Top 10 Reasons to Vote Green on Saturday

1. The Greens stand up for what’s right, not just what’s easy. Whether it’s protecting the environment, introducing universal dental care, opposing the war in Iraq or advocating for refugees to be treated humanely, the Greens are driven by values, not polls.

2. It’s the Party everyone’s heading to. The Greens are the third largest political party in Australia, with five national Senators, 21 State MPs and more than 100 local Greens councillors already playing a positive and constructive role across Australia. More than a million Australians voted Green in 2007, and we're the fastest-growing party in the country.

3. Break the deadlock in the Senate between the Government and the Opposition. Last time the Government of the day also got control of the Senate, we got WorkChoices. Or, Tony Abbott's Coalition could easily win control of the Senate, which would deliver Australians nothing but three years of deadlock. We deserve a Senate that will work for us and deliver strong, sensible action – not just spin.

4. Provide future generations with clean air, clean water and a stable climate. The Greens will tackle climate change by putting a price on carbon for big polluters in the next term of government. It’s time we created new clean energy jobs and started investing in the economy of the future.

5. Make legislation better. When the Coalition tried to block the stimulus package that kept Australia out of recession, the Greens passed it with added environmental and small business benefits. The Greens will do the same thing to improve the mining super profits tax.

6. The Greens have vision. When Bob Brown first spoke to the Senate about climate change 14 years ago, his Labor and Liberal colleagues actually laughed at him. Now the Greens are the only party working to end all forms of legal discrimination against Australians based on sexuality. The Greens focus on what’s right for the next generation, not just the next election cycle.

7. An environmental party. The Greens have always worked to protect Australia’s magnificent natural environment for future generations – whether that’s protecting our native forests and their wildlife , or our pristine beaches and marine ecosystems.

8. An environmental party and much, much more. The Greens stand for much more than just cutting carbon pollution, securing our water supplies and protecting our environment. Think better public schools, more funding for hospitals and fixing our broken mental health system. The Greens also drive great new ideas, like building high-speed rail between Australia’s major cities, which is now gaining momentum but would never have gotten up otherwise.

9. For a more powerful vote. Another Labor or Liberal candidate will just vote the way they’re told. With the Greens, every vote is a conscience vote. If you’re disappointed with Labor but don’t want Tony Abbott, you can send a powerful message to Julia Gillard. And if your Greens candidate doesn’t win, your vote will simply go to the next candidate of your choice at full value.

10. Bob Brown. A genuinely decent politician and the most experienced party leader in Parliament.


 Subscribe in a reader

Bob Brown - Zero Carbon Australia plan sets the bar

The challenge posed by the climate crisis is an enormous one. Facing up to it will require every bit of resourcefulness and ingenuity we humans can muster.

As global political leaders have slowly but surely woken up to the reality of climate change, have been dragged to it by their citizens, too often they have responded with fine words but no action. The contradiction between Kevin Rudd's "great moral challenge of our time" and his patently inadequate response played a big part in his downfall - taking him from one of Australia's most popular Prime Ministers to one of its least popular within months.

Our leaders lack imagination. They don't imagine a world where we have actually stopped polluting, stopped destroying our forests and moved onto a truly sustainable footing. Only when our leaders make that leap will it actually happen.

That's why the Zero Carbon Australia plan from Melbourne University and Beyond Zero Emissions is so important.

By demonstrating that it is technically feasible to completely replace polluting coal power in Australia with currently available renewable energy technologies in as little as ten years, they have made the climate solution imaginable.

Now the onus is on those who say it can't be done to fault this study. So far an astonishing array of technical experts has looked it over and given it their imprimatur. All we have from opponents of action are blanket statements that renewables are somehow not up to the task, statements that run contrary to the clear evidence around the world.

The ZCA study focuses primarily on the potential for baseload solar power, particularly in a country as sunny as Australia. Currently, Spain and the USA are powering ahead with this exciting technology that concentrates the sun's energy and stores it for up to 16 hours after the sun goes down - in other words, through the night. One collection of plants in the USA, known as the Solar Energy Generating System, has a combined output of 350 megawatts (MW), although without storage. Nevada Solar One is a single plant of 64MW. Andasol 1 and 2, in Spain, will soon have 100MW with storage. Gigawatts of power plants are currently in planning and construction across the globe.

I am impressed by the rigour with which this study sets out how, where and how fast this technology can be rolled out across Australia, making use of sunny areas in convenient geographical areas.

If you don't believe the ZCA study, do the modelling yourself. That is the challenge we Greens have set the government, with Christine Milne moving a motion in the Senate in June calling on the government to request a similar modelling task from the Departments of Climate Change and Resources, Energy and Tourism.

As part of her Safe Climate Bill, the Senate has legislation that would give Infrastructure Australia responsibility for studying and planning a transition to 100 per cent renewable energy in Australia and establishing how fast that can happen. The bill asks Infrastructure Australia to map renewable energy resources across the nation; it would bring all levels of government, local communities and renewable energy developers together in early consultation, and create renewable energy development zones based on the mapped areas, with streamlined approval processes. It would lead to funding of the connection of the zones to the electricity grid and to a strategic plan for reaching 60 per cent, 80 per cent or 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

The ZCA plan is one solution for stationary energy (power stations) in Australia. We may well see a range of other technologies - geothermal, wave power and more - adding to our mix and diversifying our power. But this study raises the welcome reality of a carbon pollution free future for Australia.

Bob Brown is Senator for Tasmania and Leader of the Australian Greens and introduced the Human Rights (Mandatory Sentencing of Juvenile Offenders) Bill 1999 into the Senate.

 Subscribe in a reader

Why a conscientious Christian could vote for the Greens

Cardinal George Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby led by Jim Wallace have once again joined forces in the public square - this time to advocate that Christians not vote in the forthcoming election for the “anti-Christian” Greens who the Cardinal describes as “sweet camouflaged poison”.

Jim Wallace launched the initial salvo in The Australian describing the Greens as “a party whose philosophical father, Peter Singer, clearly places the rights of animals above the rights of children, but at the same time endorses sex with animals, which presumably are robbed of any right of consent”.

On Sunday His Eminence took up the call in his regular Sunday Telegraph column stating: “In 1996 the Green leader Bob Brown coauthored a short book The Greens with the notorious philosopher Peter Singer (now at Princeton University in USA), who rejects the unique status of humans and supports infanticide, as well as abortion and euthanasia.”

The Cardinal has urged his listeners and readers “to examine the policies of the Greens on their website and judge for themselves how thoroughly anti-Christian they are”.

Clearly the Greens will not be gaining the votes or preferences of Pell and Wallace. But was it principled and prudent for them to make this public declaration? Could not a conscientious Christian still vote for the Greens? And are their policies more anti-Christian than those of the major parties?

Let's be clear: the Greens are not in the contest for government and they are very unlikely to have much, if any, say in the House of Representatives. Their political purchase after the election will be in the Senate where they will most probably have the balance of power.

Some Christians, myself included, think that it is never a good thing for the government of the day to control the Senate. You just have to look at what happened to the Howard government in its last term when it controlled the Senate. Hubris set in; the usual rational debate about the limits on WorkChoices was abandoned because the government was assured passage of its overbroad, ideological legislation. When the government does not control the Senate, it needs to garner support for legislation by putting coherent arguments in order to attract a handful of Senators on the cross benches.

In days past, those cross benches were occupied by the Democratic Labor Party, which boasted Catholic credentials, and then the Democrats, who were just as secular as the Greens.

