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Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

by AugustaBeem Posted on December 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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More than seven years ago, Barack Obama told campaign supporters that one day, Americans would be able to tell their children that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Saturday* evening—just hours after international leaders agreed to a historic deal to fight global warming—Obama told the nation that the accord could represent “a turning point for the world” and would help humanity “delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.”

“We may not live to see the full realization of our achievement, but that’s OK,” Obama said. “What matters is that today we can be more confident that this planet will be in better shape for the next generation.” You can watch Obama’s remarks above.

The deal, known as the Paris Agreement, includes commitments from countries around the world to reduce their emissions and pledges from high-polluting, developed nations help help poorer countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change. You can read more about the details of the agreement here.

Obama portrayed the hard-won deal as a product of American leadership. He said that the joint plan to control emissions that he and China’s President Xi Jinping announced last year inspired other countries to make ambitious climate commitments. “Over the past seven years,” Obama said, “we’ve transformed the United States into the global leader in fighting climate change.”

Obama also took a shot at his Republican critics, who have bitterly opposed his regulations on power plant emission and his other climate policies. “Skeptics said these actions would kill jobs,” said Obama. “Instead, we’ve seen the longest streak of private-sector job creation in our history.”

Still, Obama acknowledged that the Paris Agreement is far from sufficient to end the dangers posed by climate change. Negotiators pledged to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. They also agreed and to “pursue efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, all of the emissions cuts promised by countries thus far won’t come anywhere close to meeting those goals. Scientists estimate that these commitments would put the planet on course for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming—and that’s only if countries actually follow through on them.

“The problem’s not solved because of this accord,” said Obama. “But make no mistake, the Paris Agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis.”

* Day corrected

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Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

by DenaeTina858 Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The next 24 hours could make or break humanity’s chances of staving off the worst impacts of climate change.

Negotiations in Paris for an international agreement to limit and adapt to global warming are in their final moments, after diplomats pulled their second consecutive all-nighter to crash through a few critical remaining questions in the 28-page document. The most recent draft, released Thursday evening, resolved one of the most important questions on the table: an agreement to at least attempt to limit long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a crucial half degree less warming than had been on the table before. For climate activists and diplomats from the world’s most vulnerable countries, that was a huge win.

Now, the question is whether the agreement will actually have the necessary tools to achieve that target. Many of the critical pieces needed to make the deal as strong as possible—most importantly, increased funding for climate adaptation in developing countries and a plan to ramp up greenhouse gas reductions over time—are still on the table. That’s a good thing. But there’s no way to know how many of them will survive the night.

“We’re in a good position. The sunlight is really in front of us,” said Li Shuo, a campaigner with Greenpeace in China. Still, he added, “we have tremendous risk that this very could be watered down tomorrow.”

The most important issue under debate right now is the “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their climate ambitions incrementally over time. It’s an essential component for actually meeting the 1.5 degrees C target (or even the less ambitious 2 degrees C target), because the promises countries have made so far add up to about 2.7 degrees C—a level of warming that could ultimately prove catastrophic around the world. At the moment, the text requires countries to report their greenhouse gas emissions every five years. But it is still vague about how countries that lag behind could be penalized, how countries could be required to increase their efforts over time, and how exactly their reporting could be internationally fact-checked. Secretary of State John Kerry has been ambiguous on this point; he said on Wednesday that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.”

Crucially, negotiators have also not agreed on when those reviews need to start happening. The view of most experts here is that in order to stay within the 1.5 degrees C target, the reviews should start as soon as possible—certainly before 2020. That way, there’s time to correct course before it’s too late. But the Chinese delegation has resisted that timeline. Last night President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke on the phone, according to Chinese state television; what exactly they discussed was unclear, but the call raised some eyebrows here about a possible wedge emerging between the two countries.

Some tension at this stage is to be expected, said David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute.

“What’s happening here is the world is trying to craft a new way of collaborating,” he said. “We’re seeing the growing pains of that process.”

