What Do We Want?

Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate our lofts, turn our TVs off at the wall. In other words, they have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I can determine not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to reduce the supply of fossil fuel. So the demand-side policy will fail. Every barrel of oil and tonne of coal that comes to the surface will be burnt.Or perhaps I should say that they do have a supply-side policy: to extract as much as they can.

That’s an angle that probably won’t have been debated much in Bali this week, where…

…the biggest NGO delegation in Bali is the lobbying group, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). With 336 representatives including lawyers, financiers, emissions traders, consultants, certifiers and emissions trading experts from companies like Shell, the IETA makes up 7.5% of the 4483 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) delegates registered to attend the UN climate talks.The IETA totally dwarfs even the largest environmental groups like WWF (2%), Greenpeace (1.6%), Friends of the Earth (1.52%) as well as big development organisations like Oxfam (1.31%).

Remember, NGO doesn’t stand for Cuddly Loveliness For Everyone, just for Non-Government Organisation. Though it wouldn’t be the case from a literal reading of the definition, this category does seem to exclude profit-seeking corporations, but it may as well not do. Buying a stake in the Third Sector is the easiest thing in the world to do, if you have the money, and organisations that aren’t working for any profit of their own may well do wonders for the profits of their benefactors. Tony Vaux’s book The Selfish Altruist contains many great examples of how the well-meaning NGOs can still end up ill-doing - it’s only a matter of time before someone draws up a theory analogous to the Propaganda Model - and as for those who mean ill in the first place…

No, there’s no reason to expect the armies of politicians, lobbyists and journalists in Bali to do an especially sincere or thorough job of representing us. We have to represent ourselves, and the best way we’ve found of doing that has been through taking to the streets: I was there this weekend, one of 10,000 people trudging accross London in the freezing rain. This was by no means the biggest environmental protest we’ve ever seen, but it’s a step in the right direction.

But - and don’t get me wrong - I can’t stand environmental protests. I mean, we need to have them, we need to have them now more than ever, but they just don’t seem to be remotely angry. A good bit of fury is a carthatic way of getting over the hassle of marching, as well as getting the point accross a little more convincingly, but this doesn’t happen with the climate like it does for, say, the war. It’s good, yes, that environmentalism is reaching the mainstream, but it needs more than just numbers: it needs teeth.

“What do we want?” someone always yells, but at environmentalist marches the question rarely seems all that rhetorical. There was a muted chant of this, with the answer “global action”, and I tried again at one point for “climate justice”, but it didn’t take off. Whether that’s because the silent majority didn’t care for all this shouting spoiling a nice day out with the kids or whether, as I suspect, they’re not sure exactly what they want but they don’t like the sound of “global action” or “climate justice” one bit.

I realise that when I rant it’s often unpleasant and unconstructive, so I’ll stop here. Well, I’ll finish with a little reminder: environmentalism is no longer about hugging trees (not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se) but about our survival as a species. If that’s not worth getting a bit worked up about I don’t know what is.

Update: In addition to the above vitriol, I’ll point you to the emergency Avaaz petition against attempts from to sabotage a strong agreement.

Climate negotiations in Bali are in crisis. Things were looking good till now: near-consensus on a delicate deal, including 2020 targets for rich countries, in return for which China and the developing world would do their part over time. IPCC scientists have said such targets are needed to prevent catastrophe. But Japan, the US and Canada are banding together to wreck the deal, and the rest of the world is starting to waver…

We can’t let three stubborn governments throw away the planet’s future. We have until the end of Friday to do everything we can. Please sign our emergency global petition below — we’ll deliver it through stunts at the summit, a full-page ad in the Financial Times in Asia, and directly to country delegates to stiffen their nerve against any bad compromise. Add your name to the campaign below now!

“We call urgently for the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking serious 2020 targets for emissions reductions, and for the rest of the world to refuse to accept anything less.”

h/t The Coffee House

15,000: Who killed the flying car?

This website just got its 15,000th view today. Celebrating meaningless milestones being a fair bit easier than, err, getting down to some serious coursework, I have found the following video clip, of crucial relevance to current events.