A thoughtful Christian is entitled to consider the workings of the Senate when deciding where to allocate preferences in their voting. A thoughtful Christian could give their first or second party preference to a minor party like the Greens confident that this minor party would hold to account whichever party is in power on contested legislative proposals.

Some Christians, myself included, think that the Greens are not classifiable as straight out anti-Christian. While some of their members may be (much like Mark Latham was in the Labor Party), others like Lin Hatfield Dodds have given distinguished public service in their churches for decades.

On some policy issues, I daresay the Greens have a more Christian message than the major parties.
Consider their stand on overseas aid, refugees, stewardship of creation and the environment, public housing, human rights protection, and income management. On all these issues, the Greens are far more in synch with the periodic utterances of most Church leaders than either of the major political parties. The Greens have been the only party to hold back the tide against the race to the bottom in the asylum seeker debate since Kevin Rudd was replaced as Prime Minister.

Admittedly the Greens can afford to be more idealistic on some of these issues because they will never occupy the treasury benches. This idealism appeals to some voters, especially the young. Even some of us hardened older voters see a place for some idealism expressed by minor political parties.

Like Cardinal Pell and Jim Wallace, I part company with the Greens on issues like abortion, stem cell research, same sex marriage and funding for church schools. But on none of these issues will the Greens carry the day given that policy changes in these areas will occur only if they are supported by a majority from both major political parties.

Cardinal Pell says: “The Greens are opposed to religious schools and would destroy the rights of those schools to hire staff and control enrolments. Funding for non-government schools would be returned to the levels of 2003-04.” It is a complete furphy to suggest that the election of Greens in the Senate would threaten the funding of church schools. The funding formula for schools will be altered by law only if the government of the day wins support from the Opposition, given that the Opposition and government will be much closer on such a formula than will be the Greens with either major political party.

The Greens position on funding of Church schools will be an irrelevance. Even if the Greens were to try to use reduced funding of Church schools as a bargaining chip for some other policy concession, they would be most unlikely to succeed, provided the church school lobby maintains its good standing with both major political parties.

If all the Greens' policies were truly classifiable as “anti-Christian”, I would have no problem with church leaders urging people to vote for another party. But given that some of their policies, and on issues which will be legislated in the next three years, are arguably more Christian than those of the major parties, I think it best that Church leaders maintain a discreet reticence about urging a vote for or against any particular political party.

This is especially the case given that Green preferences are more likely to favour the major party headed by an atheist rather than the one headed by a professed Christian. It would be very regrettable if an attack by Pell and the Christian Lobby on the Greens could be construed as an indirect shot across the bows of the atheist Prime Minister.

Though the Christian Lobby thought its influence significant when the major parties were both headed by professed Christians, there is a need for special sensitivity, judging politicians and parties by their fruits in this pluralistic democratic Australia where quite a number of its thinking voters as well as some of its leading politicians happen to be atheist.

I thought the language of our Cardinal on this occasion unbecoming and unhelpful in the cause of church credibility in the public square. If the Australian Christian Lobby wants to mount such rhetorical election campaigns, all our bishops should maintain a dignified distance and reticence.

First published in www.eurekastreet.com.au on August 10, 2010. 

Fr Frank Brennan SJ is Professor of Law at the Public Policy Institute, Australian Catholic University, and Adjunct Professor at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Australian National University.

 Subscribe in a reader

The deserving rich v the undeserving poor

This deeply uninspiring election campaign has seen both leaders try to out-do one another as fiscal conservatives. Despite the appearance of flinging money around, most commentators agree that the two sides are being relatively penny-pinching - for an election campaign anyway.

The Coalition, in particular, have been fulminating about “waste”, keen to land blows on the ALP over the “failed” BER, the pink batts debacle, and the horror of borrowing $100 million a day to service our (actually fairly miniscule) debt “crisis”. Abbott is claiming to be so careful with taxpayer’s money he has even foreshadowed extending the quarantining of welfare payments to all the long term unemployed across Australia, so that half their money can only be used to purchase food, clothing and other necessities. He has justified this by declaring that taxpayers have a right to know where their money is going.

Yet it never ceases to amaze me how selective both parties are about just what constitutes wasting public money in today’s Australia. But, to be fair, it seems most of us are half blind in much the same way.

We watch what people at the lower end of society do with their welfare payments like hawks. Pouncing on any evidence of misuse with cries of “dole bludgers” and “welfare cheats”. Our view appears to be that you can’t trust the poor an inch when it comes to giving them money. Indeed, so punitive were the Howard government’s attitudes to single mothers - ending all supporting parent benefits when the child turned six - that these women are credited with helping defeat Howard in 2007 and in chasing former Community Services Minister Mal Brough from his seat. You can understand their frustration and anger when you consider the tax incentives the Howard government also used to encourage mothers in two-parent families to stay home and care for their children, no matter what the child’s age.

It seems we are witnessing a fundamental change in the way we distribute public funding. When it comes to middle class welfare, both sides of politics are falling over themselves in their haste to throw more and more money at those who are already doing fairly nicely, thank you very much. Public investment in social services has become a way for governments to reward and punish certain groups.

Just look at the way politicians use the tax system to fund schools. If we want to talk about wasting taxpayer’s money, the discredited SES funding system for private schools would appear to me to be the prime example of chucking big money about carelessly.

More than half of Australia’s private schools now receive more public funding than they are entitled to according to their SES ranking, thanks to the politically expedient funding maintained and funding guaranteed sweetheart deals done between the powerful private school lobby groups and successive governments. Despite instituting the first review into schools funding for decades, Gillard has promised she will not reconsider SES funding until 2013, no matter what the review recommends. Abbott has said he will maintain the SES funding as it is in perpetuity.

Just imagine the outcry if we discovered that more than half of Australia’s unemployed, single mothers or old aged pensioners were receiving more than they were entitled to from the taxpayer? You can already hear the shock jocks shrieking from their bully-pulpits. Yet we do not hear a peep from anyone about excessive government subsidies to schools that can afford to buy White City, build under-ground carparks, multi-purpose media centres and professional-standard sporting facilities.

Indeed, if anyone does have the temerity to complain, they are howled down with cries about the “politics of envy” and the handful of Indigenous scholarship kids (subsidised by a quick $20 million from the taxpayer via Kevin Rudd) are trotted out to demonstrate elite schools’ earnest commitment to social justice. Now Abbott is promising to give a small number of kids with a disability $20,000 vouchers to attend these schools. How come no one has asked why these unbelievably wealthy schools, especially the ones being over-paid, can’t divert a little of the public subsidy they already receive to support such students?

Unlike the recipients of real welfare, who are policed within an inch of their lives, there is little accountability for the millions handed out to these schools. Justified as supporting parental choice, there is actually no mechanism attached to these subsidies to make sure that they have any effect on the fees parents pay at all. Indeed, the fees of most private schools rise every year, often at a much greater rate than inflation.

In fact, as we have seen with the healthcare rebate, the childcare rebate and the first home-buyer’s scheme - and as economists have said about Tony Abbott’s promise to rebate a percentage of school fees - public subsidy of private provision is largely inflationary. The market will charge what the market will bear, so the private provider - quite sensibly - simply ups the fees by the amount of the subsidy, providing a windfall for them and no relief for parents. A waste of taxpayers’ money, in anyone’s language.

