The Limits of Clear Language

Orwell worried about polluted language, but polluted information is more toxic
By Nicholas Lemann

Can there be a political writer who has not fallen in love with George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”? Part of its appeal is what’s appealing about all of Orwell—its directness and honesty, its plainspokenness, its faith, against all evidence, that human affairs can be conducted morally, its sense of being on the side of ordinary people, not of the sophisticated and powerful. The only people Orwell attacks by name in “Politics and the English Language” are two celebrated academics, Harold Laski and Lancelot Hogben, not the kind of minor-grade politicians and bureaucrats who would have made easy targets.

“Politics and the English Language” begins as a lesson, and quite a good one, in how to write well (delivered in the form of an attack on people who write badly), and ends with the hope that better writing can engender a better society. What idea could be more attractive to writers than that what we do, if improved along the lines Orwell suggests, can improve not just our readers’ experience of our work, but the lives of everybody? To Orwell, the connection between the English language and politics was that the debasement of the latter requires the corruption of the former. “In our age,” he wrote—meaning, the age of the rise of totalitarianism—“there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” But saying this generates the hope—highly qualified, as hope always was in Orwell’s work—that better, clearer language could rob bad politics of its voice, and thereby might bring it to an end.

Orwell began work on his masterpiece, 1984, not long after “Politics and the English Language” was published (the essay owes some of its resonance to the way it foreshadows Newspeak, the great literary device Orwell invented for the novel). Although “Politics and the English Language” is probably the best known of all Orwell’s essays, at the time he wrote it—for Horizon, a magazine edited by his old schoolmate Cyril Connolly—he was an extremely busy freelancer. The essay was one of more than a hundred pieces Orwell published in 1946. Even as it advocates care and precision in the use of language, it is more passionate than systematic.

To produce 1984, on the other hand, Orwell, by then a dying man, removed himself to a location about as far from the setting of the book as one can imagine: a house on the sea, at the end of miles of unpaved road, on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Newspeak is a fully worked-out system, far more horrifying than the examples Orwell gives us in “Politics and the English Language.” Its aim is to make individual, independent thought impossible by depriving the mind of the words necessary to form ideas other than those fed to it by the state. Newspeak at once radically limits and shortens the number of words available to people (so that everyone has to operate at the linguistic level of a three- or four-year-old) and turns all words denoting concepts into long, incomprehensible, bureaucratized euphemisms, devoid of meaning and unable to provoke debate or resistance. Take away words, and you have taken away mental function; take away mental function, and you have taken away the possibility of political action.

Because Newspeak is an aspect of a fully realized work of art, it has the quality of seamless, self-contained perfection that art often has: it exists literarily on terms that make it powerful and inarguable. “Politics and the English Language,” because it is farther from perfection, is more interesting to think about today. Its conceptual roughness makes possible a real consideration of Orwell’s proposition that bad language always produces bad politics (and good language can produce good politics) in a way that Newspeak does not.

The primary villain in “Politics and the English Language” is the kind of fancy, pretentious, imprecise prose that is usually purveyed by intellectuals (Orwell’s particular targets were intellectuals on the left), not the state. Nobody who has read the essay can ever use a formulation such as “not unlike” again with a clear conscience. Throughout the essay, Orwell wanders into what seems to be a blanket condemnation of all use of abstractions in political discussion. Life without “democracy,” “justice,” “science,” “class,” and “equality” is a lot more difficult to contemplate happily than life without “not unlike”—these are not, after all, terms purposely made incomprehensible in the manner of Newspeak.

Although Orwell’s language is wonderfully clear, his thought, on this crucial point, is not. Sometimes he seems to be saying that his despair about virtually all political discussion is an artifact of a bad historical moment—which would mean there is hope. But in concluding, he writes, “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That sounds pretty hopeless. Orwell is so uncomfortable with big, complex societies that it’s hard to tell whether he would ever approve of political writing that seeks to make observations conceptual, rather than concrete and specific. Bad writing is, unfortunately, eternal; surely there is even more of it today, by weight, than there was in 1946. As a writing guide, “Politics and the English Language” is, more than sixty years after publication, absolutely useful. Whether Orwell’s idea—that better writing, and clearer language, can actually improve politics—applies today is a tougher question.

There are really two distinct kinds of bad political writing: the overcomplicated, unclear kind, and propaganda. The first kind is dangerous because people in power can use it to fuzz up what they are doing and thus avoid accountability—think of a word like “rendition”—but it is usually not persuasive, because persuasion is not its intent. Propaganda, on the other hand, is often quite beautifully and clearly written. When it works, it works by virtue of being simple and memorable. What is dangerous about propaganda is that it is misleading. But its success seems to disprove Orwell’s implication that all bad ideas must be clumsily expressed. Consider the following extract from President Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, in which he unveiled the “War on Terror”:

On September the eleventh, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars—but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war—but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks—but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day—and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.