Seriously, though, a few people really are working on flying cars, and it’s one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with right now. We need to cut back, massively, on our pollution and energy consumption. Our burning desire for cars that fly has to come second to our need for survival.

The 8th of December will be a day of global protests for tougher action on climate change, specifically aimed at influencing the outcome of upcoming climate talks in Bali. Do what you can to decrease your own footprint, of course, but decarbonising our economy is going to take a massive collective effort, and it’s just as important to get a bit of political mobilisation going. UK readers: see you in London?

And a Happy Hallowe’en to my elected representative

I won’t bother with any outlandish fantasy horror, as there is something really scary out there at the moment anyway, something that can give me nightmares now I’ve long outgrown ghosts and zombies and the Borg. I’m talking about the ecological collapse into which we’re sleepwalking, and of which by far the most visible aspect is climate change.

Someone who I thought deserved a bit of a scare was my MP, James Purnell. In the spirit of the season, I wrote James the following letter:

Dear James Purnell,

The Climate Change Bill is likely to get a second reading in December before being debated in Spring. While it is good to see environmental targets being enshrined in law, the law doesn’t go nearly far enough, and I hope you will do what you can to make it go further. The three following amendments would be particularly welcome.

1/ A higher 2050 target
Even Gordon Brown has acknowledged that a 60% cut in emissions may 2050 may not be satisfactory. Some prominent climate scientists go much further than that, and I hope we can commit to at least an 80% cut.

2/ Binding annual targets
If a week is a long time in politics, 43 years is an eternity. Few of us are convinced that governments would pay much attention to a 2050 target in setting day-to-day policy. We need legally-binding annual milestones on the way to any 2050 target, or the latter will become just so much “aspirational” PR.
Incidentally, these milestones will be a great help to the businesses and entrepeneurs whose interests New Labour takes so seriously, and for whom the current uncertainty can only be frustrating.

3/ Include shipping and aviation
Currently, emissions from shipping and aviation are excluded from the UK’s emissions total. Given the amount contributed by these sectors, as well as the massive growth currently projected, this makes a mockery of the whole system. I have heard the justification that working out how much of the emissions associated with a flight are attributable to which country are too complex, but this is nonsense: attribute half the emissions to the country of departure and half to the country of arrival.

The UK is on target to meet its Kyoto targets merely because of the savings inherent in the politically-motivated flight from coal to gas. As coal mining starts to expand once more, and with imminent massive airport expansion, there is a real danger of our emissions rising dramatically without strong government action. Even the U.N., in its latest reports, acknowledges the immense dangers posed by climate change to our very survival as a species, and I trust you will take these concerns as seriously as they merit.

On an unrelated note, I also hope you take some steps in the aftermath of this Photoshop incident to reassure your constituents that their confidence in you is justified, perhaps by supporting the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill introduced by Adam Price MP of Plaid Cymru.

Yours sincerely,

Dave Sewell

I suggest you drop yours a line (click here to send a quick email, here to go further); even if they’re a slippery toerag you’d never contemplate voting for, they are supposed to at least try and represent you. Post your letters here in the comments section if you like.

Incidentally, the amendments suggested here are those of the I-Count campaign (h/t the Coffee House), but they’re by no means enough to make it perfect (nor, in my view, will even 80% be enough, but it’s a start). I could also have complained, for example, about the potential for wriggling out of any commitments with dodgy trading schemes, but that’s a complex argument that I don’t think there’s any point me having out in emails with my MP. We need to raise the level of debate on the issue first, and in the meantime there is scope for vastly improving the bill with those three amendments that I reckon we can all agree with based on existing information. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and all that.

Derailing a Disaster

Via ExitStageRight: Humanity could cause its own demise

Unfortunately, the current discussion of global warming is rarely placed in the context of an even more arresting prediction: If current environmental trends continue, half of the species on Earth - perhaps including humans - will go extinct by century’s end.