According to the sweetheart SES deals, the public funding to many private schools can only go up, never down. For example, if a school once had a few kids from rural and remote areas, their SES funding went up and then stayed up, even after the kids were long gone. The equivalent, perhaps, to someone who received benefits when unemployed continuing to receive them long after they have got a job. We actually prosecute people who attempt to do that, I believe.

If we are serious about not wasting public money, we simply must put a stop to it at the top end of the income scale as well as at the bottom. And until politicians come to terms with the fact that they are wasting money on a grand scale through the corrupted SES funding scheme, and, by doing so, stopping schools that service the most disadvantaged kids in the community from putting that money to much better use, everything else - uniform rebates, national curriculum, performance pay for teachers, cash for high performing schools, more chaplains, and so on - is just fiddling round the edges.

We must re-distribute our precious education funding to the students who really need it and the schools that will not waste it. School funding should not be about rewarding “good” parents and punishing “bad” ones. School funding should deliver opportunities for children, regardless of who their parents are.

 Subscribe in a reader

More on Extreme Weather - Day Two stories go a step farther in drawing connection to climate change

Stories exploring a possible connection between climate change and extreme weather around the world continued over the weekend, with some scientists willing to venture personal opinions that recent events are likely (but not demonstrably) the consequence global warming.

Last week, reporters produced commendably temperate coverage of this summer’s abnormal weather. In general, reporters explained that while scientists cannot attribute individual droughts and storms to global warming, they expect their intensity and frequency will rise with temperature. Stories over the weekend went a step farther, however, emphasizing that a number of scientists think that the recent parade of unusual phenomena is evidence that extreme weather is already becoming more frequent and intense.

On Saturday, The New York Times juxtaposed photos of monsoonal floods in Pakistan, heat-wave induced wildfires in Russia, and torrential downpours in Chicago, over a front-page story headlined, “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming.” Asking whether or not climate change is, at present, causing more weather extremes, the article found that, “The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.”

Generally, I’m leery of “collective” answers, especially those that are “boiled down,” but the article is actually very nuanced. First of all, it does not report that this summer’s extreme events are directly attributable to global warming, only that there is a chance that they are, since warming appears to be increasing the instance of extreme events generally. Second, most of the story is dedicated to explaining why a scientific answer to weather-climate connection is not, in fact, easily reduced to a one-word reply:

Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves. Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that much of this is starting to happen.

But the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change. Most climate scientists are reluctant to go that far, noting that weather was characterized by remarkable variability long before humans began burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Nonetheless, a few scientists have overcome some of that reluctance in the last few days, expressing their belief that, while conclusive evidence is lacking, they strongly suspect that global warming had a role to play in this summer’s extreme weather.

“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt told the Times. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”

Schmidt was more restrained during an interesting CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria, which also included Jeff Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Pat Michaels, a climatologist who has adamantly opposed climate-warming reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But he’s not the only scientist ready to make an informed guess. In a column for the Guardian, Potsdam University climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf (who, with Schmidt, writes for the blog RealClimate.org) wrote:

Looking only at individual extreme events will not reveal their cause, just like watching a few scenes from a movie does not reveal the plot. But, viewed in a broader context, and using the logic of physics, important parts of the plot can be understood…

This cluster of record-breaking events could be merely an streak of bad luck. But that is extremely unlikely. This is far more likely to be the result of a warming climate – a consequence of this decade being, worldwide, the hottest for a thousand years.

Rahmstorf catalogues a host of extreme events in recent years, and offers a good explanation of why greenhouse gases are clearly what’s throwing the Earth’s energy budget out of whack (see also Andrew Freedman’s interesting conversations with Peter Stott, head of the U.K. Met Office, and Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist for The Weather Channel, at Climate Central and The Washington Post, respectively). As for the proof that Schmidt mentioned, the Times’s article went on to point out that:

In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.

Climate-change skeptics dispute such statistical arguments, contending that climatologists do not know enough about long-range patterns to draw definitive links between global warming and weather extremes. They cite events like the heat and drought of the 1930s as evidence that extreme weather is nothing new. Those were indeed dire heat waves, contributing to the Dust Bowl, which dislocated millions of Americans and changed the population structure of the United States.

But most researchers trained in climate analysis, while acknowledging that weather data in parts of the world are not as good as they would like, offer evidence to show that weather extremes are getting worse.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t present much more of that evidence. It mentions a government report (pdf) from 2008, which identified changing weather patterns across U.S., but could have gone farther. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, for instance, contains a useful FAQ section (pdf), which lays out recorded observations of decreases in cold nights, increases in warm nights, increases in heavy precipitation events, and increases in droughts in various parts of the world. [Update, 4 p.m.: Justin Gillis, the author of the Times article, followed up with a good blog post offering more supporting evidence a warming-related rise in extreme weather.]

It is also unfortunate that the Times never specifies the basis for its statements about the opinions of “most researchers” and their “collective answer” to the climate-weather question. I don’t doubt the statements’ accuracy, but words like “consensus” have been become so controversial in today’s media that the justification for such quantifications bears mentioning. In the case of the Times’s article, is the “collective answer” of “most researchers” represented by the IPCC’s report? By the large number of scientists that its reporters interviewed? What? The reader needs to know, because confusing statements about consensus are rife.

Take, for example, this headline at The Wonk Room: “Climate Experts Agree: Global Warming Caused Russian Heat Wave.” That bold proclamation is based on statements from two people, in particular. The first is Michael Tobis, a research scientist associate at the University of Texas, who wrote on his blog:

… right now I feel like hazarding a guess. As far as I understand, nothing like this has happened before in Moscow … it may turn out reasonable, in the end, to say “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change”. (I also ventured something like this about the Australian fires last year.)

The second is Rob Carver, a meteorologist at Weather Underground, who has provided some of the best descriptions of the “blocking” of the jet stream that is the proximate cause of the heat wave in Russia. In an e-mail exchange with The Wonk Room, Carver wrote:

I agree with Michael Tobis’s take at Only In It For the Gold that something systematic has changed to alter the global circulation and you’ll need a coupled atmosphere/ocean global model to understand what’s going on. My hunch is that a warming Arctic combined with sea-surface-temperature teleconnections altered the global circulation such that a blocking ridge formed over western Russia leading to the unprecedented drought/heat wave conditions. Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all. (You may quote me on that.)

Like Schmidt in the Times, both Tobis and Carver are inching out onto a limb here, which is fine (the limb seems to grow sturdier by the day), but The Wonk Room’s decision to use a “guess” and “hunch” to declare that “climate experts agree [that] global warming caused the Russian heat wave” is grossly misleading. Likewise, I recently received a memorandum from Friend of the Earth, an environmental group, addressed to “journalists covering extreme and unusual weather events.” It argued that:

Some media outlets have now begun to examine the connections between the extreme weather and climate change, but this story merits more coverage and in-depth reporting. The connections between a warming climate and extreme weather are unambiguous, and the media has a duty to connect the dots.

I would agree that this story merits more in-depth reporting, and the media have a duty to connect the dots between extreme weather and climate change. Those connections are not “unambiguous,” however. Stott, the head of the U.K.’s Met Office, had a great column in the Guardian last week, explaining that while he and colleagues were able to demonstrate that the European heat wave of 2003 would have been likely without global warming:

For some other types of extreme weather there is a need for more research. For example, circulation changes could mean that some extreme weather events become less, not more likely under climate change. Better understanding of which extreme weather events are part of normal variations rather than of a developing pattern of climate change effects will help societies adapt to the challenges of ongoing climate change. Next week in Colorado, experts from the UK and US forecasting centres at the Met Office and NOAA will meet to consider how we can provide better information on the causes of extreme weather in near-real time.

