Africa’s growth rates Alex Evans

Engrossing graph encountered while researching the effect of Chinese investment in Africa (click on it for the full size version):

From the excellent World Bank report, Africa’s Silk Road.

Ripple effects on camera Alex Evans

This image shows NOAA modelling of the tsunami that followed Chile’s earthquake – which proved to be highly accurate.  Yale Environment 360 explains how to decipher the map:

Researchers used seismic information, wave measurements collected from buoy-based equipment, and computer modeling technology to predict the maximum wave amplitude, wave arrival time, and the extent of wave inundation. The colors illustrate the maximum computed tsunami amplitude in centimeters during the 24 hours after the quake, with the highest waves in purple and red and smaller waves in orange and yellow. The red triangles represent buoys.

Scarcity issues arrive in the world of Icanhascheezburger Alex Evans

(H/t Icanhascheezburger’s sister site, Ihasahotdog.com.)

How British government worked on 9/11 Alex Evans

Among the many, many gems in Andrew Rawnsley’s gripping new book on Labour’s last two terms of office, students of resilience will especially enjoy his account of how the British government actually worked during 9/11. It emerges that:

- Tony Blair’s hurried journey back to London from Brighton, where he had been due to deliver a speech to the Trades Union Congress, was made not by helicopter or a 90 mph motorcade with armed escort - but by train. Blair’s Special Branch protection officers “created a makeshift area for the Prime Minister and his aides by sealing off part of a carriage with police ’scene of crime’ tape”.

- Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary, found out about the attacks not through being alerted by Number 10 or the intelligence services, but from his driver on his way back from lunch – and then in more detail from the car radio.

- Jeremy Heywood, Blair’s Principal Private Secretary at Number 10, then rang Wilson to say: “We’ve been told that the White House is evacuating. Should we be evacuating?” Wilson’s reply: “If you evacuate, where would you evacuate to? I think it is a good rule not to evacuate unless you have an idea where you are going to evacuate to.”

- David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, learned about the attack not from MI5 or the Home Office, but from one of his sons, who rang to tell him what he’d just seen on the news.

- Although the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Secretariat had been created to deal with national emergencies after the fuel protests a year earlier, all its staff were away at a team-building session in Yorkshire.

- The entire staff of the Cabinet Office Overseas and Defence Secretariat was en route to a meeting in Herefordshire – and had taken all the keys to their offices with them.

- And to top it all, the Cabinet Office telephone system – which had been installed the previous week – then crashed altogether.

Rawnsley’s conclusion: “Had terrorists or a foreign power planned an attack on Britain, there would rarely have been a better time to strike than on 9/11.”

The battle for India’s climate policy Alex Evans

While we’re on the subject of comings and goings on India’s climate team, worth noting that the Indian press is full of talk of an epic fallout between India’s Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, and Shyam Saran, the Indian PM’s Special Envoy on Climate Change – who’s just quit. So what’s the fight about? Over to the Times of India:

Indian negotiators are up in arms against minister of state for environment and forest Jairam Ramesh commissioning a study and proposing a meeting of experts that could redefine India’s fundamental principle of `per capita emissions’ norm while negotiating how the burden of reducing greenhouse gases is shared.

The per capita norm, embodied in the Kyoto protocol, has been backed by successive governments and reiterated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself.  Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, the seniormost Indian negotiator and member of the PM’s council on climate change told TOI: “I am deeply concerned that the per capita equity approach, which provides the foundation for India’s position on climate change negotiations, is being questioned at the level of minister of state (Jairam Ramesh).”

The study that Ramesh is commissioning is to be undertaken by Arvind Subramanian – formerly at the IMF, now at CGD and the Peterson Institute. The reason for the consternation, according to the TOI, is that Subramanian’s published work rebuts the idea of per capita equity – and a quick web search confirms that a piece he co-authored with CGD’s director Nancy Birdsall in December last year (summary here) does indeed implicitly rebut “equality of greenhouse gas emissions per capita as a desirable long run objective”.  Instead, it argues for “industrial countries [to] drop their demand that developing countries commit now to binding emissions targets”, and focus instead on improving access to energy for the poor – although his paper does also call for sharp improvements in emerging economies’ carbon efficiency.

