Extracts From Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs

President Barack Obama
Delivered in person before a joint session of Congress
May 25, 2009

[With apologies to JFK's 'man on the moon' speech.]

The Constitution imposes upon me the obligation to “from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.” While this has traditionally been interpreted as an annual affair, this tradition has been broken in extraordinary times.

These are extraordinary times. And we face extraordinary challenges… [The President's discussion of economic, security and resource threats has been cut from this transcript.]

…Finally, if we are to win the battle to secure our shared future, then we must act decisively to stabilize the world’s climate. Otherwise, we will begin to suffer the consequences of our folly within a generation – not just at home, but across the world, as we struggle to sustain security and prosperity on an increasingly crowded planet.

Since early in my term, serious efforts to tackle climate change here in America have begun. We have examined where we are strong, and where we are not, where we may succeed and where we may not. Now it is time to lead the world in a great new enterprise, one which will hold the key to our future on earth.

I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the international decisions or marshaled the international resources required for such leadership. We have never before specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.

I therefore believe we should set these global and national goals.

First, I believe that the world should commit itself to achieving the goal of stopping the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions that is doing so much to put our planet in peril. I don’t believe we should aim to achieve this goal in 2020 or 2030 or 2050 – but right now in 2009, making this year the high water mark for mankind’s global experiment with the global climate.

Second, once we have bought emissions to a standstill, we should aim to force them down year by year – slowly at first, but at an ever increasing pace, triggering a radical transformation that brings us to a near zero carbon world by mid-century.

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A recurrent game in Washington DC is trying to fix the fact that DC itself has no Congressman (it sends a non-voting delegate).  Initiatives to give the capital a national representative come and go, but never succeed.  And so it has come to pass again:

Legislation to give the District of Columbia voting representation in the House has been pulled from Wednesday’s calendar because of concerns about Republican efforts to use the bill to wipe out many of the District’s gun laws.

A key House aide confirmed that the bill will be pulled from consideration, at least for Wednesday. The aide stressed that negotiations are continuing and the bill could come up in the future.

Republicans want to add the language on D.C.’s gun laws to the bill.  Democratic leaders don’t want that to happen, but many of their centrist members from Republican districts would vote to support the amendment to avoid the ire of the National Rifle Association.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said adding the gun language could cost enough Democratic votes that the entire bill would fail.

While the rest of the world faces job losses, Nepal’s Maoists are hiring:

A former Maoist rebel commander said on Tuesday the group plans to recruit thousands of fighters, a move seen as a blow to peace and underlined serious tensions between Nepal’s army and the Maoists.  Nanda Kishore Pun, chief of the Maoist fighters, told Reuters it was the ex-rebel group’s turn to fill vacancies in their ranks, after Nepal’s national army’s recruited 2,800 personnel last year.

The move could endanger a 2006 peace pact which ended a decades-long civil war and saw the Maoists joining the political process, winning an election last year, analysts said.  The Maoist-led government has not commented on Pun’s remarks so far, and analysts said it was not immediately clear if he had taken Maoist Prime Minister Prachanda into confidence.

Nepal’s former rebel fighters are now housed in U.N.-monitored camps and their weapons locked away under the 2006 peace deal. Their rehabilitation is seen as key to lasting peace, but the national army is refusing to enrol “indoctrinated” rebels into its ranks.

The Maoists won a surprise victory in last year’s election and now head a coalition government but their rebel army has never disbanded. A former Maoist commander is now the defence minister.

Pun said the plan was to take the number of rebel fighters to 31,000 which was their strength when they signed the 2006 peace pact. “It is not a new recruitment and is to fill vacancies in our army,” he told Reuters.

Fairly sobering cover story in New Scientist this week, by the aptly-named Gaia Vince, a freelance journalist who apparently is ‘wandering the world’, like a cross between Monkey and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

The environment, according to Gaia, is about to strike down upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.

She asks the question – what will the world be like if it is 4°C warmer, as scientists predict it probably will be within 30-60 years?

Not good.

The world will be divided by two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).

That means the global population will have to crowd into the few places where habitation is possible, which the New Scientist estimates will be: Canada, the UK, Greenland and Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the parts of the Antarctic that are thawed. Some parts of West Africa may also be able to sustain life.

The global population will either be reduced dramatically, or will be crammed into high rise cities, eating mainly vegetarian food, unable to travel, probably subject to birth control, and energy control, and all kinds of other control. Most animal and plant life, and almost all aquatic life, will either have died of natural causes, or been eaten. “If it moves, we will have eaten it”, says James Lovelock. “We will be desperate.”

Those areas of the world that can still sustain plant life will be faced with a grim choice – do they protect their borders, create a ‘life boat’ as Lovelock put it, and close their ears and eyes to the screams of the dying, or do they open the doors to mass migration, and if so, how much, and to who? If they do, how do they order their societies? Do they give all new arrivals a vote and equal rights, or will such societies have to be run in an authoritarian, Mega City Four-type way?