OK, I know that sounds like scare mongering but stick with me for a moment… You could hardly be blamed if you didn’t notice, but we appear to be living through the fastest of the six episodes of mass extinction that have taken place in the Earth’s history. (Yes, incredibly, extinctions are taking place faster now than they did after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.)

Unlike the five previous mass extinctions, this one is man-made.

Rob Newman: It’s capitalism or a habitable planet, you can’t have both

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.

Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.

…

To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning.

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it’s wise to remember that they never went away.

George Monbiot: Bring On The Recession

I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises.

I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare. What I would like you to recognise is something much less discussed: that, beyond a certain point, hardship is also caused by economic growth.

On Sunday I visited the only UN biosphere reserve in Wales: the Dyfi estuary. As is usual at weekends, several hundred people had come to enjoy its beauty and tranquillity and, as is usual, two or three people on jet skis were spoiling it for everyone else. Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary’s beauty and tranquillity don’t figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare.

This is a minor illustration of an issue which can no longer be dismissed as trivial. In August the World Health Organisation released the preliminary results of its research into the links between noise and stress. Its work so far suggests that long-term exposure to noise from traffic alone could be responsible, around the world, for hundreds of thousands of deaths through ischaemic heart disease every year, as well as contributing to strokes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, broken sleep and other stress-related illnesses… All over the world, complaints about noise are rising: to an alien observer it would appear that the primary purpose of economic growth is to find ever more intrusive means of burning fossil fuels.

This leads us to the most obvious way in which further growth will hurt us. Climate change does not lead only to a decline in welfare: beyond a certain point it causes its termination. In other words, it threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. However hard governments might work to reduce carbon emissions, they are battling the tide of economic growth. While the rate of growth in the use of energy declines as an economy matures, no country has yet managed to reduce energy use while raising gross domestic product. The UK’s carbon dioxide emissions are higher than they were in 1997(3), partly as a result of the 60 successive quarters of growth that Gordon Brown keeps boasting about. A recession in the rich nations might be the only hope we have of buying the time we need to prevent runaway climate change.

The massive improvements in human welfare - better housing, better nutrition, better sanitation and better medicine - over the past 200 years are the result of economic growth and the learning, spending, innovation and political empowerment it has permitted. But at what point should it stop? In other words, at what point do governments decide that the marginal costs of further growth exceed the marginal benefits? Most of them have no answer to this question. Growth must continue, for good or ill. It seems to me that in the rich nations we have already reached the logical place to stop.

I now live in one of the poorest places in Britain. The teenagers here have expensive haircuts, fashionable clothes and mobile phones… They have been liberated from the horrible poverty their grandparents suffered, and this is something we should celebrate and must never forget. But with one major exception, can anyone argue that the basic needs of everyone in the rich nations cannot now be met?  The exception is housing, and in this case the growth in value is one of the reasons for exclusion…

Governments love growth because it excuses them from dealing with inequality. As Henry Wallich, a governor of the US Federal Reserve, once pointed out in defending the current economic model, “growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable”. Growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest, permitting governments to avoid confrontation with the rich, preventing the construction of a just and sustainable economy. Growth has permitted the social stratification which even the Daily Mail now laments.

Is there anything which could sensibly be described as welfare that the rich can now gain? … Is it not time to recognise that we have reached the promised land, and should seek to stay there? Why would we want to leave this place in order to explore the blackened wastes of consumer frenzy followed by ecological collapse? Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible?

But because political discourse is controlled by people who put the accumulation of money above all other ends, this policy appears to be impossible. Unpleasant as it will be, it is hard to see what except an accidental recession could prevent economic growth from blowing us through Canaan and into the desert on the other side.

Discuss.

Norway Bans Greenwash!

Well, not quite, but they’re climbing the mountain:

No car can be “green,” “clean” or “environmentally friendly,” according to some of the world’s strictest advertising guidelines set to enter into force in Norway next month. Cars cannot do anything good for the environment except less damage than others,” Bente Oeverli, a senior official at the office of the state-run Consumer Ombudsman, told Reuters on Thursday.