All this has now become a political issue in India. The opposition BJP has picked up on the issue:

On Saturday, BJP alleged that Saran had to go because of his resistance to UPA government’s bid to dilute the country’s stand in climate change negotiations, attracting allegation of irresponsibility from the Congress. The BJP attributed Saran’s departure to his reservations against environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s attempt to “weaken” India’s negotiating stance on emission cuts.

Meanwhile Ramesh is trying to cast himself as the victim in all this, as in this piece in The Hindu on Thursday:

Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has cast himself as a lonely crusader for the environmental cause within the government, with no support from any quarter except the Prime Minister and the UPA chairperson. In an interaction with journalists on Wednesday, hours before a meeting called by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to iron out differences within the Cabinet over Bt brinjal, Mr. Ramesh said he had “zero” friends in the government.

“I have no friends, only the Prime Minister supports me in the Cabinet… At times I feel I am fighting a lonely battle. The odds are tremendous against anyone trying to do anything right and rational when it comes to the environment and forests,” he said, using the words ‘thankless’ and ‘friendless’ to describe his job.

So is Ramesh really ’selling out’?

Well, not necessarily. Back in November last year, David quoted an analysis by Indian policy analyst Malini Mehra, who noted that Ramesh was attempting to act as a reformist and dissolve some of the stalemate in the climate debate:

As the Major Economies Forum got underway in London, news broke in Delhi that Jairam Ramesh had allegedly proposed dumping the Kyoto Protocol, ditching the G77 in favour of the G20, and taking on carbon cuts without concomitant financial or technical guarantees. In a country with a well-entrenched political consensus on India’s role in international climate negotiations, the Minister’s alleged remarks were seized on as heresy …

Interestingly, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and even Indonesia are all considering variations of domestic emissions peaking, national and sectoral caps – not in response to western arm-twisting but in response to increasingly unequivocal climate impact projections, energy security, development and economic competitiveness concerns.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that India’s long-standing advocacy of per capita equity is not the same as proper Contraction and Convergence (see this if you don’t know what that is), but instead just an indication that it’s willing for its emissions not to exceed those of developed countries. Not so much a framework for solving climate change, then, as a promise not to screw the planet any faster than the developed world does: not much solace for small island states.

Contraction and Convergence, after all, isn’t just ‘equity for equity’s sake’ – the whole point is that it’s intended as a way of sharing out the global emissions budget that gets created as soon as you take a decision on the level at which to cap greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. If you don’t have that stabilisation target, then you don’t have zip – and right now, India’s endorsement of per capita equity doesn’t start from such a target.

So what happens now? Well, the consensus in India is that the PM’s climate envoy is unlikely to be replaced, which seems to put Ramesh – and hence also Subramanian – in the driving seat for now.

In tactical terms, this may be helpful, especially if Ramesh can play the BASIC coalition skilfully to manoeuver emerging economies into a better place. Positioning himself as arguing for tougher action “in response to western arm-twisting but in response to increasingly unequivocal climate impact projections” definitely looks like a smart starting point – and of course, there’s also the fact that China’s strategy really depends on staying very close to India in negotiations, which gives Ramesh additional leverage.

But what Ramesh still needs is some kind of proposal for an overall global framework on climate change.  Although Subramanian’s an Birdsall’s work on this area is interesting, it’s not clear to me that they have such a proposal.

BASIC puts forward its candidate to replace Yvo de Boer at UNFCCC Alex Evans

A small but potentially rather significant exchange in the UN Secretary-General’s spokesman’s press briefing on Thursday last week:

Question:  India has said that it’s put forward a candidate to replace Mr. [Yvo] de Boer on the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].  It’s named the individual, and said that it has the support of China and other BRIC nations.  I just wondered, first, can you confirm that names have been received by the Secretary-General for that post?  How many names and what’s the process for selection?

Spokesperson:  I can’t confirm whether specific names have been given or not.  Clearly, there is a process that’s under way.  This is an appointment that is indeed made by the Secretary-General in consultation with the Board of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  There is still a way to go in that selection process, and I don’t want to get into details here

So who might India’s candidate be? Over to wire coverage a day earlier from Indo Asian News Service (which seems to have been barely noticed outside India):

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has written to the United Nations backing the candidature of Vijai Sharma, secretary with the ministry, for the post of executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The minister said here Wednesday that China has already supported the move.