This would strike many people today as practically the locus classicus—as Orwell surely would not have put it—of the kind of language we call “Orwellian.” (At the time, it struck almost nobody that way.) Bush was responding to a successful terrorist attack by declaring war, not against the attackers themselves but against unspecified “enemies of freedom.” Thus, as in 1984, the United States was in a war without a definite beginning or end point, against whomever Bush wanted it to be against. Still, the speech wasn’t exactly Newspeak—its rhetoric was neither purposely obscure nor flat and simple to the point of meaninglessness. It was meant to have a genuine, persuasive emotional effect, and it did. Neither, except in its violation of Orwell’s proposed ban on the word “freedom,” is it representative of the kind of rhetoric “Politics and the English Language” was aimed against. It was vivid and (to quote Orwell) “all its words are those of everyday life.” The one exemplar of good writing Orwell singled out for praise in “Politics and the English Language” was the King James version of the Bible—a text that Bush and his chief speech writer at the time, Michael Gerson, obviously also admired and tried to use as a model. The challenge that “Politics and the English Language” puts before us today is in determining how far we can get politically through linguistic reform.

All politicians use slogans. Most significant legislation is given a meaning-obscuring name, for instance, the USA patriot Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. The way we respond to these uses of language is partly conditioned by our political preferences. Conservatives, who admire Orwell today no less than liberals do, find Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (pretty names for great expansions in the charter of the federal welfare state) to be Orwellian uses of language. Every recent president has seemed to his opposition to have used political spin at an unprecedented and alarming level, and every party out of power believes that if it can only use language more effectively (as opposed to more honestly), it will win again. Is there a set of rules we can propose for the honest use of political language that transcends ideology, and that would stand up to the often unlovely exigencies of campaigning and government in a free society?

There is nothing wrong with Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language”: simple is better than complicated; concrete is better than abstract; careful is better than sloppy; think before you write. The experience of the last few years would lead me to add that in political language, function is far preferable to emotion: the words used to denote something the government does should have to do with the activity itself, not the values it is meant to embody or the feelings it is meant to activate. (The war in Iraq, yes; Operation Enduring Freedom, no.) But this would get us only part of the way.

There are real limits to how what’s wrong with politics can be fixed linguistically. Many people participate in politics through group membership, not through consuming messages delivered through the mass media. People in interest groups, whether they’re environmentalists or beet farmers, usually come to politics with their minds already made up, or at least with a frame of reference so powerful (legal abortion is like the Holocaust) that it lies completely outside the bounds of the general public debate. They are not susceptible to persuasion, but that means they can’t easily be misled or brainwashed, either. The targets of political language are the marginal players, not the committed ones. Conversely, active and widespread political participation decreases the importance of language, and thus, for good or ill, reduces the role of writers, intellectuals, and propagandists in the political system.

To my mind, an even more frightening political prospect than the corruption of language is the corruption of information. Language, especially in the age of the Internet, is accessible to everybody. Some users of language are more powerful than others, some are more honest than others, and some are more adept than others—but the various ways of speaking about politics can at least compete with each other in the public square, and we can at least hope that the more honest and clear ways will triumph in the end. Information, on the other hand, is much less generally accessible than words. When the process of determining whether the facts of a situation have been intentionally corrupted by people in power (whether, let’s say, Saddam Hussein had the ability to produce nuclear weapons, or whether a new drug has harmful side effects), there often is no corrective mechanism at hand, as there is in cases of the intentional corruption of language. Intellectual honesty about the gathering and use of facts and data is a riskier and more precious part of a free society than is intellectual honesty in language. We ought to guard it with the same zeal that animates Orwell’s work on political speech.

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Eight Questions Reporters Should Ask Mike Huckabee

The campaign lurches along under more journalistic surveillance than ever before, but like other observers I’m often struck by questions — significant questions, in my estimation — that go unasked, or at least not asked very often or insistently. Of course, since I don’t read everything, it’s hard to know whether someone, sometime, has asked a given question of a given candidate. But if you think the public has the right to answers, and concede that only small slivers of the public are paying attention at any given time, it follows that significant or revelatory questions need to be asked more than once.

Here are some questions for the Republican candidate and former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. In the coming weeks, I’ll be posing questions for others, alternating Democrats and Republicans. Next: Barack Obama.

Questions for Mike Huckabee

1. In an interview on the Rev. Kenneth Copeland’s television show, “Believer’s Voice of Victory,” posted on his Web site, you said the following: “If we see any part of our society and culture that’s decaying, what’s going to keep it from rotting? The Christians. God’s people.” Do you believe that people who are not Christians are not “God’s people”?

2. In this same interview you referred to “God’s absolutes.” Could you tell us what “God’s absolutes” are?

3. You support a flat sales tax of 23 percent to replace all existing federal taxes, and you insist that its total effects will be “revenue-neutral.” Since lower-income people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than higher-income people, the result of your plan would be that a higher percentage of total taxes collected would be paid by lower-income people. Do you think this proposal is compatible with Christian beliefs? As a Christian, do you think it is consonant with the principles of Jesus to support the abolition of taxes on capital gains and interest?