Until more research is hand reporting that the weather-climate connection is “unambiguous” will only sow confusion. Moreover, journalists don’t need to overreach in order to be agenda setters. The Times’s front-page article was a great example of how reporters can highlight scientists’ growing suspicion that global warming is steadily raising the baseline for wild temperature swings while also being honest about the limitations of their current knowledge.

Other papers are making similar efforts, pointing out weather-climate connections without overplaying them. Take the very laudable opinion column by the editor of the Albany Times Union, Rex Smith, apparently penned in response to readers’ complaints about a front-page Associated Press article the paper ran last week, explaining that this summer’s extreme weather jibes with climatologists predictions about a warmer world. In it, Smith writes:

Let’s be clear, as the Associated Press article we published was: You can’t blame climate change for any single weather event — not for last year’s wet summer here, for example, nor for the disasters that have befallen various corners of the world this summer. But scientists say that a warmer world is one where extreme weather events are more likely to occur, and that’s what we’re seeing nowadays…

The topic is worthy of greater exposition than I can offer here, but in terms of our reporting, the principle at stake is simple: Even if what we need to know isn’t what we want to hear, it’s quite simply what we are owed by anyone who professes to practice good journalism.

Thankfully, many editors appear to be of the same mind as Smith—ready to let their reporters delve into a complex subject that defies easy answers in order to deliver nuanced stories that stress scientists’ concerns about extreme weather and place them in proper climatic context.

 Subscribe in a reader

Temperate Coverage of Extreme Weather - Media put heat, floods in proper climatic context

More and more, reporters have been asking whether or not climate change could be responsible for this summer’s extreme weather. Thankfully, most have resisted the temptation to pin the events directly to global warming, placing them in proper climatic context instead.

For the last week, news outlets around the world have churned out stories about record-setting temperatures and blazing infernos around Moscow as well as flooding in Pakistan that the United Nations called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history. To a lesser extent, there have also been plenty of reports about rain-induced landslides in China, severe droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, and the calving of an enormous iceberg from the Greenland ice sheet.

“The occurrence of all these events at almost the same time raises questions about their possible linkages to the predicted increase in intensity and frequency of extreme events” laid out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 assessment report, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported Wednesday.

Indeed, before the WMO even made that observation, reporters were seeking out scientific sources that could provide answers. Articles and blog posts from Reuters, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, the Telegraph, BBC News, the Associated Press, New Scientist, and The Economist have all come to the same basic conclusion: While no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, more extreme weather events can be expected in a warmer world, and the ones we’ve seen this summer fit the IPCC’s predictions.

The contributions from New Scientist and The Economist are among the best of the bunch. Unlike some of the others, which explore the indeterminate climate connection but leave it that, they both explain (quoting from the latter) that “The immediate cause of the [the Russian heat wave and Pakistani flood, which appear to be linked] is the behavior of the jet stream, a band of high-level wind that travels east around the world and influences much of the weather below it.”

Basically, the jet stream’s current pattern has become “blocked,” as meteorologists put it, by north-south airflows high in the atmosphere. As a result, a high-pressure “ridge” has become locked in place over western Russia (with cooler than average temperatures to the east). The ridge intensifies the hot and dry conditions on the ground, which, in turn, intensify the ridge in a positive feedback loop. Meteorologists Jeff Masters and Rob Carver offered technical but useful explanations of the situation at Weather Underground, and an explanation of blocking is available at the National Weather Service’s Web site.

Peter Stott, the head of the climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K.’s Met Office, had an enlightening column in the Guardian explaining why the Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods might be linked, and delved into their connection to climate change. Wired Science’s Brandon Keim delivered a nice, clear explanation of the linkage between the weather events in Asia as well.

There were missteps, of course. The Telegraph mentioned the jet stream’s role in extreme weather, but its importance was obscured by the paper’s unfortunate decision to run the headline, “Climate change experts say global warming could be the cause.” Worse still was the BBC, which didn’t mention the jet stream at all (it only referred to “circulation anomalies”) and ran the headline, “Climate change ‘partly to blame’ for sweltering Moscow.” Such language—which suggests that we can, in fact, attribute specific weather events to global warming—should be strictly avoided.

Still, almost every outlet eschewed the temptation to say, “Look there! I give you global warming!” The New York Times’s Tom Zeller, Jr. saw that temptation coming at the end of July. In a smart piece for The Week in Review, he reminded readers that climate skeptics had seized on unusually cold weather last winter in order to mock climate science, and warned against resorting to such antics in support of it:

In any debate over climate change, conventional wisdom holds that there is no reflex more absurd than invoking the local weather.

And yet this year’s wild weather fluctuations seem to have motivated people on both sides of the issue to stick a finger in the air and declare the matter resolved — in their favor.

Last week, New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin provided a specific example of why scientists are reluctant to attribute single weather events to climate change. In a post about the calving of a massive iceberg from the Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on August 5, he quoted Andreas Muenchow, an oceanographer at the University of Delaware, who spotted the breakaway ice.

According to Muenchow, air temperatures had very little to do with the event, because the glacier is losing more 80 percent of its ice from below, where part of it floats on the ocean. In order to make the connection to global warming, one would need to prove that temperatures under the ice have increased, and Muenchow said he simply doesn’t have the data to do that. In a word of caution against getting ahead of the science, he added:

Global warming and climate change are very real and challenging problems, but it is foolish to assign every “visible” event to that catch-all phrase. It cheapens and discredits those findings where global warming is a real and immediate cause for observable phenomena. Details matter, in science as well as in policy.

Thankfully, there’s some indication that overwrought reporting isn’t needed to get policymakers and the public to sit up and think about the ramifications of manmade climate change. The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and others have run blog posts and articles pointing out that Russian president Dimtry Medvedev seems to have reversed his position that climate change is not a priority.

“What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate,” he said in late July, according to Time magazine.

Some of these articles are a bit too sanguine, however, and Climatewire deserves credit for talking to the World Wildlife Fund’s climate negotiator in Moscow, who thinks that “once the smoke clears” the Russian government will lose interest in doing anything about global warming. Political and public will are fickle things indeed. Nonetheless, outside Russia, other adamant opponents of addressing climate change are changing their positions, too.

A trip to Greenland this summer caused Michael Hanlon, science editor of the Daily Mail, to rethink his beliefs about global warming (tip o’ the hat to blogger Joss Garman, a Greenpeace campaigner in the U.K.). “I have long been something of a climate skeptic, but my views in recent years have shifted,” he wrote on Thursday. “For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic.”

In a separate post on Tuesday, Hanlon explained that he is still not alarmed by the prospect of global warming, and reminded readers that one hot summer does not an altered climate make. But he added that the trip Greenland had made the science “look a bit less equivocal.”

The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson saw a similar, if less complete, change of tune in CNN meteorologist Chad Myers. While discussing the Russian heat wave with Rick Sanchez on Monday, Myers conceded that a “significant portion” of global warming is due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. As Johnson pointed out, however, Myers flubbed an argument about solar activity as well, claiming that we are “now in a very hot sun cycle,” when in fact we are just coming out of a very dormant one.