Can we avoid this grim scenario? Yes, but the chances are very slim.

Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist, says: “”I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70%  by 2015. We are currently putting in 3% more each year.”

In other words, we have to get ready for a much hotter world, we have to start thinking the politics, economics, and ethics, of it through.

At the same time, for the next 30 years, and particularly in the next five years, we need to devote all the effort we have to lobbying governments to reduce emissions as much as possible. There’s no higher priority. Discussing anything else  is like discussing the latest cricket results on the deck of the Titanic.

We will be judged on this by the rest of humanity, and our generation will probably be considered the most stupid, lazy and destructive ever. Our children and grandchildren, if they are unfortunate enough to have been brought into the world, will stare at us and say ‘why didn’t you do something when you had the chance?’ And we will smile weakly, and look away.

Just a final word at the end of a turbulent day on the assassination of Guinea-Bissau’s two most powerful men, the President Joao Bernardo Vieira and the army chief of staff, General Tagme Na Waie.  It seems pretty likely that troops close to the General were responsible for killing the President, in revenge for what they thought was a Vieira-backed plot to do away with his rival.

But the more interesting question is who killed Tagme Na Waie? Vieira is obviously the prime suspect, as he hated the General, who had accused him of involvement in the cocaine trade (many diplomats thought Tagme was also involved). Vieira had not shrunk from murder to get rid of political opponents during his first spell in charge of the country in the 1980s, and Tagme Na Waie himself blamed the presidential guard for an attempt on his life in January.

But an analyst who spoke to the Times today said the killing of the General bore the hallmarks of a hit by drug cartels.  South Americans using other Guineans (including possibly Vieira) to smooth their path through the country could have wanted to remove Tagme as he was getting in their way. This would tally with similar killings in Colombia and Mexico over the years, with one gang eliminating another’s key contacts or leaders.

But would the inevitable chaos provoked by such an action benefit the cartels? If they’d wanted chaos, surely they’d have chosen Liberia or Cote d’Ivoire rather than Guinea-Bissau as their transit point. Both those countries were or had just been at war when the Colombians arrived. Guinea-Bissau was stable by comparison. It is hard to see how turmoil helps the cartels, who, as John Robb said when I interviewed him recently, “want the maximum level of corruption and to be left alone, with bureaucratic apparatus geared towards helping them do business.” The dealers are, in the end, businessmen, and doing business will be infinitely more difficult if civil war breaks out.

Perhaps Tagme’s killers miscalculated, and assumed that Vieira would quickly be able to put a lid on any unrest that ensued from the murder.  If so (and even if they had no hand in either killing), might they now shift their operations to somewhere more stable – Senegal, maybe, or even Ghana?

The life of Joao Bernardo Vieira, the President of Guinea-Bissau who was assassinated this morning, was a microcosm of the post-independence history of his country.

Born in 1939 and an electrician by trade, “Nino” rose to prominence during Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence, when he was a trusted comrade of Amilcar Cabral, who as head of a well-organised band of guerrillas led the country to freedom in 1974.  The PAIGC party, which Cabral formed and which Vieira led until his death, began as a revolutionary group whose goal was to expel the Portuguese colonialists and set up a socialist state. The party was both idealistic and pragmatic, its ethos summed up in a famous speech by Cabral:

Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas…they fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.

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My forthcoming article in EMEA Finance magazine on how the assassination of Vieira is likely to be linked to the cocaine trade that has swamped Guinea-Bissau:

As most of the world worries about capital flight, a small corner of its poorest region has enjoyed an unexpected surge in foreign exchange reserves. Guinea-Bissau and its West African neighbour Guinea have recorded sharp rises in foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent years even as investors in more prosperous countries are running for cover. FDI in Guinea-Bissau rose from a meagre $20m to $120m between 2004 and 2006, while Guinea has seen a tenfold increase since 2000. In the last five years, Guinea-Bissau’s foreign reserves have more than tripled.

What accounts for the sudden popularity of these countries, which according to the latest United Nations Human Development Index are the ninth and thirteenth poorest in the world? The UN Office on Drugs and Crime believes drug money is to blame. Its director, Antonio Maria Costa, says that the influx of cash is “a form of money laundering, it comes in as foreign direct investment, it goes into rural real estate, purchase of land, hotels, tourism.” Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UNODC’s regional office for West Africa, explains how it works: “If you want to launder money, you can declare full occupancy in a hotel for one year after opening it even if it’s empty. If you look at the occupancy rate of hotels, it’s not increasing.”