China and the United States were among the first countries to take a strong bilateral stand in advance of the Paris talks, when they released a joint plan to fight climate change last November. Many people I’ve spoken to here have said that this early partnership was one of the biggest reasons to be optimistic about these talks, since disagreements between the two countries has been a key reason that past climate summits have collapsed. So if that mood is changing, it could really improve the final deal in Paris.

China has yet to sign onto the “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that includes the United States, European Union, and dozens of developing countries. That coalition has emerged in the past few days to fight for what it portrays as the strongest possible agreement. I’ve heard concern from many activists here that the coalition is really just a way for the United States to seem like it’s on the right side of history, without actually taking very ambitious steps, while simultaneously painting China and India as the villains. (Eric Holthaus at Climate Desk partner Slate did a good job breaking down that dynamic.)

“Everyone is trying to hide behind the political smog,” Shuo said.

Meanwhile, the United States seems to be obstinately resisting language in the agreement that would make more money available for developing countries to expand their clean energy sectors, and for a compensation fund for the most climate-impacted countries. And negotiators are still squabbling over how exactly to determine which countries should be obliged to do what.

So now, it’s a waiting game. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my days at this summit, it’s to not even bother looking at the official procedural schedule. Anything can happen anytime because most of the action is taking place behind closed doors. That will continue through Friday night; the next draft of the agreement is due Saturday at 9 a.m. Paris time. At that point, it’s more or less up to the French officials leading the summit to decide whether to force an up-or-down vote or to let diplomats pull their red pens out again.

At the very least, it’s pretty safe to say that the chances of the talks totally collapsing are slim to none. Instead, it’s a question of whether the deal will actually be as ambitious as leaders such as Kerry have repeatedly said they want it to be, or whether it will be something more milquetoast. Either way, no one expects this agreement to actually solve climate change. But this is the most optimistic activists and diplomats have been in the 20-year history of these talks.

As Tine Sundtoft, the Norwegian environment minister, told reporters this afternoon, “There’s no real danger that we will lock in low ambition for decades to come.”

Master image: Triff/Shutterstock

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

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The Paris Climate Agreement Could Be More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