4. In your book, From Hope to Higher Ground, you wrote: “Wal-Mart is a case study in the genius of the American marketplace.” Yet despite some recent improvements, most of Wal-Mart’s employees were not covered by the company’s health insurance. (Another round of improvements scheduled for January 2008 still requires an annual premium of $2,000 for a company whose employees often earn less than $20,000.) Moreover, the company has been forced to pay more than $200 million to employees they forced to work off the clock, and according to the Web site Walmartwatch.com, “Wal-Mart is currently facing the largest workplace-bias lawsuit in U.S. history for widespread discrimination against women employees; a class action lawsuit filed by African-American truck drivers; and numerous other cases involving discrimination against workers with disabilities.” What is your reaction?

5. Speaking about the children of illegal immigrants, you said recently that “we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.” Today, the children of poor people are penalized for their parents’ poverty. Obviously, they inherit less. Their schools are inferior. So are their job prospects. What would you do about this?

6. The other day, you said this: “Long before God ever created a government structure, the basic structure was the family.” When did God create a government structure? Did He create the government of the United States? Did He create the government of Iran? Pakistan? Afghanistan? Iraq? Did He create the government of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany? If not, who did?

7. There are many Biblical verses that support female submissiveness. Do you agree with them?

8. “I would love to see a human life amendment to our constitution,” you said last September. “Human life begins at conception.” According to some physicians, intrauterine devices (IUDs), emergency contraception (the “morning after pill,” or “Plan B”), the pill, the patch, and the Depo-Provera shot may work by preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs—after conception. Does this mean that you support the banning not only of abortion but of any or all of these methods of contraception?

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Wikimedia and the Free Culture Movement

While communication technologies have created a world flush with knowledge, creativity, and communication, works of culture are more tightly controlled and restricted today than ever before. A rapidly expanding copyright regime makes the use, modification and distribution of almost all documented human expression the exclusive right of its creator. Copyright today is automatic, extensive, and lasts for more than a century. Our culture today, is owned.

To counter this trend, writers, scientists, musicians, artists, and others have joined together to call for access to knowledge and the creation of a social movement for free culture — culture that is free as in freedom, if not necessarily as in price. In the short lifetime of the free culture project, Wikipedia has taken up a position as the most successful and important free cultural work. Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, provide everyone working toward a free culture with an example of what success might look like, hints for how they might achieve it, and the inspiration to continue.

Your support of the Wikimedia Foundation during this year’s donation drive does more than fund the foundation and its projects. It helps support and pave the way for the global movement for free culture that is already much larger than Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and wikis. The free culture movement, as Wikipedia demonstrates, offers a compelling vision of how we might improve the way we produce and consume information throughout our lives.

Free Culture

Under contemporary copyright laws, one can not legally copy an article for a friend, create a mash-up of a video, or sing Happy Birthday at a restaurant with asking for permission and, in most cases, paying for a license. Even more problematically, most cultural works are copyrighted by default at the moment of creation; only by explicitly disclaiming rights can works be used, copied, or modified. Through copyright, access to the most important cultural and scholarly resources are barred by tolls and restrictions. Legal access to most knowledge and culture is expensive — and prohibitively expensive for many. The creation of transformative or derivative works — like sampling and “mash-ups” — is frequently prohibited altogether.

Outraged by this situation, creators and consumers of culture have demanded increased freedom to distribute and modify creative goods as part of the free culture movement. While some leaders of the movement have resisted the statement of explicit goals, they have consistently positioned free culture in opposition to “high protectionist” approaches to copyright and intellectual property. Music, art, knowledge, and culture, free culture activists argue, should be widely accessible, flexible in the terms and restrictions placed on its use redistribution, and modification.

In part, the free culture movement is constituted by Utopians who imagine, describe, and espouse a world of what they feel is truly free culture. For these Utopians, free culture is a glimpse of ideal world where knowledge can be used, studied, modified, built upon, distributed, and shared without restriction. It is a world where creators are fairly and universally respected, attributed, and compensated. The major problem faced by free culture Utopians is that, in many cases, they do not know to move from contemporary cultural-economies based on copyright, ownership, control, and permission-asking to their ideal world.

Feeling that Utopianism is impractical, free culture’s pragmatists argue that it’s better to settle for the best that we can get by reforming the current copyright system and making incremental improvements. In particular, pragmatists argue that Utopian idealism eliminates the exclusivity on commercialization that helps support the production of many creative works. Better, they say, to settle for non-commercial use or verbatim copying than copyright’s default of “all rights reserved.”

The free culture movement, in this sense, is torn between the desire to create a world of truly free knowledge and the sense that in, for that knowledge, they have eliminated all viable financial and social systems to sustain creation of these works. The pragmatists compromise on a Utopian vision of a free world while the Utopians espouse what appears to many to be unrealistic.