Drugs are a growth industry in West Africa. Colombian and other South American dealers, dislodged from their traditional channels by stricter US law enforcement and lured across the Atlantic by the strong euro, have adopted countries like Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone as staging posts on the cocaine route. They fly or ship in large consignments of the drug, break it up into smaller packages, and dispatch it north across the Sahara to Western Europe.

West Africa’s governments are powerless to stop the trade. Guinea-Bissau’s police force has no handcuffs or vehicles, its air force no aircraft, its navy no ships. There are no prisons, and officials’ paltry salaries, which often go unpaid, give them little incentive to turn down Colombian bribes. Few observers doubt that senior figures are involved. In the recent general election campaign the opposition leader described President Joao Bernardo Vieira as the country’s top drug trafficker. In Sierra Leone, meanwhile, the chief of the airport police was arrested last July while allegedly assisting in the delivery of 600 kilos of cocaine to Freetown’s main airport.

The military futurist John Robb, author of ‘Brave New War,’ believes the Colombians’ wealth and weapons mean they can more or less do as they please. “When a transnational criminal organisation that has guerrilla warfare capability penetrates an easily corruptible country, you end up with a hollow state,” he says. “They have financial resources far in excess of what’s available internally within that state and the ability to put in more money and more resources than the international community. If the Colombians have found a hole in West Africa, there are no barriers to their expansion.”

An uncertain future

Some West Africans will benefit from the drug trade, at least in the short-term. Politicians, police and army officials paid by the Colombians to provide security or help them elude arrest are reaping rich rewards. Some ordinary citizens are also doing well. Drug ‘mules’ who make it to Europe send back some of their profits to relatives back home. Remittances to Guinea-Bissau were negligible throughout the 1990s but increased from $2 million in 2000 to over $28 million in 2006. Families can use these funds to feed themselves or invest in businesses (perhaps providing services to the drug barons).

The risks, however, are manifold. Numerous African countries have already suffered terribly as a result of the “resource curse,” and cocaine, like diamonds, gold and oil, is a commodity whose immense value can distort economies and societies with devastating effects.

Some of the effects are common to all such commodities. The disproportionate profits from the drug trade (or diamonds, gold or oil) discourage investment in other activities. Guinea-Bissau’s main exports are unprocessed cashew nuts, Senegal’s peanuts and fish. It is not difficult to see the allure of cocaine, a couple of tons of which are worth more than the Guinea-Bissau government’s entire annual budget. As drug exports push up the value of local currencies, moreover, other products become less competitive in international markets. Legal exports from much of West Africa have declined in recent years and may suffer further as the drug trade grows. With agriculture and manufacturing withering, the masses who are excluded from the cocaine windfall will sink deeper into poverty.

Political instability is also common to resource-cursed countries. The contest for diamonds in Sierra Leone led to one of Africa’s bloodiest wars. Oil has made Nigeria’s delta region a no-go zone. Battles over cocaine have torn apart Colombia and rocked northern Mexico. West Africa, as Mazzitelli warns, is much less equipped than Mexico to deal with the problem. “Mexico is big,” he says, “the state can respond, the economic structures can cope with illicit and criminal activity. In Africa, the overall state structure is much more defenceless to this kind of push. There are weaknesses all over the region that leave it exposed.”

In the last few months these weaknesses have become increasingly apparent. In November 2008, a group of soldiers attacked the President’s palace in Bissau with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, killing a guard but failing to reach the head of state himself, who was cowering inside. Two months later, the head of the armed forces was shot at by presidential guards. A recent feud between rival police factions left two senior counternarcotics officers dead. And in neighbouring Guinea, a group of young soldiers staged a successful coup d’état at Christmas. The coup leaders promised to wipe out corruption and stage democratic elections, but Guineans have heard such promises before – former president Lansana Conté, whose death precipitated the Christmas putsch, had himself come to power in a coup before proceeding to turn his country into a cesspit of corruption.

Although there is as yet no clear evidence that the above events were linked to the drug trade, that the sudden increase in instability has occurred just as the profits from cocaine are soaring has not escaped the notice of observers. Discussing the attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau, Antonio Mazzitelli commented that “control of drugs is becoming as contested as the control of diamonds was in Liberia and Sierra Leone. It’s a major source of income, and different providers of services will start fighting each other for control of the source of income.”

Political instability and damage to manufacturing and agriculture are the lot of many resource-cursed nations, but some impacts of the curse are unique to the drug trade. First, cocaine addiction is spreading through the affected countries. Second, money laundering requires the complicity of those working in the financial sector. Banking in the region is booming, with Gambia emerging as a key financial hub and banks opening up even in dirt-poor Guinea-Bissau. Once corrupted, says the UN, financial professionals “can be used for concealing all manner of criminal proceeds,” and financial institutions, crucial for promoting development, will be undermined.