Carmakers such as Toyota, General Motor’s Opel, Mitsubishi, Peugeot Citroen, Saab and Suzuki had all used phrases this year in advertisements that the watchdog judged misleading, she said. One Toyota advertisement for a Prius, for instance, described the gasoline-electric hybrid as “the world’s most environmentally friendly car.”

“If someone says their car is more ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ than others then they would have to be able to document it in every aspect from production, to emissions, to energy use, to recycling,” she said.

“In practice that can’t be done,” she said of tougher guidelines entering into force in Norway from October 15. The guidelines distributed to carmakers said: “We ask that … phrases such as ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘green’, ‘clean’, ‘environmental car’, ‘natural’ or similar descriptions not be used in marketing cars.”

To my mind, there are few things more perverse than claiming to save the environment by selling cars. Of course some cars are worse than others, and downsizing from a Chelsea tractor to a tiny, efficient hybrid can only be a good thing - but it’s a decision that needs to be taken based on objective, substantiable facts, not on sales waffle like “[the Volvo C30 was] designed with the utmost respect for the environment in mind.”

I use the Volvo example not because they’re the worst offenders, but because that particular greenwash was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, who deemed it misleading given the C30’s relatively high emissions. That’s an order of magnitude weaker than the Norwegian laws, but it’s a start and we should envisage better things. Norway’s ruling party is substantially to the left of ours, but not so much that they oppose large-scale privatisation, and of the new laws were released with the usual sugar happy-businesses-leading-the-way rhetoric. They even belong to the same European political bloc as New Labour, and if it can be done there, why not here?

Of course, Gordon Brown showed how he feels about facing up to big business in the name of the environment, by appointing a former head of the CBI as energy minister. Norwegians too tend be more environmentally aware than Brits - after all, for decades our pollution has been blown across the North Sea to rain on them - but the only way to change that is to, well, change that.

The ASA are already looking into the problem of excessive greenwash, but the more noise we make the further that is likely to go. I don’t have a TV, and while I watch it at my parents’ house I usually leave the room in disgust at every commercial break (incidentally, did anyone see Ghosts on FilmFour last night? How unreal were the adverts: here we are watching desperation and poverty, now we are watching happy bouncy aspirational ads for fashion clothes and cars, here we are watching people trapped and alienated in the rain miles from home, now we are planning our holidays in the sun miles from home). However, from now on I will make the effort and urge you all to join me: when you see shameless abuse of environmental concerns in an advert, write to the ASA (or your country’s equivalent: the FTC in the U.S., the ASB in Australia, the ASCI in India, etc.).  Tell them which advert in particular has bothered you and why; if enough of us do it, this is the best way to get a convincing general picture across.  Several hundred people read this blog alone, and the ASA rarely gets more than a couple dozen complaints for a given advert; if we all send one complaint each, they’ll listen.  Come on, it’s the work of about 30 seconds.

The ASA won’t solve all our problems - as I’ve argued before, we should think about banning ads for all flights and all but the most efficient cars ASAP, and that goes way beyond the remit - but it could push for Norwegian-style legislation and, more broadly, put advertising restrictions onto the agenda.

A Broken Home

The Brahmaputra-Ganges river system is bursting. There is now more of Bangladesh under the water than above it, and things are little better upriver in Nepal and Bihar. Hundreds are dead, millions displaced. ‘Tis the season, of course, and the Gangatic plain expects a bit of flooding at this time of year, but there’s no Monsoon in China where the Yangtze river system is drowning even more people, and more homes. This catastrophic water isn’t just coming from the sky.

Life is nothing without water, and life in much of Asia revolves around a few mighty river systems. The Yangtze-Kiang feeds about half of China and (before the Three Gorges Dam) Indochina. “The story of the Ganges,” said India’s first President Jawaharlal Nehru “from her source to the sea, from old times to new, is the story of India’s civilization and culture”; his more religious minded compatriots go even further in worshipping her, though both the religion and the secular republic are named for another river, the Indus, which now rules most of Pakistan.

