risk. More to come.
Good map showing last year’s flooding (courtesy of The Independent) can be found here.
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Influence and networks
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about Abengoa – a biofuels company which has been taking out full page ads in the FT and elsewhere, arguing that biofuels are nothing to do with rising food prices (an argument that calls to mind the image of Lt. Frank Drebbin in The Naked Gun, standing before an exploding fireworks factory and calling through a loudhailer “Move on! There is nothing to see here!”). As I said at the time, Abengoa’s ad campaign was pure cornwash.
So it’s with great satisfaction that I pass on news of the following letter in the Financial Times today:
Sir, in an advertisement in the FT on June 18, Abengoa Bioenergy stated that “Bioethanol is currently the only real alternative for eliminating our addiction to oil”, citing our report “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transport in the EU25 (2004)” as one of two sources to justify that claim.
It is impossible for a reader of our report to reach the conclusion Abengoa draws. It does not even mention biofuels or bioethanol. If the company is genuinely interested in “supported evidence”, as it claims, it must know that T&E’s view on biofuels bears no resemblance to its own. T&E has consistently warned against volume targets for biofuels at European Union level since at least 2004, when we published our report “Sense and Sustainability”. We believe Europe should set an environmental target to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the production of all transport fuels, not a biofuels quantity target that gives a boost to the fuels Abengoa produces regardless of their environmental performance.
Running Europe’s fleet of heavy, gas-guzzling cars on biofuels rather than petrol is no cure. If Europe truly wants to end its addiction to oil, it should start by making cars twice as fuel-efficient as they are today.
Abengoa has misused our name and research in an advertisement claiming to separate “manipulation” from “evidence”. That is reprehensible. As an environmental group, our main capital is our reputation and credibility, which we will defend.
Jos Dings,
Director,
European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E),
B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Wow. What a truly monumental PR cock-up by Abengoa. They probably retain the same PR firm as the PRC.
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
WEF has just published a statement on climate change ahead of the G8 from what appears more or less all of the world’s CEOs (A is for ABB, Abercrombie & Kent, Agility, AIG, Airbus, AkzoNobel, Alcoa, AMD, ANA, Anglo American, Arup; B is for Bain & Co., Bayer, BG Group, Booz & Co., BP, British Airways, BC Hydro, BT… oh, you get the idea). They say this:
Addressing climate change will require clear and honest communication as to the scale of the challenge we all face. Lord Stern describes the problem for us succinctly:
“Current annual global emission flows are around 40-45 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtC02-eq).
About 45% of current global emissions come from developing countries and this is set to grow.
A 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 equates to an aggregate annual flow of around 22GtC02-eq.
As there will be around 9 billion people in 2050, this implies per capita emissions per year of about 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq.
Currently, US emissions are more than 20 tonnes of CO2-eq per person per year, Europe and Japan 10-15 tonnes, China 5 or more tonnes, India around 1.5 and most of Africa much less than 1 tonne CO2-eq per person per year.
The consequence is that rich countries will have to take the lead and demonstrate strong cuts.
Since around 8 billion people will be in currently developing countries, those countries will also have to be in the range of 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq by 2050, otherwise the world average for the total would be unachievable.
Refreshing to see some actual numbers rather than the usual guff about “developed countries taking the lead”, isn’t it?
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Global system, North America
The United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which reports to President Bush, published a report yesterday on (you guessed it) public diplomacy – specifically, on the human resources dimension of the challenge.
As Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner reports, one of the report’s key concerns is that there isn’t enough dedicated resource available for US public diplomacy work. While public diplomacy officers want to prioritise communicating with people where they’re based, they can’t – because “90% of their job descriptions and work requirements are something else, like administration”. The report worries “there is no one overseas whose primary job responsibility is to interface with foreign audiences”.
Moreover, Armstrong continues, PD officers find their career tracks hampered in DC as well. People on the public diplomacy track face a glass ceiling; no public diplomacy officer has ever become the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; public diplomats are under-represented in senior management compared to other career tracks like economics, political, consular and management.
It’s easy to see why the Advisory Commission would be worried if public diplomats “view themselves, and are viewed by others, more as managers and administrators than as expert communicators”; likewise, it’s hard to argue against the idea that everyone who works on public diplomacy should “have at least one work requirement entailing substantive engagement with the host country public”.
Where I diverge from the Commission, though, is over their acceptance that public diplomacy can be seen as a separate discipline from other parts of diplomacy – and above all the political component. Armstrong thinks that “the problem is perhaps that State went too far to integrate public diplomacy, pushing a square peg into a round hole”. But you can argue the converse, too: that in today’s world there will never be a neat line between work with politicians on one hand and work with the media and with diverse publics on the other; that all of these tasks take place within the same political discourse; and that in all of these contexts, the core task and skill-set is the same: influence.
Sure, it’s a problem if State doesn’t “recruit for public diplomacy, test for public diplomacy, train for public diplomacy”. But I’m not sure that any of those three things has to imply a separate cadre of people. The implication of the ‘civilian surge‘, of a 24 hours news cycle, of the globalisation of risk and the erosion of borders may be that public diplomacy is – simply – tomorrow’s diplomacy.