by SharylBlevins Posted on December 10, 2015

green4us

The US and other countries want to set a lower limit for global warming. But will that promise actually mean anything?  A climate activist at the Paris conference calls for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. US negotiators appear to agree. Michel Euler/AP The international climate summit in Paris may be getting too ambitious for its own good. There are a lot of numbers flying around at Le Bourget, the modified airport in the northern Paris suburbs where diplomats from around the world are racing toward an unprecedented international agreement to limit climate change. Many of the most important are dollar figures: the need for wealthy countries to raise $100 billion annually to help vulnerable countries deal with climate impacts; promises by the US to double spending on clean energy research and climate adaptation grants for developing countries. But right at the top of the draft agreement is another number that, in the big picture, could be the most important. That’s the overall limit on global temperature increase that the accord is designed to achieve. At the last major climate summit, in 2009 in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, based largely on findings from scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that anything above that level would be totally catastrophic for billions of people around the world, from small island nations to coastal cities such as New York. All the other moving pieces in the agreement, which officials here hope to conclude by late Friday or Saturday, are more or less aimed at achieving that target. It’s the number that is really driving the sense of urgency here, since earlier this year the world crossed the halfway point toward it. In other words, time is running out to keep climate change in check. As the negotiations push into their final hours, something unexpected is unfolding: That target might get actually get even more ambitious. There’s a very good chance, analysts and diplomats say, that the final agreement will call for a limit of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F)—a crucial half-degree less global warming. Here’s the relevant section of the text; negotiators need to pick one of these options: The US delegation is supporting Option 2, according to an official in the office of Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN agency overseeing the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak to the press about the negotiations. That aligns with the announcement, made yesterday by Secretary of State John Kerry, that the US will join the European Union and dozens of developing countries in the so-called “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that has emerged to push for the strongest outcome on several key points, including the temperature limit. Negotiators in that bloc have realized, the official said, that “if they move the long-term goal further out, it will move politics in the short term closer to where they need to be.” If the 1.5 degrees C target makes it into the final agreement, that would be a massive win for climate activists and delegates from many of the most vulnerable nations, especially the small island nations. Since the 2 degrees C goal was set in Copenhagen, the leaders of low-lying countries like the Marshall Islands and the Maldives have increasingly protested that even that level of warming would essentially guarantee the destruction of their islands. The fact that the US is now backing a more ambitious target is a sign that President Barack Obama is hearing that message, said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate activist with Christian Aid. “Paris is meant to indicate the direction of travel, and the US giving in on this point demonstrates their solidarity,” he said. “You’re talking about a level of warming that we can actually adapt to.” But here’s where things get problematic. There’s a huge difference between including the 1.5 degrees C limit in the agreement, and ensuring that it could actually be met. That’s because other key pieces of the agreement, that could actually make that level of ambition possible, are still far from clear. The biggest obstacle could be the hotly debated “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their targets for greenhouse gas reductions over time, and which the US delegation appears to be resisting. The current draft of the text includes language directing countries to provide an update of their progress every five years or so, which would be compiled into a global “stock-take,” a kind of collated update, sometime after 2020. But the enforcement stops there; there’s nothing in the agreement to penalize countries that lag behind or to compel them to boost their ambitions. Yesterday, Kerry offered a confusing take on that problem when he said that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.” Everyone here seems to agree that Paris is only a starting place: Without an incremental ramping-up of climate goals, 2 degrees C—not to mention 1.5—will remain out of reach. The current set of global greenhouse gas reduction targets only limit global warming to roughly 2.7 degrees C (4.9 degrees F). That’s a big gap. “It’s not looking good,” Adow said. “If the US means business, are true to their support, they need to agree to an annual review starting in 2018.” Instead, it seems that the US could be trading a concession on the 1.5 degrees C target for steadfast resistance to increasing its funding for climate adaptation in developing countries. The US is also standing in the way of a “loss and damage” component, which would require heavily polluting countries to compensate countries that have been wracked by climate impacts. Without extra money on the table to invest in clean energy, developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere won’t be able to contribute to the 1.5 degrees C target, said Victor Menotti, executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based activist group. “The US is pretty clear they want 1.5,” he said. “The question is what’s going to accompany it, and at what price. They’ll be able to claim climate leadership, but without any means of implementation.” The upshot is that the whole Paris accord risks losing credibility if it comes up with a really ambitious target and no way to reach it. All of these pieces are essential, because even with the best possible outcome in Paris, 1.5 degrees C is going to be really hard to meet, said Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In a recent report, Schmidt-Traub found that meeting the 2 degrees C limit means ceasing all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2070. And because most coal- and natural gas-fired power plants have multi-decade lifespans, that means we need to start planning to cease building them as soon as possible. “The bottom line is that 2C requires all countries to decarbonize their economy at a very rapid rate, but in our analysis there is some wiggle room,” he said. “If you go to 1.5C, it becomes very hard to have any wiggle room left. This is a very fundamental point that is not being discussed at all in the negotiations.”

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The Paris Climate Agreement Could Be More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

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The Paris Climate Agreement Could Be More Ambitious Than Anyone Expected

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The Government’s New Food Rules Will Be a Huge Deal. Bacon Lovers Are Not Going to Be Happy.

by GilbertV90 Posted on December 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration is soon expected to reveal its new dietary guidelines for Americans, with advice about which foods to pile onto your plate—and which ones to avoid—if you want to stay healthy.

Evidence suggests dairy doesn’t do a body good—so why does the government still push three servings a day?