These three great rivers are sister-goddesses, that we can trace back to a common starting point: Himalaya, the abode of snow. The world’s youngest and tallest mountain range, the story of the Himalayas is the story of Asia. Since they were pushed up from the sea by the advancing Indian subcontinent ten million years ago, they kept the hot, wet monsoon from going too far North and the cold, dry Siberian winds from going too far South. The great Asian deserts are theirs, as are the great Asian rivers for - as their Sanskrit name suggests - cold air and wet air meet up there to make snow, snow which is compacted into great glaciers, glaciers which melt to feed great rivers, rivers which flow to nourish great nations.

India and China are the world’s most populous nations, and both Pakistan and Bangladesh make the top ten. In all, well over half of humanity lives on, and off, the Himalayan river-systems; the home of snow is our home, and we should take any threat to it very seriously indeed.  But if creating this home involved one continent crashing into another, trashing it has involved little more than excessive greenhouse emissions continents away.  The Himalayas are one of the most pristine, unpolluted environments left on earth, but they’re still getting hotter.  The glaciers are melting, and decades’ worth of water is washing over the floodplains in a single year.

The consequences of this are so much worse than mere floods.  Need I spell it out?  The run-off will eventually run out.  The glaciers could be gone as soon as 2035, according to a recent U.N. report, and they will be missed.  Our ecology and our economy - both words, incidentally, which derive, like Himalaya, from home, in this case the Greek oikos - are dependent on fresh water; it is our life, and we are pissing it away.  The specifics differ - glacial melt is a manifestation of climate change, while water-mining is perhaps the best and most brutal example of the tragedy of the commons - but it all adds up to a terrifying picture of thirsty decades to come.

Coverage of this is predictably rare in the corporate media, with one notable exception.  While its political courage has been slipping away before our very eyes lately (are the rumours true, or is it just that market pressures are finally asserting themselves?), but Al Jazeera has been doing its utmost to raise consciousness of the issue.  Today’s leading feature was what finally prompted me to write this article; I’ve been looking into freshwater depletion for a while, and it’s terrified me to the point where I couldn’t think about it without breaking down in a panic.

This, in the end, is climate change in a nutshell.  I’ve never been satisfied with that comfortably nebulous phrase - it’s more than change and it’s more than the climate.  Let’s be done with euphemisms!  We are comitting ecocide, pure and simple, destroying our oikos, our aalaya, our home, and it’s about time we had a bit of a think about where we will live a few decades down the line.

Climate of Deception

At the beginning of this month, George Monbiot wrote:

Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it.

The paper he was talking about, published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, suggest that the IPCC conclusions on climate change may have been simplistic and optimistic. Looking at the geological record, and looking at what we know about the non-linear, disintegratey way in which large masses of ice melt, a fairly abrupt change is more likely than the gradual process previously envisaged. In particular, the IPCC’s estimate of a potential 59cm rise in sea level over the next century is an order of magnitude friendlier than Hansen’s team’s figure of 25m. Just think about that figure for a moment: twenty five meters. Scary, no? As Monbiot puts it:

I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.

So, he’s doing his bit to warn us. Fair enough. But, although I read Monbiot’s column on his own advert-free blog, most people will have seen it syndicated in a corporate newspaper - in Britain, it’s that nauseating manifesto of the uppermiddle class, the Guardian, whose readers accounted for 20% of all the champagne drunk last year, and one in six of the city breaks taken. MediaLens pointed out that:

The message could hardly have been more serious. Above Monbiot’s online article was a jokey animated advertisement featuring whizzing little cars on which were superimposed the smiley faces of Guardian journalists. The ad plugged the SEAT Leon Cupra car, “the embodiment of SEAT’s motto - “Auto emocion”. The ad’s text comprised four short lines zapping into view from right to left, one above the other:

Win VIP tickets to a BTCC [British Touring Car Championship] race and check out our writers’ driving skills in the SEAT race day challenge

A click on the ad took Guardian readers to a breathless story about the product:

If you love the thrill of the chase, the rush of competition and the exhilaration that comes from having the edge over the pack, keep reading - you’re the person the new SEAT Leon Cupra hot hatch was designed for.