Wikimedia

Wikimedia is a Utopian free culture project. Its goal is not only to collect knowledge; its goal is to do so freely. Wikipedia was created before it was clear that a free encyclopedia could or would succeed or that it would be better than the existing proprietary alternatives. Its goal was to be free, open, and unrestricted. Ironically, this idealistic commitment drove the creation of alternatives and redefined what was possible and realistic. In the free culture space, nothing demonstrates this better than Wikipedia. Nothing gives free culture’s Utopians as much hope.

Wikimedia is important simply in that it exists and in that is existing freely. As one of the most visited websites in existence, Wikipedia is an inevitable destination for any web searcher or surfer. It is a frequent response to the questions and curiosity of millions. But it is not just ubiquitous; it is better. It is no longer particularly controversial to suggest that Wikipedia is the single most impressive reference work ever compiled. It is one of the most important extant culture works in the world. And it is also free.

Early this year, the Wikimedia Foundation Board made an explicit commitment to a strong articulation of free culture goals. Through their resolution, the Wikimedia Foundation board made clear what was obvious to those involved in the project: Wikipedia has succeeded not in spite of the fact that the encyclopedia is free but because the encyclopedia is free. Wikimedia projects are valuable precisely because they have torn down barriers to contribution, use, and reuse.

Equally important for the free culture movement, Wikimedia has set an example and painted a picture of how a free culture might be achieved. In large part because of Wikimedia, wikis — once a marginal tool used by a small group of geeks — are a core technology in the production of free culture on thousands of wikis on myriad subjects. The technologies, social models, communication structures, and decision-making policies, procedures, and systems each provide inspiration and instructions for others in the broader free culture community. In each of these areas, Wikimedia projects provides a set of innovative models and practices that are compelling, successful and well documented.

Donating to the Wikimedia Foundation

While Wikipedia is free to use and is written without direct compensation to the vast majority of contributors, running Wikipedia is not without costs. Wikipedia is free as in speech, but not free as in beer — at least not for the Wikimedia Foundation. Financial support is necessary to power servers, sustain essential technological development, fend off legal threats, and ensure a healthy and productive community. This essential work is paid for by donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

And yet, while these donations are targeted toward the support of Wikimedia and its member projects, their impact in the free culture movement is much larger and more important. As the visible symbol of free culture to the vast multitude of people who have never heard the term, Wikimedia is intimately tied up in free culture’s success. Wikipedia provides not only an example of how free culture is possible, it demonstrates how it can be done. It also shows that free culture — truly free culture — is better than the proprietary alternatives. Wikipedia has already paved the way for the success of hundreds of free culture projects. Its success in its struggles, including this fundraising drive, will help or hurt the immediate prospects of the entire movement for free culture.

Please, join me in donating to the Wikimedia Foundation this year. The fate of a much more than Wikipedia is riding on our generosity.

Benjamin Mako Hill is an free software and free culture activist. He is an editor on English Wikipedia and Wikiversity and sits on the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board. He is an initiator of the Definition of Free Cultural Works and a director of the Free Software Foundation. By day, he works as a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management and as a Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

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U.S., China Not Ready to Limit Climate Emissions

At the half-way point of the UN climate change conference in Bali, delegates from the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, are declining to commit to the steep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases scientists say are necessary to avert the worst impacts of global warming.

The senior U.S. negotiator said Washington would draft its own plan to cut emissions gases by mid-2008, and would not commit to mandatory caps at Bali. "We're not ready to do that here," said Ambassador Harlan Watson.

A Chinese goverment climate expert who is part of the Chinese delegation in Bali conference says developing nations like China need not adopt binding emissions cuts because they have not been pumping out greenhouse gases as long as industrialized countries.

Su Wei, director-general of the Office of National Leading Group on Climate Change, said at a side event last week, "China is in the process of industrialization and there is a need for economic growth to meet the basic needs of the people and fight against poverty."

The top UN climate official says the Bali conference is not intended to set mandatory emissions limits but to agree on how to get there and on Saturday expressed optimism about the outcome of the meeting.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, the parent treaty for the Kyoto pact, said what is needed is a breakthrough in the form of a "roadmap for a future international agreement on enhanced global action to fight climate change in the period after 2012," the year the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires.

"The main goal of the Bali conference is threefold - to launch negotiations on a climate change deal for the post-2012 period, to set the agenda for these negotiations and to reach agreement on when these negotiations will have to be concluded," he said.

Conference President Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia's environment minister, said Saturday that the Bali roadmap would take the form of a President's Declaration at the end of the Bali conference on Friday.

Witoelar explained that he conceptualizes the roadmap as having several tracks and numerous milestones, including a track for negotiations under the Convention, with a milestone in 2008 and a destination in 2009.

He said the roadmap will also have tracks and milestones to progress issues such as technology transfer, reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries, adaptation implementation, and the Adaptation Fund.

Among the topics under debate, said de Boer, is the need for quantified national emission objectives for industrialized countries - guided by the range of 25-40 percent reductions by 2020 - and the need for emissions to peak in the next 10 to15 years.