Once illustrated by the Food Pyramid (and now by a circular graphic called MyPlate), the guidelines are updated every five years, and they’re hugely influential, affecting everything from school lunch menus and government agricultural subsidies to aid programs for low-income families and research priorities at health agencies. They’re supposed to be based on scientific studies and recommendations from nutrition experts, but given all the different theories about what makes a healthy diet—not to mention all the different stakeholders, including Big Ag—past guidelines have sparked plenty of controversy. This year’s drafting process has been particularly contentious. Here’s a primer:

Meat eaters, take note. The government has cautioned in the past against eating too much red meat. But this year, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—which reviews scientific studies and gives the government advice about how to write its guidelines—has recommended that you watch your intake of all meats, including leaner options like chicken, as my colleague Maddie Oatman reported in February. Seafood will probably still be considered healthy, though, and the government will likely scrap its previous advice about limiting cholesterol—which means that you can replace your breakfast sausage and bacon with a hearty helping of eggs.

Watch that sweet tooth. The new guidelines will likely recommend that you cut down your sugar intake—big time. The Advisory Committee concluded that most people shouldn’t consume more than about four to nine teaspoons of sugar per day, depending on your body mass index. What does that mean for your snacking? A single eight-ounce cup of low-fat strawberry yogurt has six teaspoons of sugar, to put things in perspective. Right now, some studies suggest we eat as many as 30 teaspoons of sugar every day. Here’s a look at several surprisingly high sources.

Shoddy science? In September, food writer and activist Nina Teicholz ruffled feathers by questioning the scientific integrity of the dietary guidelines. In an investigation published by a major British medical journal, she claimed that the Advisory Committee had used some studies by outside professional organizations with backing from Big Food, like the American Heart Association. She also claimed that some members of the committee had received support from groups like the International Tree Nut Council, Unilever, and Lluminari, a health media company that works with General Mills and PepsiCo. The government fired back, arguing that Teicholz’s claims were based on factual errors and that the Advisory Committee had conducted “a rigorous, systematic and transparent review of the current body of nutrition science.” More than 180 scientists called for a retraction of Teicholz’s investigation, but others have agreed that the food industry plays too big a role in what the government tells us to eat. (Check out this Mother Jones feature about how Big Dairy has convinced the government to promote milk, despite evidence showing that too much of it may be harmful for adults.)

Sorry, tree huggers. This year’s dietary guidelines won’t consider the environmental footprint of foods—and that’ll make Big Ag happy. Back in February, the Advisory Committee published a report urging the government to focus on sustainability as a component of healthy eating. Committee members argued that if we don’t think about the planet now—by promoting diets high in fruits and vegetables and lower in meat products—we’ll likely face problems later on. “Access to sufficient, nutritious, and safe food is an essential element of food security for the U.S. population,” they wrote. “A sustainable diet is one that assures this access for both the current population and future populations.” That advice didn’t please Big Ag, whose backers sent letters to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, arguing that environmental impact was beyond the scope of the dietary guidelines. And he listened: In October, Vilsack made it known that the guidelines would pinpoint good foods for human health—not foods with a light impact on the planet.

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The Government’s New Food Rules Will Be a Huge Deal. Bacon Lovers Are Not Going to Be Happy.

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Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

by MiriamPTCZ Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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The week after ISIS launched its catastrophic November attacks in Paris, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) published its annual “Global Terrorism Index.” It contained an unexpected finding: By killing 6,664 people in 2014, the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram was the world’s deadliest terrorist group, beating out ISIS by nearly 600 victims. But the report, with its exact-sounding figures, raises a question: Is it really possible to know how many people ISIS has killed?

As in many conflicts, assessing the actual toll of the Syrian civil war is a difficult, potentially dangerous business. And when it comes to putting a precise number on ISIS’ death toll, researchers who track these grim statistics are skeptical. “My gut instinct is, we don’t know,” says Megan Price, the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). “I don’t think those are knowable numbers.”

“What we know is just a part of what is going on,” says Bassam al-Ahmad, the spokesman for the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), a monitoring organization that gathers information from inside the country to maintain a running count of how many people have died in its nearly five-year-old conflict. Using a three-stage documentation process, the VDC has confirmed the deaths of 4,406 people at the hands of ISIS so far. But Ahmad says that is by no means the total number. “What is the percentage of what we know?” he asks. “Maybe around 50 percent.”