In this juxtaposition, Monbiot’s article was the exception and the SEAT ad the rule. The Guardian, like the rest of the mainstream press, buries reporting like his under an avalanche of “green consumerist” bumf, telling us which ethical products and ecogadgets to buy, and outdoes even this with its prolific advertising. The overall message, clearly, is “buy more things” - the opposite of any sensible approach to mitigating climate catastrophe - and the few honourable exceptions like Monbiot cannot offset this so much as legitimise it.

With the notable exception of John Pilger, the few honest, reliable ‘proper’ journalists tend not to talk about the systematic biases of the corporate media, even when this bias completely overwhelms their own more balanced reporting. Robert Fisk, for example, the Independent’s award-winning correspondent in the Middle East, is well aware of the shoddy propaganda that characterises most media coverage of that region, but while his own often excellent and insightful writing contradicts this propaganda it almost never addresses it. When it does, he avoids discussion of the systematic biases, preferring to talk about shameful isolated incidents that sully the good name of the corporate press:

I despise the internet. It’s irresponsible and, often, a net of hate. And I don’t have time for Blogopops. But here’s a tale of two gutless newspapers which explains why more and more people are Googling rather than turning pages….

While professional journalism becomes an increasingly elitist field, the internet is open to anyone with access to a computer an a modem; bloggers do not have to worry about generating advertising revenue, or cultivating relationships in Westminster and/or Washington. None of the selective or market forces that give us such a deferential media (see the Propaganda Model for details) really apply here, but Fisk dismisses this as “irresponsible” for, as in any open forum, there are some pretty scary haters out there.

Monbiot’s reluctance to criticise the establishment media is more frustrating, as it’s exactly the kind of thing he’s into. The encroachment of corporate power has always been a recurring theme in his work, and he did more than anyone to uncover the conspiracy to muddy the media waters on climate change science by the same people who once conspired to obfuscate the health risks associated with passive smoking. But why are the press so eager to buy into the conspiracy? Letting journalists off the hook as “unwitting dupes” doesn’t seem adequate.

After conceding in a debate with MediaLens that the Guardian’s lifestyle and travel sections “make a mockery of its claims to be responding to climate change”, largely due to its dependence on advertising, Monbiot wrote a powerful inditement of “eco-junk” culture. It makes for a fine article, and will hopefully wake a few people up from their delusions of shopping themselves to sustainability, but he still singularly fails to address the root of the problem. To read his article, one may suspect laziness on the part of newspapers, or naivety - but one would never guess that hawking tat is essentially their raison d’être.

This partial victory on the part of the citizen media watchdogs is, in itself, very rare. While it was always obvious to anyone who paid attention, the absence of either weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda in Iraq made the role of the media obvious even to many who didn’t, and MediaLens is not the only website devoted to straightening out their spin. But any challenges to the ostensibly fair and balanced press tend to fall on deaf ears. Fanonite’s story is pretty illustrative:

A short while back my friend Dahr [Jamail] was invited to London to appear on a panel discussion following a play based on events in Fallujah. The play was based on actual testimonies, and each line in the play was an actual quote. When the New York Times reported on it however, they dismissed it as being activist propaganda since it repeated the claims of the US military using chemical weapons during the siege. They even got Dahr’s nationality wrong. But after complaints that showed that the paper itself had confirmed in its earlier coverage the facts about the use of chemical weapons, the NYT did issue a correction - they corrected Dahr’s nationality!

When the media do publish corrections of factual inaccuracies, it’s usually days later, buried in columns of whimsical grammar checking - as if referring to Venezuela’s democratically elected president as a dictator were on the same level as the correct capitalisation of the definite article before a proper noun - far too little too late to undo the damage done. Misleading headlines seem to be the specialty of many a subeditor, and of course there’s no correcting for the bizarre yet convenient opinions and speculations of the professional punditry. As for the bigger picture, the massive overall imbalances are never corrected for - and very rarely even acknowledged.