‘Vijai Sharma is our official candidate for UNFCCC executive secretary. I have written to the United Nations Monday and have also written to BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) countries seeking their support. We have got support from China already for his candidature and we will get support from other BASIC countries,’ Ramesh said at an interaction at the Indian Women’s Press Corps.

Ramesh said the time has come for the post to go to a developing country. ‘The first three secretaries have all been from developed countries and Vijai Sharma has long years of experience with UNFCCC. He was chief spokesperson for G77 for Kyoto negotiations. I am pursuing it. I am not sure as European countries and the US will prefer somebody from a smaller country and India is unarguably at a different profile but I would like to see him there,’ the minister said.

Sharma – a career bureacrat - is well-respected inside the UNFCCC process as far as I can make out.  But I wonder whether India’s making a tactical error in equating “developing country” interests with those of the BASIC grouping of emerging economies. At Copenhagen, BASIC’s hardline position was conspicuously not in the interests of the least developed countries who stand most to lose from climate change.  It’ll be interesting to see whether an alternative developing country candidate comes forward – one from the ’survival’ rather than the ‘growth’ faction of the G77.

Better late than never Alex Evans

Leaders should therefore commission an independent review of the IPCC’s integrity, auditing the executions of its mandate to provide a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent assessment of the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change.

This review should not be of the state of climate science – where the IPCC has, and should retain, primacy – but rather of the quality of the IPCC’s procedures and the integrity of the research methods on which its findings rely.

- David and I in Hitting Reboot (published December 22, 2009)

The UN is to commission an independent group of top scientists to review its climate change panel, which has been under fire since it admitted a mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers.

The experts will look at the way the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates and will recommend where they think changes are needed. The panel will be part of a broader review of the IPCC, full details of which will be announced by the UN next week.

- The Guardian (published March 1, 2010)

Taiwan’s take on Gordon (FF to 35 seconds in; h/t Dizzy Thinks) Alex Evans

How intelligence clearance turns you into a moron Alex Evans

Daniel Ellsberg, in 1968, speaking to Henry Kissinger, who was just entering government for the first time:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.

Recounted in Mother Jones; h/t Nils Gilman.

Tangerinegate (alas, the story isn’t true) Alex Evans

The UN’s impending reshuffle Alex Evans

Last week I noted that Britain now has fewer European Commission staffers per capita than any other member state apart from Romania.  Now that the news of John Holmes’s departure as head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance has finally gone public (he’s off to replace Jeremy Greenstock as director of Ditchley in September), we’re also about to lose our only senior United Nations official.

The Times, predictably, writes this up as the latest episode in a gradual story of diminishing numbers of Brits in top UN jobs over the past few years (“Britain loses grip on power as last top post is vacated”). 

From 1993 to 2005, it notes, the post of Under-Secretary General for the UN’s Department of Political Affairs (effectively ‘the UN’s Foreign Office’, one of the most politically significant bits of the UN secretariat)  was a Brit – first Marack Goulding, then Kieran Prendergast.  From 1999 to 2005, there was also a Brit – Mark Malloch Brown-  as Administrator of UNDP, regarded as the 3^rd most important job in the UN after SG and Deputy SG. 

But when Malloch Brown became Chief of Staff to Kofi Annan in 2005, the UK lost the UNDP post. Then, when he became Deputy SG shortly afterwards, Britain also agreed to let DPA go elsewhere (first to an Indian, then to an American).  The UK was then left with two USG posts: head of the Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance, and USG for Safety and Security.  It lost the latter to an American in May last year, leaving it with just OCHA; and now, with John Holmes’s departure, it’s losing that too.

Of course, Holmes’s departure also opens up the prospect of the UN equivalent of a Cabinet reshuffle – in which the Foreign Office will be gearing up for a major push to get a Brit or two into key jobs. The UN rumour mill is already in overdrive, with early indications seeming to point towards the UK trying to get either DPA or the post of Chief of Staff in the SG’s office.  Other rumours suggest that the French might want the job at OCHA, which would imply their letting go of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations – which the US is rumoured to covet, which would entail its relinquishing DPA.