Myers’ gaffe is yet another indication that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of improving policymakers’, the public’s, and the media’s understanding of science. But the smart, accurate coverage of this summer’s weather, which placed the extreme events in proper climatic context, is a step in the right direction.

 Subscribe in a reader

News Corp.’s Digital Gamble: Predictions for Murdoch’s tablet-only newspaper

Last week, Rupert Murdoch announced his latest scheme to develop a new national daily newspaper, to be distributed through subscription exclusively for tablet computers. The newsroom for the new publication will operate under the auspices of the New York Post and will be headed by the “scrappy” young editor Jesse Angelo. The launch is likely before the end of the year, but no details yet on staff, budget, or exact subscription fees.

To those who say that tablets are too expensive and inaccessible to the general public to be more than a passing fad, I point to Harry McCracken’s very comprehensive survey of the tablet market on Technologizer. He found thirty-two iPad competitors in all, from the comparably expensive Microsoft OS versions available now to the merely theoretical $35 slates of the future. Point being, there are a whole lot of people banking on the tablet not going the way of the LaserDisc.

Still, it’s incredibly early in the tablet game, and as of August 2010, iPad-only, paywalled publications still strike some as a gamble, to say the least. Will this work? First, the question of audience. These excerpts from the Los Angeles Times article about the announcement stand out:

“We’ll have young people reading newspapers,” the 79-year-old Murdoch said during the company’s Aug. 4 earnings call.

[…]

Alan D. Mutter, a media and technology consultant, said it remains to be seen whether Apple’s iPad will allow old-line print publications to reach new, younger readers. Preliminary research shows that newspapers attract readers 40 and older regardless of how the news is disseminated.

“Newspaper content tends to attract — whether on print or on an iPad or however — mostly the same kind of readers,” Mutter said. “Not necessarily younger readers.”

Young people may be the ones who seem to feel most positively about newspapers, as we saw in a recent Gallup poll. As for iPads, though, NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel pointed out that middle aged tech heads are the ones who can actually afford the things, at least until some of those cheaper versions come on the market. So it will be interesting to see what kind of readers the content is meant to attract.

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon argues several significant hurdles for Murdoch’s venture to jump, one of which is that very question of audience. Given its description of “short, snappy stories that can be digested quickly,” the app’s target audience will likely be the young and attention-deficit-prone, a crowd that won’t take kindly to a paywall that prevents sharing links with friends. Furthermore, as hard as it is to get customers to pay for a brand they’re already loyal to (like The Wall Street Journal), it will be next to impossible to get them to shell out for a new publication they’ve never seen before. Salmon sums up:

My feeling, then, is that this is a project born more out of ideology — “people must pay for news online and on tablets” — than out of any particularly compelling business model. I’d never be foolish enough to bet against Rupert Murdoch on anything. But I will be very, very impressed if he manages to make this work.

Tablet-only publications can get probably around the problem of unfamiliarity with heavy marketing campaigns and free trial periods. For instance, the forthcoming digital publication Nomad Editions—a weekly, personalized “mini-magazine” for the iPad and iPhone—offers a 30-day free trial, after which readers will have to subscribe in three-month cycles to keep reading. Free trials worked for Netflix, and every new print magazine ever.

But perhaps the most obvious obstacle to paid content of the daily-rag type is an abundance of free competition. Print giveaways in cities, like AM and Metro already offer the same types of content that this app presumably would. As Ian Paul on PCWorld points out, iPad apps already exist that let you browse news sites and save stories to read offline later, allowing you to be your own aggregator of free daily news from around the world. What would make this particular app special?

On the other hand, if it’s a conduit for specialized News Corp. content that is already (or soon-to-be) behind an online paywall anyway, maybe readers will just accept it. If you’re a News Corp. fan, and you need that special blend of stock ticker quotes, Times soccer scores, Journal editorials, and Post Page Six on the go, you might not have a choice.

 Subscribe in a reader

Gulf Health Problems Blamed on Dispersed Oil

DAUPHIN ISLAND, Alabama, - BP says it is no longer using toxic dispersants to break up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Gulf Coast residents claim otherwise, and say they have the sicknesses to prove it.

On Aug. 5, Donny Mastler, a commercial fisherman who also works on boats, was at the Dauphin Island Marina.

"I was with my friend Albert, and we were both slammed with exposure," Mastler, told IPS, referring to toxic chemicals he inhaled that he believes are associated with BP's Corexit dispersants. "We both saw the clumps of white bubbles on the surface that we know come from the dispersed oil."

Both of their eyes were watering and their throats were burning, so Albert went to sit in his air-conditioned truck, while Mastler headed home.

"I started to vomit brown, and my pee was brown also," Mastler said. "I kept that up all day. Then I had a night of sweating and non-stop diarrhea unlike anything I've ever experienced."

BP has been using two oil dispersants, Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527, both of which are banned in Britain. More than 1.9 million gallons of dispersant has been used to date on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Pathways of exposure are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts include headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, dizziness, chest pains and tightness, irritation of eyes, nose, throat and lungs, difficulty breathing, respiratory system damage, skin irrigation and sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, genetic damage and mutations, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage, among several others.

Not along ago, at the same marina, WKRG News 5 took a water sample to test for dispersants. The sample literally exploded when it was mixed with an organic solvent separating the oil from the water.

Bob Naman, the chemist who analysed the sample, told the station, "We think that it most likely happened due to the presence of either methanol or methane gas or the presence of the dispersant Corexit."

As for Mastler's physical reaction to his exposure, Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistleblower and analyst, has reported this of the effects of the toxic dispersants:

"We have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that's what dispersants are supposed to do…And, for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around 50. It's very dangerous, and it's an… economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public."

By early July, the Alabama Department of Public Health said that 56 people in Mobile and Baldwin Counties had sought treatment for what they believed were oil disaster-related illnesses.

Mastler had a previous exposure when he was working on a boat for a BP contractor and brought aboard an oil-covered absorbent pad he found in the water. That exposure, too, found Mastler with rashes on his arms, a soar throat, and nausea. He told IPS he knows many island residents who stay inside to avoid toxic fumes that blow in from the Gulf.

BP claims to have conducted air monitoring of oil-effected areas. A written statement by the company says, "The monitoring data shows that few people, if any, are exposed to levels of oil or dispersants that have even the potential to cause any significant adverse health effects."

Many scientists and doctors disagree.

"The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol," Dr. Riki Ott, toxicologist and marine biologist, told IPS.

"Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber. Spill responders have told me that the hard rubber impellors in their engines and the soft rubber bushings on their outboard motor pumps are falling apart and need frequent replacement…Divers have told me that they have had to replace the soft rubber o- rings on their gear after dives in the Gulf and that the oil-chemical stew eats its way into even the Hazmat dive suits," Ott said.

"Given this evidence, it should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known," Dr. Ott added. "In 'Generations at Risk', medical doctor Ted Schettler and others warn that solvents can rapidly enter the human body: They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses. For example, 2- butoxyethanol is a human health hazard substance: It is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders."

Even the federal government has taken precautions for its employees. U.S. military officials decided to reroute training flights in the Gulf region in order to avoid oil and dispersant tainted-areas.

Public health agencies operating in the region have told their researchers who test the air quality to wear respirators when they are offshore, and in preparation for a long-term study of health effects from the BP disaster, the U.S. Labour Department has started gathering data from thousands of workers.

Meanwhile, physical evidence around the Gulf continues to mount daily. Ongoing reports of fish kills and wildlife deaths are a daily occurrence now.