De Boer said that technology must be "at the heart of the future response to climate change." Environmentally sound technologies and sustainable development approaches, he said, could help developing countries "leapfrog the carbon intensive stage of economic development."

The United States is not ready to commit to limits on greenhouse gas emissions in part because the Bush administration is holding a series of climate conferences with the "major economies" which James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality will, "reach agreement on a long-term global goal for reducing emissions."

While the United States is not ready for binding limits, Connaughton says the Bush administration is doing a great deal to limit global warming.

President George W. Bush proposes to reduce U.S. gasoline usage by 20 percent by 2017, he reminded reporters in Washington before flying to Bali for the high-level segment of the conference, which opens Wednesday.

"We have five different mandatory programs already in place, three of them at the federal level," Connaughton said, "mandatory fuel economy requirements, mandatory renewable fuel requirements, and mandatory appliance efficiency standards covering most of the major appliances."

At the state level, we have mandatory renewable power requirements and mandatory building codes that our Department of Energy has been helping to design," Connaughton said. "And then we have our new effort to try to bring a lot more nuclear power online."

Despite the unresolved problem of nuclear waste disposal, both the United States and China plan to build more nuclear power plants in the next decade.

Su said China is committed to controlling greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. At a side event in Bali, he said China is endeavoring to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP by 20 percent and increase the country's share of renewable energy to 10 percent.

China is closing down backward energy intensive plants and replacing them with advanced ones, Su said, adding that China is implementing 10 priority energy conservation programs, targeting more than 1,000 key energy intensive enterprises.

China is stabilizing emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide from industrial processes at the 2005 level, he said, and controlling the growth of methane emissions, another of the basket of six greenhouse gases controlled by the Kyoto Protocol, although China is not governed by that treaty.

In addition, Su said, China is increasing its forest coverage rate to 20 percent, thereby increasing the absorption rate of the greenhouse gas carbon dixoide by 50 million tons over the 2005 level.

Despite the heat and humidity in Bali, the overall atmosphere at the negotiations is "constructive and agreeable," says the global conservation group WWF.

Most of the developing countries, united in the G77 plus China, have come to Bali with considerable ambition and are showing flexibility, says Hans Verolme, director of WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.

"A group of major emerging economies including China, South Africa, and Brazil showed clarity of vision this week and made concrete proposals to tackle technology transfer by proposing a platform for public-private partnerships for technology cooperation."

The preparedness to engage has, however, not been matched by all G77 countries - Saudi Arabia and Malaysia especially disappointed with "old-fashioned unconstructive contributions," Verolme said.

Contact groups and informal consultations are underway today in a race to finish work before the high-level meeting opens Wednesday.

Delegates completed their work on the Adaptation Fund, education, training and public awareness, mitigation, as well as carbon capture and storage under the clean development mechanism. Talks are continuing on capacity building, communications among developing countries, reducing emissions from deforestation, and technology transfer.

Young people in Bali are making their concerns known. Children from Sunrise School in Kerobokan, Bali presented over a Green Footprints plan of action to UNFCCC Executive Secretary de Boer on behalf of more than 128,000 children from around the world.

That effort expresses hope, but not all young people in Bali are hopeful. "Of late, there has been a feeling of intense frustration within the youth caucus - while the fate of our world hangs on the line, negotiators and decision makers seem intent on creating innumerable obstacles to prevent progress in the negotiations," writes Australian youth delegate Emily Lawrence on the It's Getting Hot in Here website.

Saturday was the International Day of Action on Climate with marches, rallies and other coordinated events all over the world urging world leaders to take action on climate change.

In the streets just outside the conference center thousands of Indonesians called upon delegates to curb global warming.

The Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Bali Saturday, escorted by a flotilla of 50 local fishing boats, to "engage delegates," Greenpeace said. Some delegates have scheduled visits to the ship.

Demonstrations took place in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany, Greece, Spain, Turkey and the United States.

Organizers said more than 10,000 people rallied in London despite the cold and rain. They gathered in Parliament Square, some carrying signs reading, "There is no Planet B," others with signs against biofuels.

Friends of the Earth UK Director Tony Juniper said, "All across the world people are calling on national leaders to take tough and urgent action to combat climate change. It's essential that our politicians show the leadership required and ensure that the climate talks in Bali speed the world towards a low-carbon future and ensure the long-term security of generations to come."

In Germany some 10,000 gathered, according to organizers. A symbolic blackout action had people turning off their lights for five minutes in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Some 4,000 people rallied in the streets of Brussels despite freezing weather, in an action organized by Coalition Climat, a movement made up of 70 organizations. The day ended with a concert set up by Art for Earth.

In Athens, Greece, fire-eaters entertained a rally of about 1,000 people by blowing flames over the crowd.

About 1,000 demonstrators were reported in Istanbul asking the Turkish government to sign the Kyoto Protocol and reject plans to build nuclear power plans, just approved by parliament.