Finally, the global illegality of drugs means that, unlike with diamonds or oil, foreign countries are likely to try to snuff out the industry, cutting off the supply of remittances and starving new businesses of funds. The European Union has provided aid and technical assistance to help West Africa’s governments tackle the problem. Military intervention may soon follow if the region becomes a stopping point on the heroin route from Central Asia to the US. If the Colombians leave, foreign investment will dry up, and West Africans, forced to rebuild agriculture and manufacturing from scratch, will have taken a step backwards on the long road out of poverty.

Shocking news from Guinea-Bissau, where president Joao Bernardo Vieira and his army’s chief-of-staff have both been assassinated.  The two men were thought to be rivals, so the killing of Vieira may have been a revenge attack. There is no evidence yet that the killings were linked to the country’s lucrative drug trade (see my earlier posts here, here and here), but the battle for access to it appears to be intensifying. Coming just weeks after the successful coup in Guinea, this latest convulsion may be part of a worrying trend of increasing instability on the West African coast.

Update: The Times is fairly sure Vieira’s death was a revenge attack.  Interestingly, too, it quotes an expert analyst who thinks the bombing of the army chief-of-staff, General Tagme Na Waie, was a “drugs hit,” with his men killing Vieira in the erroneous belief that he had authorised the hit.

Another update: An army faction has admitted that it killed President Vieira, who was shot by soldiers loyal to General Tagme as he tried to flee from his house. They say this is not a coup, however, and that they will respect the constitution and allow the head of parliament to take over. A different army spokesman, on the other hand, promised that his bit of the army would pursue the killers.  Dangerous times indeed.

And another: Anyone wanting background on the wider issues behind the troubles in Guinea-Bissau might be interested in this talk I gave to the UK Home Office last month.

One more: Fear is gripping the people of Guinea-Bissau. According to one eyewitness, they are staying in their homes because radio stations have been closed down and nobody knows if it’s safe to venture out. The reporter expects mixed reactions to the assassination, however – he points out that 70% of Guineans voted against Vieira in the last elections. I expect the majority reaction will largely depend on whether or not the next leader can maintain peace. If another civil war breaks out, even those who voted against the late president might long for the relative stability he brought.

Over at The Interpreter, Sam Roggeveen objects to Jules’s call for national service to be used to toughen up the youth in the face of a changing climate.

This strikes me as completely contrary to the spirit of ‘resilience-ism’ (sorry; ugly, I know), which emphasises local knowledge rather than a top-down approach — giving communities the tools to help themselves rather than waiting for government to do it for them. It also raises my libertarian hackles (again): there are few better ways to empower the state at the expense of the individual than to have it conscript its youth.

Two points. First, why do we always want to conscript the young? To be sure, they make excellent cannon fodder, which is why national service was vital to the ‘total wars’ of the late 19th and early 20th century. But modern challenges are knowledge-intensive, needing people with much greater experience and skills.

So if we’re going to have compulsory service of any kind, let’s impose it on the post-war, baby boom generation – surely the most narcissistic generation of them all (in the spotlight as teenagers in the sixties, hippies in the seventies, yuppies in the eighties, middle aged and smug in the 90s, early-retired victims of age discrimination in the noughties)? 

And second, I want to pick up on his Sam on his comfortable equation of resilience with bare-chested libertarianism. Alex and I began to delve into the politics of resilience in the most recent issue of Renewal. Our conclusion? Resilience is tough on all major strands of political thinking – libertarianism (or what Brits still think of as liberalism) included: (more…)

The climate clock is ticking, but civil society is still missing in action. With only nine months to go before the Copenhagen climate summit, the world’s NGOs are far from having a compelling set of demands to campaign on.

Perhaps it is already too late. Many governments are already ramping back their expectations of what can be delivered. The deal-makers among them now desperately need civil society to change the terms of debate and boost all countries’ level of ambition.

I’d give campaigners until April’s London Summit to get their act together. After that, they have zero chance of retaking the high ground and starting to shape the pre-Copenhagen agenda.

So what should their demands be? What makes a good headline ‘ask’?

• First, it has to fit with the science – that means stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e (nothing lower is now possible).
• Then, it needs to make sense to insiders – people who are making the major policy or investment decisions a clear sense of what they need to do now.
• Third, it must communicate to a wider public – which means a goal that the average 12 year-old (or journalist) can understand and remember.
• And finally, it needs to build climate into a wider post-meltdown narrative, offering an integrated vision for global recovery.

I think one clear, crisp demand fulfils all these criteria, providing a starting point from which all key elements of a global deal logically flow. Global greenhouse gas emissions exploded during the boom years, pumped up by debt-fuelled overconsumption. Now oil demand is declining – and we can expect global emissions see a modest fall too.

This provides civil society with a real opportunity. They should declare 2009 the year of peak emissions and challenge the world’s governments to develop a concrete plan to ensure they are never allowed to rise again. (more…)