And uncovering the information needed from ISIS territory presents even greater challenges. Media and NGO access is all but barred. In the group’s Syrian capital, Raqqa, internet cafés have been forced to close, and in other areas ISIS militants have put them under surveillance, making it difficult for activists to share information with the outside world. There are consequences for those who dig up information that the insurgent group doesn’t want publicized, like kidnappings, torture, and executions. In January 2014, ISIS militants kidnapped one of the VDC’s reporters in Raqqa. “They came to his house and abducted him,” says Ahmad. “Until now, we don’t know anything. We have sources who say he was beaten and tortured.”

That reporter, as well as four other VDC employees who disappeared from the Syrian city, Duma, in December 2013 and have not been heard from since, are not included in the group’s tally of the dead. The VDC does not know if they’re alive, but it also has no way to confirm their deaths. It’s not an uncommon problem. “We hear many stories about people who are kidnapped by ISIS and are executed. But sometimes you have no information about them. If you don’t have information about an incident, that doesn’t mean something hasn’t happened,” Ahmad says. The number of people who have simply vanished in Syria is in the tens of thousands. They are not included in the VDC’s count.

“Violence can be hidden,” says Price. “ISIS has its own agenda. Sometimes that agenda is served by making public things they’ve done, and I have to assume, sometimes it’s served by hiding things they’ve done.” For example, after Kurdish forces recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS last month, as many as 16 previously unknown mass graves were uncovered.

In determining ISIS’ 2014 death toll at 6,073 people, the IEP drew its data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, which uses publicly available materials like news articles and legal documents to establish its estimates. It’s a common documentation method, but it can be limiting because more newsworthy events, like bombings with a high number of casualties, make it into the data, but under-the-radar deaths may not.

“Traumatic events that cause multiple deaths get very well communicated—and maybe even exaggerated—in their frequency and occurrence compared to more mundane, violent acts that result in death,” says Les Roberts, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist who has led dozens of surveys on mortality in war zones, including in Iraq. (Read more about the controversy surrounding his 2004 estimate that 100,000 civilians were killed after the American invasion.) “A bomb is newsworthy. A bomb is big enough that the people in the morgue when you call them will say, ‘Oh yeah, we had four deaths in here,’ because they came in together and they create a psychological image, even though they had 42 dead bodies come in from a variety of other causes, mostly gunshot wounds.” In ISIS’ case, this may mean that public mass executions and suicide bombings get counted while other atrocities are overlooked.

Getting a grip on ISIS’ impact is just part of the larger struggle to get an accurate picture of the carnage in Syria. The VDC has confirmed approximately 200,000 casualties by name, photos, or videos. Their number is dwarfed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ most recent estimate of as many as 330,000 casualties. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stopped providing public estimates of Syrian casualties after January 2014, saying it could no longer guarantee the accuracy of its source material.

According to Price, the HRDAG intends to publish new numbers in early 2016—nearly two years after the last public UN estimate. These figures will be based on not only cases gathered by the VDC and three other groups documenting deaths in Syria, but an extrapolated estimate of unreported deaths. Even if it’s the most accurate account to get presented, however, the new number will still likely be off. “Having looked at the data in this particular conflict, as well as several others, the safe answer always is: that number is too low,” Price says.

Roberts notes that it can be hard to collect reliable casualty data even in a country that’s at peace. “In the United States, which I think is a near-optimal environment for us investigating murders,” says Roberts, “our best estimate is that something in the ballpark of one-third of murders are never detected.” Sometimes a death is misclassified as an accident or a suicide, or a body is never found. Now imagine trying to get this information with ISIS breathing down your neck. “If in the United States we have a gross undercount of murders, how can we expect in the anarchy of Syria that it’s going to be even comparable?”

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Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

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This Is How Much Money It Will Cost to Save the World

by ChristeLoewe Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Finance is full of big numbers, and for almost every big number, there is another, even bigger number it should be compared to.