On Aug. 5, in Port St. Joe, Florida, city officials closed a public boat ramp following an unexplained fish kill in St. Joseph's Bay that caused hundreds of dead fish and crabs to wash ashore. Witnesses sighted a brown, sludgy material roughly six miles offshore.

"My voice is gone," Mastler, speaking to IPS with a gravelly voice. "Another time I was at the marina and got exposed again, I could smell the oil. I've got a lot of burning in my mouth right now."

On Aug. 8 he said that his urine was still "brown", but said he was starting to feel "a little better". Given that Mastler already had a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he believes he is "like the canary in the coal mine" with dispersant exposure.

Over the last six weeks, IPS has spoken with several people along the Gulf Coast who have complained of skin rashes, respiratory problems, nausea, headaches, burning eyes, and other problems they believe to be associated with BP's toxic dispersants.

Mastler told IPS he chose not to work for BP because he never trusted them.

"That's why I never went to BP, and I'm not going to, and I don't appreciate the people they let die over this, and how they're making us sick, and we've already had some deaths around this island," he added, "They put untrained people out on the water, with faulty equipment, and with faulty respirators."

On Wednesday, Mastler was still suffering.

"I'm still feeling terrible. I'm about to go to the doctor again right now. I might end up in the hospital. I'm short of breath, the diarrhea has been real bad, I still have discolouration in my urine, and the day before yesterday I was coughing up white foam with brown spots in it."

Mastler plans to file a claim against BP for his medical expenses.

 Subscribe in a reader

Geo-coding aid: Know where you give

Aid transparency and accountability will never be the same again, now that it is possible to 'geo-code' aid. AidData, Development Gateway and the World Bank have collaborated to establish a way to pinpoint and track the geographic coordinates of the actual locations where aid activities are taking place (the World Bank has tracked its activities in Africa and Latin America thus far). This musically enhanced video will explain all:



Apparently, this is easy and quick to do. No doubt, donors will be scrambling to get on board, though countries that heavily tie their aid to their security concerns will likely lag behind. But with aid budgets and aid activity locations increasingly available online and in great detail, it won't be difficult for another organisation to do the geo-coding for them. More opinion on this technological breakthrough can be found here.

 Subscribe in a reader

Shutting out the world as we vote

Happy is the country that can shut out the rest of the world as it decides its future. The lucky country is so lucky that the polity doesn't have to worry the voters too much about high diplomacy or the harsh facts of military might.
The lack of almost any foreign policy or defence debate in the election worries wonks, specialists and internationalists. Taking a cue from both sides of politics, though, let's impart the positive spin. It has been a most unusual election, but this may be the new normal. Or perhaps just a reach towards an even more determinedly domestic form of normal.

The final election of the first decade of the 21st century is being fought by two leaders who both won their spurs – in government and opposition — in education, employment and health. During the era of significant economic reforms from the 1980s on, it was always Treasurers who stepped up to the top job. But with Canberra seizing ever more control of the traditional state responsibilities of health and education, it is no longer necessary to be the Treasurer to have a shot at being Prime Minister.

Maybe Australia is heading towards the Malaysian model: the leadership aspirant must have performed as education minister.

The previous column lamented the lack of campaign discussion of the Afghanistan war. It's not a claim that could be made of the previous three federal elections, which each had significant international elements, even tinges of khaki. In 2001, the Howard Government surged to victory in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the Tampa crisis. In 2004, the Government again did well out of the alliance, attacking Mark Latham for his promise to have the troops home from Iraq by Christmas. By 2007, Iraq was part of the lead weighing down Howard and lifting Labor to victory.

You have to go back to the Vietnam era to get a similar international/khaki trifecta: 1966 was the big alliance-flavoured victory for the Coalition; by 1969 the anti-Vietnam tide helped deliver a big swing to Labor; and in 1972, the Vietnam failure was part of the It's Time sentiment that gave victory to Labor.

Such history offers the serious side to the throwaway thought about the fortunate fate of a nation that doesn't have to think too far beyond its own suburbs. The intrusions from the outside world in the election have come from areas not always taught in the international relations canon: border protection and population.
The two issues have morphed into a strange concoction. The scene was well set back in July when Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, spilled his thoughts on the 'toxic' nature of the immigration debate, which was 'killing the government'.

It is simplifying a complex mixture to see this merely as an expression of a dark space in the soul of Oz. This column is looking on the bright side, so instead, call it the electorate playing back distorted echoes of the messages it is getting from its leaders and the national security complex.

For a discussion of the growth of 'border protection', consider this piece by Peter Chambers on the complex effects of Australia's efforts, many of them unanticipated. Chambers suggests that Australia's interdiction policy can actually generate more boat people. He argues that interdiction almost guarantees safe passage to detention and is thus a strong selling point for those running the trade:

Formerly, smugglers required older, experienced fishermen with extensive knowledge of the waters, currents and other hazards between Java and north-western Australia, on the presumption that any boat that departed Indonesia would, plausibly, make it all the way to Christmas Island or even the north-west coast of the Australian mainland. But, in practice, with interdiction undertaken from the moment a vessel suspected of carrying people suspected of not having visas enters the Exclusive Economic Zone, passengers and pilot and crew can reasonably assume that they will be picked up long before they get into serious trouble on the high seas.

Too much complexity there for poor pols out tramping the streets and tripping over TV cables in shopping centres.

 Subscribe in a reader

Pakistan floods: Worse to come?

Peter McCawley, a specialist on Asian economic issues at the ANU, is completing a book with Sisira Jayasuriya of LaTrobe University about the delivery of assistance following the Asian tsunami.

For those of us who study responses to megadisasters, events in Pakistan are distressing and all too predictable. Fifteen million or more Pakistanis are locked into what is becoming a well-known post-disaster cycle of desperate need, neglect, government hand-wringing, and (it is safe to predict) long delays in the provision of decent levels of assistance.


It is, as a matter of fact, an outrage. The Pakistan Government should certainly do better. But so should the international community. More, much more, needs to be done to respond to mass disasters in poor countries.

The cycle begins with the failure of both domestic and international policy-makers to prepare disaster-preparedness programs in poor countries. As the International Red Cross Federation pointed out in the World Disasters Report last year, better early warning systems are needed. The absence of disaster-preparedness programs means that, when a megadisaster occurs (the Asian tsunami in 2004, cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, and now the floods in Pakistan), almost everybody is unprepared. Coordination is almost always a major headache.

The failure of governments (both at home and abroad) to act quickly is very common. Astonishingly, as the floods in Pakistan were building up last week, President Zardari of Pakistan persisted with an official visit to Europe. And then, on return, he nipped off again overseas for a one-day visit to Russia.
But it's not only domestic leaders who fail to respond quickly. The international community is usually tardy as well.

Everybody seems to find excuses. Everybody has other priorities (as Stephen Smith has noted, here in Australia the media is focused on the election), and anyway, a favourite response from international aid agencies and governments is that 'we are waiting for a detailed assessment of needs from the field.' They might, one feels, try watching a TV screen, for a start. Certain needs, such as fast guarantees of firm financing for urgent supplies, are pretty obvious.

The welcome news is that, on this occasion, the UN has acted quickly. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has already issued a useful Initial Floods Emergency Relief Plan.