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Rudd to fly into climate battle as US resists greenhouse plan

Kevin Rudd may fly into a fight at the Bali climate change talks today, as the US mounts strong resistance to a plan for rich nations to set ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse emissions by 2020.

As Mr Rudd prepared for his first foray on the world stage as Prime Minister, the battle to keep tough wording in the final agreement of the UN climate change conference was still being played out a day before the high-level stage of the conference begins.

The draft agreement currently says developed countries such as Australia will need to cut emissions by between 25% and 40% by 2020 if the world is going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Last night, Reuters reported that the US had led a concerted last-ditch fight to have the specific targets removed from the draft, but had not yet succeeded.

"The numbers are still in the text. There has been a lot of pressure to take them out," said a delegate with intimate knowledge of the negotiations.

The final Bali deal will be put to Mr Rudd and ministers from more than 180 nations this week. Details of the draft emerged at the weekend, and many observers here hope it will launch formal negotiations to achieve a new global agreement by 2009.

But yesterday deep divisions over the draft still remained between the developed and developing countries, including China. The UN's climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said the controversial wording in the draft text took direction from the UN's peak scientific body and was a crucial part of the text because nations needed to leave Bali "with a clear sense of where we are going".

The economist shaping climate policy for the Australian Government, Ross Garnaut, said Mr Rudd would not be expected to commit to any interim 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target in Bali. "That's there for consideration, but no one expects this meeting in Bali to reach agreement on anything like that," Professor Garnaut said.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett, who arrived in Bali yesterday, refused to clarify Australia's position on the level of greenhouse emission cuts to which it and other developed nations should commit.

Significantly, the draft deal does not explicitly mention legally binding targets for developed countries, in an apparent effort to keep the US in the global negotiations. But it raises the bar for developing nations such as China and India, saying that a new climate agreement needs to consider "measurable and verifiable" actions by these countries to limit or reduce their emissions, boost efforts to stop deforestation and promote cleaner economic growth.

Speculation over whether the US would back the draft deal intensified yesterday, as Washington said goals for 2020 should be negotiated over the next two years rather than fixed in advance. "It's prejudging what the outcome should be," chief US negotiator Harlan Watson said of 2020 targets. "We don't want to start out with numbers." But Democratic senator John Kerry flew into Bali with the message that, whatever President George Bush said, the US would ultimately adopt tough, mandatory cuts in emissions under a new president.

"Every single Democratic candidate for president has embraced mandatory caps, has embraced the need for the US to lead on this issue," Senator Kerry said.

Also yesterday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Mr Garrett and environment campaigner Terri Irwin joined in a plea to save the orang-utan.

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Climate Science Manipulation Alleged

The White House has systematically tried to manipulate climate change science and minimize the dangers of global warming, asserts a Democratic congressional report issued after a 16-month investigation.

Republicans called the report, issued Monday by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a ``partisan diatribe'' against the Bush administration.

The report relies on hundreds of internal communications and documents as well as testimony at two congressional hearings to outline a pattern where scientists and government reports were edited to emphasize the uncertainties surrounding global warming, according to Waxman.

Many of the allegations of interference dating back to 2002 have surfaced previously, although the report by the Democratic majority of the House Oversight and Reform Committee sought to show a pattern of conduct.

``The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming,'' the report concludes.

It said the White House over the years has sought to control public access to government climate scientists, suppressed scientific views that conflicted with administration policy and extensively edited government reports ``to minimize the significance of climate change.''

The White House called the findings ``rehash and recycled rhetoric'' that has been addressed by administration officials in the past. ``It's a thinly veiled attempt to distract attention from the administration's efforts ... at the Bali summit,'' said White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore.

The report was issued as government officials from across the globe were meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to map out a strategy for dealing with climate change after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol on climate expires. The United States is a participant.

Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the House committee, issued his own report disputing the Democrats' conclusions.

The Democrats ``grossly exaggerated'' claims of political interference and ignored ``the legitimate role of policymakers, instead of scientists, in making administration policy.'' said the GOP rebuttal. It said requests to the media about science were referred to scientists.

Among the findings cited by the Democrats:

- The White House Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, made 294 edits to the administration's 2003 strategic plan for its climate change science program. It said the changes were to either emphasize uncertainties or diminish the importance of the human role in global warming.

- Media requests for interviews with climate scientists were routinely routed through the CEQ, which often sought to make available scientists whose views were more aligned with administration policy.

- Climate scientists' testimony before Congress was often heavily edited by political appointees. In cases cited in the report scientists were persuaded to play down the human influence on climate change and - in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the link between climate change and hurricanes.

James Connaugton, the CEQ chairman, rejected suggestions that science was being ignored or suppressed.

``This administration has an unparalleled record of supporting funding, advancing and publicizing climate change research,'' said Connaughton in a statement. ``Claims that this administration interfered with scientists and with the science are false.''

He said that nearly $12 billion has been devoted to advance climate change science since 2001 and that peer reviewed findings by U.S. government scientists have been a prominent part of assessments issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group of international scientists spearheading research into global warming.