Climate change is no different. As world leaders meet for climate talks in Paris, here’s the big number: In 2014, the world invested $391 billion in low-carbon and climate-resilient infrastructure. And here’s the even bigger number: We should actually be spending $7 trillion dollars a year for the next decade, and even more later.

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This Is How Much Money It Will Cost to Save the World

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900 Arguments That Will Decide the Fate of the World

by SergioHauser Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Paris climate talks are not really happening in Paris. By train, the commune of Le Bourget is about 45 minutes from the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, or a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens. (It is, after all, unseasonably warm.) That train passes beneath two beltways to get to the the outer ring of Parisian suburbs.

At Le Bourget station, green-vested volunteers smile and direct new arrivals to a herd of free shuttles in the ad hoc bus corral. Sunday morning, downtown Le Bourget is semi-busy and quasi-shuttered. The commune’s main avenue has a notable number of pizza shops, and quartets of cops huddle together like Doo Wop groups on every other corner. After about 10 minutes, the shuttle arrives at Paris-Le Bourget, France’s oldest commercial airport and temporary home of the so-called Paris climate talks.

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900 Arguments That Will Decide the Fate of the World

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Trump Says He Predicted Osama Bin Laden. He Didn’t.

by LeiaBaltes Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, appeared on the internet-based talk show of Alex Jones, a so-called 9/11 truther who promulgates a wide variety of wild conspiracy theories. Jones heaped praise on Trump for being a modern-day George Washington who could save this nation before it falls into utter ruin in the next few years, and he begged Trump to vow that he will not pull out of the race (even under pressure from dark globalist forces). Trump, for his part, also heaped praise on Trump.

In touting his own national security credentials, Trump pointed to a book he published in 2000 called The America We Deserve. He noted that in this work, he brilliantly foresaw the threat posed by Osama bin Laden:

I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden. I mean I really study this stuff. I really find it very interesting, even though I am a businessman…I said we better be careful with Osama bin Laden. There’s a guy named Osama bin Laden. Nobody really knew who he was. But he was nasty. He was saying really nasty things about our country and what he wants to do to it. And I wrote in the book in 2000—two sic years before the World Trade Center came down—I talked to you about Osama bin Laden, you better take him out. I said he’s going to crawl under a rock. You better take him out. And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, “You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden.” Which actually is true.

Really? Trump, in a 2000 book, fingered bin Laden as a primary threat who had to be neutralized, and he did this before others saw the Al Qaeda leader as a danger?

Okay, by now you know where this is heading. In the Kindle version of this book, there is no index. But according to the search function, there is only one—yes, just one—brief reference to Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda in the entire book. Here it is:

Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess—one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

That’s it. Nothing prescient. Nothing that was not known publicly at the time. Nothing about putting bin Laden on the top of the national security to-do list. In the book’s opening chapter, Trump did note, “I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers.” But he did not connect this to bin Laden. And in the book’s short chapter on terrorism, Trump had no mention of bin Laden or Al Qaeda. He focused instead on the terrorist threat—such as a “biobomb”—posed by the governments of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. And he proposed “The (Trump) National Security Lottery,” which “would sell tickets just like in a Powerball Lottery, but dedicate every cent to funding an anti-terrorism campaign.”

So Trump is wrong. In this book, he did not predict the rise of bin Laden. He and his co-writer were simply riffing off the clips of the day.

Not surprisingly, Jones did not call out Trump on this. Instead, he cheered on the tycoon and said Trump’s campaign is “epic.” Trump repaid the compliment. As the segment was ending, he told Jones, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

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Trump Says He Predicted Osama Bin Laden. He Didn’t.

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The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Bankrolling the Paris Climate Talks

by JoanFranz5073065 Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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You might not expect fossil fuel companies to pay for a conference designed to shrink their industry. But in Paris, that’s precisely what’s happening.