But too often, when the international community finally gets around to focusing on needs, the promises of financial support are slow in coming and meagre in amount. Bill Clinton, co-chair of the international commission overseeing assistance for Haiti, recently pointed out that, of the monies pledged by the international community to help in Haiti, fully six months after the disaster only 10% had been disbursed. And of the $US1.15 billion of aid promised by the US, only $30 million (about 3%) has actually been paid into the donor fund. The rest is 'tied up in Congress.'

An important part of the answer to the problem of supplying aid quickly after megadisasters is to provide more help in the form of cash. Donors are often reluctant to provide cash aid because they worry about corruption and how disaster victims will use the funds. But there are problems with all kinds of aid. Aid provided in kind (food, shelter, medical supplies) can be stolen, takes time to move, and often ends up in the wrong hands.

But cash aid, at least in the short term, may be of very limited help in the Pakistan disaster.
An unusual feature of the Pakistan megadisaster is that, while the initial loss of life has been relatively low, huge economic damage has been caused by the floods across widespread areas, especially in the agriculture sector. Food is already in short supply and in some places food prices have already doubled. It will be some time before a full assessment of the economic damage is available. However, reports suggest that the floods will deliver a heavy blow to the entire economy. For the millions of Pakistanis who live outside of the immediate flood zones, the worst may yet be to come.

 Subscribe in a reader

How Fox Used "Raw Corporate Power" to Crush a Critic

BARRY NOLAN
The media watch group FAIR reports: "Boston TV newscaster Barry Nolan was outraged to learn back in 2008 that Fox host Bill O'Reilly was getting an award from the local chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. So Nolan made flyers documenting various O'Reilly outrages and distributed them at the local Emmys ceremony -- and did not do so in a disruptive manner. He was soon fired by his employer (Comcast), and told his story at Think Progress."

A new article at the Columbia Journalism Review website "The O'Reilly Factor: How the Fox host used raw corporate power to crush a critic" by Terry Ann Knopf reveals that pressure on Comcast came directly from News Corp/O'Reilly:

"On May 12, 2008 -- two days after the Emmys -- O'Reilly went on the offensive against what he called Nolan's 'outrageous behavior' with a carefully worded, lawyerly letter to Brian Roberts, the chairman and CEO of Comcast, which distributes Fox News and entertainment programming, to its subscribers. The letter was written on Fox News stationery and was copied to Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.

"Pointedly, O'Reilly began by noting their mutual business interests. 'We at The O'Reilly Factor have always considered Comcast to be an excellent business partner and I believe the same holds true for the entire Fox News Channel. Therefore, it was puzzling to see a Comcast employee, Barry Nolan, use Comcast corporate assets to attack me and FNC.' Telling the Comcast CEO that Nolan had attended the Emmy Awards 'in conjunction with Comcast,' O'Reilly apologized for bothering him but let him know he considered this 'a disturbing situation.'"

Knopf also reports that while Comcast has claimed that Nolan wasn't fired for speaking his mind ("Professional journalists need to have the right to express their opinions without fear of correction or retribution from a corporate parent," a company executive said), newly-released court documents "reveal that Comcast and Fox were involved in 'ongoing' contract talks at the time, with Comcast fearing Nolan's protest 'jeopardized and harmed' its business dealings with Fox. In response to a question posed by Nolan's attorneys in his lawsuit, Comcast's written response, dated Aug. 5, 2009, states:

"'... Mr. Nolan's protest at the NATAS Award Ceremony and of William O'Reilly as the recipient of the Governor's Award jeopardized and harmed the business and economic interests of Comcast in connection with its contract with Fox News Channel, and its contract negotiations with Fox News that were ongoing at the time.'"

In addition, the Columbia Journalism Review piece appears to have originally been slated to run in Boston Globe Magazine (owned by the New York Times Company), but was killed. Writes Dan Kennedy in the Boston Phoenix: "Oddly enough, Knopf's story was originally slated to run in the Boston Globe Magazine. When Knopf interviewed me, she was on assignment for the magazine. In late July, I received a call from a Globe Magazine fact-checker. Both Knopf and Globe Magazine editor Susanne Althoff declined to comment this week when I asked them why the piece was killed.

"The story of Barry Nolan and Bill O'Reilly is the story of what happens when someone goes up against two of the most powerful media corporations on the planet. In the Age of the Internet, the moguls may not be what they used to be. But they're still moguls. And they've still got a lot of power."

 Subscribe in a reader

Formalizing Israel’s Land Grab

Time is running out for Israel. And the Israeli government knows it. The Jewish Diaspora, especially the young, has a waning emotional and ideological investment in Israel. The demographic boom means that Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories will soon outnumber Jews. And Israel’s increasing status as a pariah nation means that informal and eventually formal state sanctions against the country are probably inevitable.

Desperate Israeli politicians, watching opposition to their apartheid state mount, have proposed a perverted form of what they term “the one-state solution.” It is the latest tool to thwart a Palestinian state and allow Israel to retain its huge settlement complexes and land seizures in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The idea of a single state was backed by Moshe Arens, a former defense minister and foreign minister from the Likud Party, in a column he wrote last month in the newspaper Haaretz asking “Is There Another Option?” Arens has been joined by several other Israeli politicians including Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin.

The Israeli vision, however, does not include a state with equal rights for Jewish and Palestinians citizens. The call for a single state appears to include pushing Gaza into the unwilling arms of Egypt and incorporating the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Israel. Palestinians within Israeli-controlled territory, however, will remain burdened with crippling travel, work and security restrictions already in place. Palestinians in the occupied territories, for example, cannot reclaim lost property or acquire Israeli citizenship, yet watch as Jews born outside of Israel and with no prior tie to the country become Israeli citizens and receive government-subsidized housing. Palestinians in the West Bank live in a series of roughly eight squalid, ringed ghettos and are governed by military courts. Jews living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, like all full Israeli citizens, are subject to Israeli civilian law and constitutional protection. Palestinians cannot serve in the armed forces or the security services, while Jewish settlers are issued automatic weapons and protected by the Israel Defense Force.
If Israel sheds Gaza, which has 1.5 million Palestinians, the Jewish state will be left with 5.8 million Jews and 3.8 million Arabs. And, at least in the near future, Jews will remain the majority. This seems to be the main attraction of the plan. 

The landscape of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, known as “facts on the ground,” has altered dramatically since I first went to Jerusalem over two decades ago. Huge fortress-like apartment complexes ring East Jerusalem and dominate the hillsides in the West Bank. The settler population is now more than 462,000, with 271,400 living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and 191,000 living in and around Jerusalem. The settler population has grown at the rate of 4.6 percent per year since 1990 while the Israeli society taken as a whole has grown at 1.5 percent. 

The net effect of the Israeli seizure of land in East Jerusalem, which includes recent approval for an additional 9,000 housing units, and the West Bank is to promulgate a form of administrative ethnic cleansing. Palestinian families are being pushed off land they have owned for generations and evicted from their homes by Israeli authorities. Dozens of families, tossed out of dwellings they have occupied in East Jerusalem for decades, have been forced onto the streets. Groups such as Ateret Cohanim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish private organization that collects funds from abroad, purchases Palestinian properties and pursues legal strategies to evict families that have long resided in East Jerusalem. Israel’s judicial system and police, in violation of international law, facilitate and enforce these evictions and land seizures.

Heavily armed settlers carry out frequent unprovoked attacks and ad hoc raids and house evictions to supplement the terror imposed by the police and military. They are the civilian arm of the occupation. 