I recently had at fruitless email conversation with Mark Carter of BBC Southern Counties’ Surrey breakfast show. My issue was relatively minor - having given up on ever showing the media the error of its ways I was moved not by righteousness but by irritation at having to listen to his rubbish as I emerged from my slumber and prepared myself mentally for another day at the office - and it was really the phrase “whatever you think about the war…” that did my head in to the point of writing in.

He concluded our exchange in a confusing if pretty much conciliatory tone; MediaLens’ David Cromwell, whom I’d taken the liberty of BCC’ing into the loop in case anything interesting came of it, congratulated me on getting such a result. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the next day Southern Counties FM (Surrey) trotted out something far more objectionable. Some random Tory had criticised other NATO members for not committing more troops to the occupation of Afghanistan… and this was the main story.

For this to qualify as news, rather than just a government announcement, some independent checking of whether and why the rest of NATO was falling behind might be in order. In fact, there are increasing doubts about the mission, in Germany and elsewhere, triggered by the enormous civilian casualties. We’ve killed more civilians there than the big bad Taliban/insurgents this year - even without accounting for all the innocent corpses we label as Taliban for the sake of a quiet life. Is this really something the Germans, Dutch and Danish should be going and killing and dying for? Should the English, Scots and Welsh not perhaps have a few doubts? Sounds like the perfect opportunity to ask these questions, and to remind ourselves that our invasion has not only made Afghanistan a far far more dangerous place - especially for women - but it’s flooded the world markets with opium too. Brilliant.

But no. None of this context on BBC Southern Countires Radio (Surrey), just giving the government a platform to berate those European surrender-monkeys for leaving good old Blighty to shoulder the White Man’s Burden alone. Every ten minutes. Disgusted, I went back to the old, slightly less infuriating, BEEP BEEP BEEP alarm clock. And that, I guess, is pretty much the point of this (uncharacteristically, I hope) disjointed rant; wailing and beeping probably does less damage to your sanity than mainstream media news coverage, which is by and large beyond reform.

A transcript of my conversation with Mark Carter follows:

Darfur - Blood, and Water

Within hours of reporting its discovery, BBC news reported that the giant underground lake in North Darfur probably dried up years ago. Further revelations notwithstanding, it was a cruelly false hope for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Darfur’s 30-year drought and the resultant violence. Still, the article ends optimistically - while drilling begins to extract water from the possibly phantom lake, a geologist working on UN water-mining project in South Darfur believes that enough water may well be available there to end the conflict.

This speculation may seem bizarre to those following mainstream media coverage of the Darfur “genocide”. Isn’t it a matter of evil Arabs massacring helpless Africans, best brought to an end through the intervention of righteous powerful states in the West? In fact, most neutral observers (including the UN) completely reject the “genocide” label. A more accurate picture would be of insurgency and counter-insurgency, and its not as simple as Arabs vs Africans either. Identity politics in Sudan are complex, and these terms do not identify racial or cultural groups (all concerned are dark-skinned Arabic-speaking Muslims) so much as political affiliations - and while the ‘Arab’ communities tend to be with the government forces and the ‘Africans’ with the rebels, there are many exceptions.

Inaccurate as it is, the genocide myth resonates with what we’re used to being told about geopolitics in general. Arabs, of course, are violent and intolerant, and it is up to our soldiers and planes to civilise them. Africans, on the other hand, are poor and helpless, and it is up to our soldiers and planes to save them. These broader myths reinforce the genocide story, and part of its purpose is doubtless to reinforce them in turn. It’s also a good excuse to elbow Khartoum (and, more importantly, Beijing) away from Sudan’s natural resources (oil, and that).

A quick glance at the people involved in the SaveDarfur campaign, though, as well as the timing of its most intense lobbying, suggests that distracting public opinion away from Iraq and Palestine is the main idea. The sanctions and no-fly-zones decried by the aid groups actually helping to cope with the crisis were largely the work of this campaign, whose supporters include John Bolton and Hilary Clinton, and which doesn’t actually spend a penny on Darfur. Some - if not most - of its donors are doubtless unaware of this fact, just glad for a chance to do good and shake off their messy, complicated Iraq guilt, but SaveDarfur doesn’t fund relief camps or aid packages for Darfuri refugees, nor did it contribute to the African Union mission that, until it collapsed due to lack of funds, was starting to bring security to the region.