What, alas, is missing in all this is much discussion about what would be best for the UN. It’s arguably a make or break moment for the organisation.  It was left largely on the sidelines during the momentous changes in global governance that followed the financial crisis (from G8 to G20, IMF reform, creation of the FSB). Ban Ki-moon’s leadership has been widely criticised. The UN’s record on climate change has been challenged by the poor outcome at Copenhagen and the subsequent departure of its climate chief (another key post to watch in the impending reshuffle).

If member states, especially those on the P5, are serious about managing global risks, then they really need to start getting better at how they make appointments. It’s all very well for member states to mutter about Ban’s leadership – but who appointed him?

If Jesus were running for office… Alex Evans

H/t Chuck Currie.

The Tea Party movement is stupid: it’s official Alex Evans

Ali Rizvi has a delicious piece in the Huffington Post, containing such delights as this:

What was until recently a difference in ideology has devolved, in a little over a decade, into a difference in intellect … By painting educated, well-earning, science-embracing, articulate, introspective, intellectual citizens as un-American, the Republican party has built an entire base made up of those who not only don’t possess these attributes, but enthusiastically abhor those who do. Not only are these factions now split along lines of educational achievement, socioeconomic status, and cultural and religious values, but most significantly, along an “intellectual divide”.

And this:

It’s one thing to be ignorant. It’s another to take pride in it. And it’s quite another to venture beyond that into full-blown stupidity. It’s not often that you get to use the word “stupidity” in a non-ad hominem context, but now — with the majority of Republicans believing Obama is a socialist without having any idea what socialism is, over a third believing he is foreign-born, and featured Tea Party speakers calling for the hanging of a US senator — it’s becoming harder and harder to euphemize some of things we’re witnessing as anything but.

Finally, the answer to Kissinger’s question Alex Evans

Proving again why he should be on everyone’s must-read list of foreign policy blogs, the Economist’s Charlemagne has news of even more clamouring from national governments on the need for Cathy Ashton to assert greater independence from the European Commission (and in particular from Jose Manuel Barroso).

Last week, the trouble started again after “news broke that Mr Barroso had pre-empted the creation of the new European External Action Service, and chosen the next EU ambassador in Washington”:

The incumbent is a former Irish prime minister, John Bruton, and plenty of EU politicians would like to see a similar heavyweight, political figure get the job. Instead, Mr Barroso has chosen a career Brussels official from his native Portugal, João Vale de Almeida (who was until a few months ago the head of Mr Barroso’s private office). In theory the appointment was made under the old rules, which operated before the Lisbon Treaty came into force on December 1st 2009, when overseas missions of the EU were delegations of the European Commission. In practice, most if not all foreign ministers found out about the appointment only very recently, and they are hopping, because they were not consulted.

Late on Sunday, as EU foreign ministers started to arrive for the monthly meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council, news started to emerge that Carl Bildt (“arguably the most serious and heavyweight foreign minister in the EU, thanks to years of international experience and a stint as prime minister of his country”) had written formally to Cathy Ashton – demanding “a discussion of how Mr Vale de Almeida came to be nominated for the EU’s most senior overseas post”:

Mr Bildt’s letter, dated February 19th, asks Lady Ashton how the nomination of Mr Vale de Almeida came about, without applying the very principles governing such appointments which are currently the subject of discussion among the 27’s EU ambassadors. The letter also seeks clarification about the impression that the nomination was made without Lady Ashton playing the leading role set out for her in the Lisbon Treaty.

So what happens now?

Is there any prospect of Mr Vale de Almeida’s appointment being reversed? I must admit, I do not see how that can happen without causing a scandal that leaves the EU worse off. The EU’s biggest diplomatic partners, from America to China or Russia, are already slack jawed with amazement at the squabbling that has broken out since the Lisbon Treaty came into force. Yet Mr Bildt is not alone in his desire for answers, I am told. Other foreign ministers are incredulous about the way this appointment has been handled.

Well, at least we finally know the answer to Kissinger’s question about who to pick up the phone to when he wants something done. Beijing, Brasilia or Delhi.

“I’m in control” Alex Evans