This week and next, roughly 40,000 diplomats, activists, policy experts, and journalists are gathering in the French capital for a round of high-stakes negotiations aimed at slowing climate change. They’re packed into a regional airport that, as described by our Climate Desk partners at the New Republic, has been converted to resemble a cross between the United Nations headquarters building, Disney World’s Epcot Center, and a natural history museum.

For two weeks, all these people need to be fed, housed, transported, entertained, and equipped with space to work. Unsurprisingly, it’s an expensive undertaking—budgeted by the French government at nearly $200 million, according to EurActiv France. About one-fifth of that tab is being picked up by private corporations.

Big international conferences frequently have corporate sponsors, but given the basic aim of the Paris talks—to dramatically reduce man-made greenhouse gas emissions—some of the event’s sponsors are drawing criticism for their close ties to the fossil fuel industry. In other words, some of the companies paying to keep the lights on and the coffee flowing at the vital climate summit may have a vested interest in limiting the scope of the international agreement.

The event (known as COP21, short for 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) has more than 50 corporate sponsors. They include the likes of Google, 3M, Puma, and IKEA. In exchange for providing the conference organizers an undisclosed sum of money, corporate sponsors get their logo splashed across high-profile surfaces—from billboards to banners to handouts—and priority access to spaces to hold branded events. Corporate participants can also get direct access to top-tier diplomats. At last year’s COP in Peru, for example, a lobbying group representing a handful of fossil fuel companies—including Shell and Chevron—hosted more than a dozen events, including one featuring UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.

According to a new report from the advocacy group Corporate Accountability International, several of the Paris COP’s corporate sponsors have direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, and, the group argues, a conflict of interest when it comes to the purported goals of the summit.

“It’s greenwashing,” CAI spokesperson Jesse Bragg said. “Those corporations are able to say they’re part of the solution just because they write a check.”

In particular, CAI’s report calls out three COP21 sponsors: Engie, a European electric utility company that is the continent’s largest importer of natural gas; EDF, a French electric utility that operates several major coal-fired power plants; and BNP Paribas, a multinational bank with billions of dollars invested in coal mines and coal-fired power plants. All three have massive greenhouse gas footprints, according to the report. CAI also points out that the utility companies have participated in lobbying organizations that promote the use of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, another activist group has taken aim at corporate greenwashing with a slate of billboard ads across Paris mocking energy and transportation companies that purport to be progressive, while continuing to pollute:

Courtesy Brandalism

Beyond greenwashing, Bragg said it’s unlikely that these companies will be able to have a direct impact on the policy outcome of this COP, given how many of the nuts and bolts were worked out by diplomats in advance. But he cautioned that the creeping influence of corporations over the last two decades of climate negotiations has made diplomats overly sensitive to business-friendly solutions.

“We need to make sure these policies are created with the environment as the primary concern,” he said. “With corporations involved, you move further and further from that target.”

Spokespeople for EDF and Engie dismissed Bragg’s assertions. EDF said that its electricity portfolio contains more renewable energy than any other European utility and that it plows hundreds of millions of euros each year into clean energy R&D. Axelle Lima, a spokesperson for Engie, pointed out that the company has recently committed to stop any new investments in coal and has publicly campaigned for a price on carbon emissions.

“We have to think of solutions with governments to replace coal with another kind of energy,” Lima said. “And together we want to find a climate solution.”

Lima said it was “natural” for Engie to be a partner at the COP, given its role in the energy sector that is being reformed. She declined to specify how much money Engie had donated. BNP Paribas did not return a request for comment.

Erik Conway, a science historian who co-authored a recent book on the fossil fuel industry’s climate science subterfuge with Naomi Oreskes, said that corporate infiltration of climate summits is less important than the lobbying that goes on behind the scenes back home.

“Of course corporate sponsorship is a conflict of interest, just as it is a conflict of interest to have fossil fuel producing nations participating in the COP,” he said. But “I don’t think the presence of fossil-fuel producing corporations at COP meetings has had much to do with their failure to achieve meaningful agreements. It’s their economic sway with individual governments that’s the actual problem.”