All of SaveDarfur’s millions go into promoting sanctions, no-fly-zones and the possibility of an invasion. A popular slogan in America’s colleges is “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur” or, to phrase it slightly differently, “We’ll Never Learn!” For as we’ve seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, Somalia, we can’t save a country by bombing and invading it. It just doesn’t work - although, once you start to belief that it’s a battle between the evil and the helpless, it’s easy to imagine that violent intervention is the only solution. To get out of that, you need context.

From the British Empire to the modern Khartoum regime, Darfur has always been politcally and economically marginalised, distant from the far more interesting regions nearer to the Nile. From the 1960s, the central government were already using the region’s “Arabs” as a scapegoat - for these were mainly the nomads, the poorest of the region, while the “Africans” were the more prosperous landowning peasants. For a long time, the two communities lived together well enough, but the 1980s saw the onset of harder times. Drought.

Where once they had allowed their land to be used for grazing, the peasants now had to close their territory off to nomads in order to feed themselves, making the latter poorer and more desperate still - and, ultimately, more envious. By the turn of the century, a popular uprising spread among the peasant villages against the regime that both oppressed and neglected them. Sudan’s army was ill-equipped to crush the rebellion - not to mention ill-motivated, as many of the Darfuri soldiers’ loyalties were seen as likely to waver - so it did the easy thing. It armed the poorest of the poor, and unleashed them on the slightly-less-poor. The Janjawid (the term means “camel-herders”) needed little encouragement, and their appalling actions in driving the villagers’ from their lands are now pretty much universally known (though it should be pointed out that the UN accuse both sides of crimes against humanity).

A good analysis of the Darfur conflict and the way it is spun comes from Colombia University’s Mahmood Mamuni: see this essay of his and/or this interview on Democracy Now, both entitled The Politics Of Naming. But what of the environmental catastrophe that started it all? From the Guardian:

Back in the 1980s, the failure of the rains was widely blamed on the people who lived in the region. Their over-grazing, it had been thought, had led to soil erosion, replaced green cover with bare rock and sand, reflecting more heat into the atmosphere and diminishing the chance of rain.

More recent computer modelling has suggested that rain patterns over Africa are influenced rather by ocean temperatures, and those in turn reflect global warming, and the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, droughts in Africa may be caused less by its hapless inhabitants and more by oversize cars and cheap flights in Europe and the US.

In fact it’s a bit less either-or; with more than a little help from rapacious foreign capitalism, the hapless inhabitants of many a Third World country continue their departed colonial masters’ work of smashing up the ecosystem. Darfur is no exception, but in its case climate change is doing more to dry the place out than the locals ever could. England isn’t the only place where the rains have been diverted, and the Guardian article goes on to speculate that similar wars could well break out all along North Africa’s Sahel belt and, ultimately, the world.

It’s a pretty grim scenario, and to avert it will take a great deal of political and economic will to both slow down the destruction of our environment, to feed and shelter those whose environments are the first to go, and to mediate fairly when the new scarcities do, inevitably, lead to new conflicts. For the almost half million Darfuri killed (by starvation and disease, as well as by violence - notice it’s still about half the current estimates for Iraq), we’ve already failed, but there’s another 6.5 billion of us to go.

Anyway, this is probably a good time to bring up the fact that next month (after leaving Surrey forever hahahahahahaha) I will be swimming across Lake Windermere to raise money for WaterAid, a charity that specifically deals with providing safe, clean and - crucially - sustainable drinking water for some of the world’s poorest countries. Their website highlights a Darfuresque environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Zambia, and is unusually frank in pointing out the flaws in the neocolonial aid system. Please give generously.

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I found this at UKWatch.  Talk about a win-win scenario.

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