“This acquiescence in settler violence is particularly objectionable from the perspective of international humanitarian law because the settlers are already unlawfully present in occupied territory, making it perverse to victimize those who should be protected—the Palestinians—and offer protection to those who are lawbreakers—the settlers,” said Richard Falk when we spoke a few days ago. Falk is the U.N. special rapporteur who was denied entry into the occupied territories by the Israeli government.

Falk said that incorporating Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank into a single Israeli state would see Israel impose gradations of citizenship.

“If the Palestinians in pre-’67 Israel enjoy second-class citizenship, those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will be given a third-class citizenship,” Falk said. “The real proposal, the envisioned outcome of this kind of proposal, is an extension of Israeli control over the occupied territory as a permanent reality. It is presently a de facto annexation. The creation of a single state would give the arrangement a more legalistic cover. It would seek to resolve the issue of occupied territory without the bother of international negotiations.”

“The effect is to fragment the Palestinian people in such defining ways as to make it almost impossible to envision the emergence of a viable Palestinian sovereign state,” said Falk. “The longer it continues, the more difficult it is to overcome, and the more serious are the abridgement of fundamental Palestinian rights.” 

Falk, who taught international law at Princeton University, will issue a report to the United Nations this fall in which he will assert that the Israeli process of colonialism and apartheid has accelerated over the past three years. He will call in the report for the U.N. to consider unilaterally declaring Palestine an independent state, as it did with Kosovo. Falk cites as examples of Israeli colonialism the official 121 Jewish settlements, as well as roughly 100 “illegal outposts” in the West Bank, and the extensive network of roads reserved exclusively for Jews that connects the settlements to one another and to Israel behind the green line. He estimates, when “all restrictions on Palestinian control and development are taken into account,” that Israel has effectively seized 38 to 40 percent of the West Bank. 

The punishing conditions imposed by the Israeli blockade of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been replicated for the roughly 40,000 Palestinians who live in “Area C,” the 60 percent of the West Bank that remains under complete Israeli military control. Save the Children, UK (STCUK), in a recent report called “Life on the Edge” argues that Israeli policies of land confiscation, expanding settlements, lack of basic services such as food, water, shelter and medical clinics are at “a crisis point.” The report concludes that food security problems are even worse than in Gaza. According to the report, “ ... Seventy-nine percent of communities surveyed recently don’t have enough nutritious food; this is higher than in blockaded Gaza where the rate is 61 percent.” Palestinian children growing up in Area C experience, according to the report, malnutrition and stunted growth at double the level of children in Gaza. Forty-four percent of these children were found to suffer from diarrhea, often with lethal effects. STCUK writes that “Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian access to and development of agricultural land—in an area where almost all families are herders—mean that thousands of children are going hungry and are vulnerable to killer illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia.” 

“Children are being forced to cross settlement areas and risk beatings and harassment by settlers, or walk for hours, just to get to school ... many children are losing hope in the future,” Jihad al-Shommali of the Defense for Children International Palestine Section was recently quoted as saying with reference to the problems of children in Area C.

Falk said, “This overall pattern suggests systematic violations by Israel of Article 55 of Geneva IV and Article 69 of the First Geneva Protocol of 1977 that delimits Israel’s obligations to ensure adequate provision of the basic needs of people living under its occupation, especially in Area C where it exercises undivided control.”

The annexation of Palestinian territory has been reinforced by the construction of 85 percent of the separation wall—256 of a planned 435 miles has been completed—on occupied Palestinian territory. The barrier cuts the West Bank off from Israel and has been built in a configuration which plunges deep into the West Bank. The settlements and the land to the west of the wall, which makes up 9.4 percent of the West Bank, have already been absorbed into Israel. The seizure of nearly 40 percent of the West Bank includes Israeli control of most of the Palestinians’ water supply. The Jewish settlers in the West Bank are allotted per capita four to five times the amount of water allotted to Palestinians by the Israeli government.
The settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank violate Article 49(6) of Geneva IV, which prohibits the transfer of the population of an occupying power to the territory temporarily occupied. Israel’s stubborn rejection of the demand of Security Council Resolution 242 that it withdraw from Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967 creates, as Falk said, “a background that resembles, and in some dimensions exceeds, in important respects the situation confronting the government of Kosovo.” 

“Lengthy negotiations have not resolved the issue of the status of Palestine, nor do they give any reasonable prospect that any resolution by negotiation or unilateral withdrawal will soon occur,” he said. “Under these circumstances, it would seem that one option available to the Palestine Liberation Organization [the Oslo Agreement empowered the PLO to negotiate international status issues] acting on its own or by way of the Palestinian Authority under international law would be to issue a unilateral declaration of status, seeking independence, diplomatic recognition and membership in the United Nations. The recent Kosovo advisory opinion of the World Court in The Hague provides a well-reasoned legal precedent for such an option.”

 Subscribe in a reader

Google as Big Brother A WSJ op-ed interview finds Eric Schmidt embracing the role

Google’s Eric Schmidt just can’t keep his foot out of his mouth.

The guy has a proclivity for giving Big Brother-like quotes to the press—which would be quaint if the guy didn’t have so much access to so much of our private information.

Do Google’s flacks sweat when Schmidt gives an interview? Or are they stuck in the Google Is Good bubble with him, helped along by a mostly admiring press, as well as gurus who implicitly compare the company to Jesus Christ?

Holman Jenkins interviewed CEO Eric Schmidt in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal editorial pages and came away with some gems (emphasis mine):

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

And this:

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

That’s a bit scary when you think about it.

Jenkins quotes Schmidt on the implications of his company and Internet culture sounding like someone deep across the border into La La Land:

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Again, it’s worth remembering what Schmidt has said previously about privacy.
Like this:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Or this:

“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

There was the Google Buzz privacy debacle where Schmidt’s company unilaterally and intentionally exposed users’ most-frequent email contacts. Never mind, that: “Nobody was harmed.”

Schmidt isn’t alone in this line of thinking, of course. It’s something of a disease in Silicon Valley, apparently. Facebook has repeatedly and aggressively violated its users’ privacy.

Why do you think it is that these Internet titans with so much access and control over our information have far looser views on privacy than the rest of us?

As Ryan Tate, who has done excellent work holding these guys’ feet to the fire, has said

The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding.

I should say they have far looser views on privacy for us, the non-billionaires. Remember when Schmidt threw a fit over an awesome story Cnet did putting together his “private” details via public Google searches? High hypocrisy. It’s also worth remembering this fun Tate story about what Schmidt doesn’t want online about himself.

Jenkins takes a skeptical tone here in this well done piece, here about Google’s privacy and antitrust scrutiny:

Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Jenkins, surprisingly enough, is making the pro-regulatory case here—or at least bringing it up—in questioning the “Don’t Be Evil” nonsense. He’s talking about network effects that make it hard to leave a site or service, and they’re very real.

The press would do well to focus on them more and on the implications of having monopoly firms like Google and Facebook (and anyone big or small, really) with extensive access to private information and a strong incentive to exploit it.

The Journal’s “What They Know” series is a good start.
— Further Reading:

Pushing Back Against Facebook’s Privacy Practices: The press and others bring needed new scrutiny to the social network

WSJ Privacy Series Raises Questions on Google’s Power: The bedrock principles of the Googleplex were built on sand, after all

Google Is Not a Heroic Defender of Privacy

WSJ Turns Over the Privacy Rock Online: An excellent investigation shows the alarming amount of info Web sites collect about you

 Subscribe in a reader