To that end, Bragg thinks the UN’s climate organization could take a cue from the World Health Organization’s efforts to block tobacco lobbyists from influencing regulation of that industry. The WHO, in its international agreement on tobacco control, adopted specific protocols that require signatory countries to insulate their public health laws from tobacco industry “interference.” The climate agreement currently being hammered out in Paris could include similar language, Bragg suggested.

“The first step is the official recognition, in text, of this conflict of interest,” he said. “Then we figure out how we can mitigate that.”

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The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Bankrolling the Paris Climate Talks

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Will the British Government Ban Donald Trump from the UK?

by Matt08Xxxvbjmtl Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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These days Donald Trump has his eye on acquiring a certain high-end and unique property in Washington, DC. But should he want to take a break from the campaign trail for a quick jaunt across the pond to visit his luxury golf resort in the Aberdeen area of Scotland, he might encounter a problem. At least, that’s what one British anti-Trump activist is hoping to engineer.

Suzanne Kelly, an Aberdeen local who has opposed the development of Trump’s golf course (which was built atop environmentally sensitive dunes), recently cooked up a plan to tar the globe-trotting tycoon who now leads the GOP presidential race. She submitted a petition to the British government requesting that it block Trump from entering the UK due to his harsh campaign rhetoric—deriding Mexican immigrants as rapists, talking about tracking Muslims—which she equates with hate speech. Her petition reads:

The signatories believe Donald J Trump should be banned from UK entry for his continued, unrepentant hate speech and unacceptable behaviour. His unacceptable behaviour is well documented, and we feel it foments racial, religious and nationalistic intolerance which should not be welcome in the UK.

The UK has banned entry to many individuals for hate speech. This same principle should apply to Donald J Trump. We cannot see how the United Kingdom can condone his entry to the country when many people have been barred for less.

Kelly may be more than tilting at Trump’s windmill, for under the British system of interactive government, any citizen or resident can go to the Parliament’s website and submit a petition. If five other people support a submitted petition, the government’s petitions committee will review the petition and decide whether to publish it. If the petition goes up and draws 10,000 signatures, the government will respond. If 100,000 people sign, the measure will be considered for debate in Parliament.

There are potential obstacles to the Trump petition.The Parliament’s petition committee can reject a petition at the start. The guidelines for that are spelled out on the government’s petitions website. Here’s a partial list of the reasons for saying no:

We’ll only reject your petition if it’s:

not clear what you’re asking for
about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for
about a purely personal issue
confidential, libellous, false or defamatory
contains language that may cause offence, or is provocative or extreme in its views deceptive or misleading
nonsensical, or a joke

Is this a joke? Kelly says, of course not. She certainly is clear on what she is requesting, and the British government has in the past blocked the entry of persons deemed purveyors of hate. For instance, in 2009, the UK barred an anti-Islamic Dutch lawmaker from entering the country to screen his film that called the Koran a “fascist book.” (This move was denounced by free speech advocates.) But there may be some wiggle room for the petitions committee to tell Kelly to take a hike, especially if the British government does not want to embarrass Trump.

If the petition goes forward, is it hard to imagine 10,000 or 100,000 signers? As of Tuesday afternoon, a petition calling for the UK to accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the country had 445,000 signatures. Another to stop all immigration and close the UK borders until ISIS is defeated had 440,000 signatures. Meanwhile, Kelly’s petition is now undergoing the committee’s review. She hopes it will be live within a few days.

At the same time, Kelly is pushing another petition calling on the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to strip Trump of the honorary degree it granted him. This petition, which has only been posted on a site for activists, reads:

We feel that Donald Trump’s unrepentant, persistent verbal attacks on various groups of people based on nationality, religion, race and physical abilities are a huge detriment to RGU. Hate speech must not have a place in academia, in politics or on the world stage. We are confident RGU will agree with the petitioners, and act swiftly.

So far it has drawn 1,200 signatures.

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Will the British Government Ban Donald Trump from the UK?

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