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On the Net

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: http://oversight.house.gov/

White House Council on Environmental Quality: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/

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Carbon-taxing the rich

The Bali summit: Countries generating emissions must pay the cost, and the fairest and simplest way of forcing them to do so is through tax

This month's international meeting in Bali will set a framework that will attempt to prevent the impending disaster of global warming/climate change. There is now little doubt that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are leading to significant changes in climate. Nor is there doubt that these changes will impose huge costs. The question is no longer whether we can afford to do something, but rather how to control emissions in an equitable and effective way.

The Kyoto protocol was a major achievement, yet it left out 75% of the sources of emissions: the US, the largest polluter, refused to sign. (With Australia's new government now having signed the protocol, America is now the sole holdout among the advanced industrial countries.) No requirements were put on developing countries, yet within the not-too-distant future, they will contribute half or more of emissions. And nothing was done about deforestation, which is contributing almost as much to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations as the US.

The US and China are in a race to be the world's worst polluter; America has long won the contest, but in the next few years, China will claim that dubious honor. But Indonesia is number three, owing to its rapid deforestation.

One concrete action that should be taken at Bali is support for the initiative of the Rainforest Coalition, a group of developing countries that want help to maintain their forests. These countries are providing environmental services for which they have not been compensated. They need the resources, and the incentives, to maintain their forests. The global benefits of supporting them far outweigh the costs.

The timing of the conference is not propitious. George Bush, long a sceptic about global warming, and long committed to undermining multilateralism, remains America's president. His close connections with the oil industry make him loathe to force it to pay for its pollution.

Still, the Bali meeting's participants can agree on a few principles to guide future negotiations. These include, first, that solutions to global warming require the participation of all countries. Second, there can be no free riders, so trade sanctions - the only effective sanctions that the international community currently has - can and should be imposed on those not going along. Third, the problem of global warming is so vast that every instrument must be employed.

Better incentives must be part of the solution. But there is a raging controversy over whether the Kyoto protocol's cap-and-trade system or taxes work better. The problem with the Kyoto system is assigning caps that will be acceptable to developed and developing countries. Giving emission allowances is like giving away money - potentially hundreds of billions of dollars.

Kyoto's underlying principle - that countries that emitted more in 1990 are allowed to emit more in the future - is unacceptable to developing countries, as is granting greater emission rights to countries with a higher GDP. The only principle that has some ethical basis is equal emission rights per capita (with some adjustments - for instance, the US has already used up its share of the global atmosphere, so it should have fewer emission allowances). But adopting this principle would entail such huge payments from developed countries to developing countries, that, regrettably, the former are unlikely to accept it.

Economic efficiency requires that those who generate emissions pay the cost, and the simplest way of forcing them to do so is through a carbon tax. There could be an international agreement that every country would impose a carbon tax at an agreed rate (reflecting the global social cost). Indeed, it makes far more sense to tax bad things, like pollution, than to tax good things like work and savings. Such a tax would increase global efficiency.

Of course, polluting industries like the cap-and-trade system. While it provides them an incentive not to pollute, emission allowances offset much of what they would have to pay under a tax system. Some firms can even make money off the deal. Moreover, Europe has grown used to the concept of cap-and-trade, and many are loathe to try an alternative. Yet, no one has proposed an acceptable set of principles for assigning emission rights.

For some, this is not a concern. With developing countries standing to lose even more than developed countries if nothing is done about global warming, many believe they can be cajoled, threatened, or induced to be part of a global agreement. Developed countries need only figure out the minimum price they have to pay developing countries to go along.

But developing countries worry that a new global agreement on emissions, like so many other international agreements, will leave them in a disadvantageous position.

In the end, Realpolitik may rule. But the world today is different from the world of 25 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Flourishing democracies in many developing countries mean that their citizens demand fair treatment.

Principles do matter. The Bali meeting's participants should bear this in mind: global warming is too important to be held hostage to another attempt at squeezing the poor.

In cooperation with Project Syndicate, 2007.

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We would be fools to banish global business from the great climate battle

Capitalism alone won't save the planet, but it has a critical, innovative role to play. The alternative is to rely on a revolution

Think about climate change long enough and you soon realise that it's more than our lightbulbs that we're going to have to change. Colleagues have already argued on these pages this week, as delegates gather in Bali to hammer out a global accord to avert this catastrophe, that a much more fundamental overhaul will be required, a war on carbon as fierce as the 1940s war on fascism. Madeleine Bunting suggested a return to wartime rationing, in order to curb a hyper-consumerism that is palpably unsustainable.

One could go further, arguing that it is not just excessive consumerism but capitalism's very nature that makes it incompatible with the survival of our planet. For capitalism requires constant economic growth, yet the Earth's resources are finite. Capitalist logic says we must buy, sell and consume more and more each year. Nature's logic says we can't.

Two possible political consequences flow from this, pointing in opposite directions. One scenario would see a reopening of an ideological debate that has remained all but dormant, at least in the west, for nearly two decades. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the prevailing assumption has been that capitalism faces no serious rival; no viable alternative system is on offer. Even self-described progressives have been wary of challenging the core tenets of free market economics for fear of looking like outdated leftovers from the socialist past. But now, armed with a plea not only to combat grotesque inequality but to save the human race's only home, progressives could start making the fundamental case against capitalism anew.

The other scenario is that capitalism could fight back, containing not, as the Marxists predicted, the seeds of its own destruction, but perhaps the seeds of its own - and therefore the Earth's - salvation.

That's certainly the impression the capitalists themselves are keen to project. Last week, the Confederation of British Industry put out a report pledging to do "what it takes" to tackle global heating - "warming" is misleadingly gentle - and to play its part in reducing Britain's carbon emissions. Days later chief executives from 150 leading global corporations, Coca-Cola, Shell and British Airways among them, issued a pre-Bali communique calling for a comprehensive, binding UN framework on climate change. Its message to world leaders: rein us in, please!

Now, the grounds for scepticism here are obvious. Most CEOs realised long ago that looking green has become a necessary part of corporate PR. So the CBI makes the right noises even as its signatory companies continue to lobby for more roads and bigger airports. They talk big but promise to cut their current, collective carbon emissions of 370m tonnes by a measly 1m tonnes over the next three years.

Yet some in business are clearly determined to do more than printing the company reports on green-scented, recycled notepaper. Some are realising that last year's Stern review was right, that business stands to lose more through inaction on climate change than action will cost. In the words of one boardroom chieftain quoted last week: "We mustn't kill our customers."

And the smartest understand that, as in every crisis, there is money to be made. Witness the cash now swilling around the cap-and-trade market in carbon, which grew threefold last year and which the World Bank now estimates is worth at least $30bn. Here's how it works. On January 1 2005, the EU put a cap on how much carbon companies are allowed to emit. If Company A gets an allowance to pump out 1,000 tonnes but only emits half that, it can sell the right to emit the remaining 500 tonnes to Company B, which would otherwise overshoot its allocation. The beauty of the scheme is that it at last puts an economic value on carbon which, until now, cost nothing - even though it literally costs the Earth. This way, runs the theory, companies have a direct financial stake in keeping down their emissions, so that they don't have to pay for credits (or fines) if they breach the cap.

In practice, though, it seems European companies prefer to pay for their sins rather than change their ways. I spoke to James Cameron, co-founder of Climate Change Capital which also takes advantage of the UN's trading scheme far beyond Europe. Cameron will approach, say, a cement company in China and offer to invest millions in a new, greener plant. In return, once verified, the UN will hand the cement firm credits for the carbon it has saved, credits that it can then sell back on the international market. The proceeds are split between the Chinese and Cameron's firm - and everyone's happy.

Except, isn't this robbing Peter to pay Paul, reducing carbon in Beijing only to keep on producing it in Birmingham? No, says Cameron. Reducing carbon in China is more efficient, costing much less than an equivalent reduction in Europe. Anyway, he says, don't be precious about it: his company is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere that would otherwise be in it. The firm's current projects aim to eliminate 70m tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to the entire CO2 output of Denmark.

Getting developing nations to cut back on carbon while we keep belching it out may seem like green colonialism, but Cameron believes the climate crisis allows for no such pieties: we just have to cut carbon as quickly as possible and reductions in China are the lowest-hanging fruit. Besides, European polluters will eventually have to make their own CO2 reductions, since buying allowances costs money. (Not that it's having that effect yet: European emissions have actually risen by 0.8% since the trading scheme started.)

Perhaps capitalism's greatest contribution will come from the thing it does best: innovation. Curiously, many of the consumer advances of recent years have, in green terms, been retreats. Landline phones used to need no mains power; now their "cordless" successors require a base unit permanently plugged in. We used to repair appliances; today their innards come moulded together, making repair impossible or more costly than replacement.

Now, though, some savvy designers are rethinking all that from scratch. Not just eliminating waste and packaging, but thinking of consumption in an entirely different way. What if we did not buy a product at all, but merely a service? iTunes provides music, rather than a physical object, and that saves on materials and haulage. Electrolux is testing a new approach to laundry in Sweden, renting, rather than selling, washing machines to customers - thereby giving the company an incentive to prolong each machine's life.

Clare Brass, who has just launched the Seed Foundation for "social environmental enterprise + design", wants to change "the way we make contact with the energy infrastructure". Carbon is invisible and colourless, and so is electricity; we don't see it when we use it. That's why Brass is a big admirer of the Wattson, a neat little gizmo that shows home energy use in pounds and pence, not watts, and which glows redder the more you spend.

On their own, none of these ideas will be enough. And it's clear that some of the headline efforts by global capital creak with contradictions. But some effort by business, alongside government, is surely better than nothing. The alternative is to wait for a political revolution, and a global resolve, that may come too late - or never come at all.

freedland@guardian.co.uk

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