Climate Change is buzzing across the US political sphere at the moment, so are torture issues, the Afghanistan war is never too far from the media’s mind, the next Supreme Court nomination is doing the rounds and North Korea just exploded a nuclear bomb. But wait! Climate Change IS buzzing, not even a debate about its existence, at least not in the mainstream, nor its role as global conspiracy but actual Climate Change or related policy has landed.
For those of us who follow the environmental issue, the US has been a sore spot to say the least, and while Obama promised much and seemed to understand it, (by which I mean he did not flat out deny mountains of scientific evidence), but with the global recession, “sceptical” Republicans in congress etc, many of us had doubts that Obama would expend serious capital pushing it through. In some ways we were right, he hasn’t expended his capital per se, rather he has revealed his strategic cunning to begin pushing through legislation and shape the debate early on.
Some countries are more responsible for global warming than others. This is a very obvious but very important statement, because it transforms the issue of tackling global warming from one of self-preservation to one of ethics.
Imagine for a moment if every country in the world was more or less equally to blame for the heating of our planet- if every nation released similar amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In this scenario, countries might choose to more or less ignore global warming, preferring, for whatever reason (e.g. upfront cost) not to make the effort to combat it and choosing instead to risk the consequences of inaction. It would be a pretty stupid decision, but it wouldn’t be an unethical one. Given that every nation was equally to blame, there would be no innocent populations that would suffer as a result. It would just be a case of reaping what you sow, not a question of morality.
In reality, of course, some countries shoulder a fair bit more of the blame for global warming than others. And, as the maps below show, that sentence could well be the biggest understatement of the year.
Is the Internet an amazing force for good? Or is it more problematic than people realise? Over the past year or so there’s been a trend in the mainstream press for articles which claimed the latter. For a while this took the form of pieces which asked the question: “Is Google making us stupid?”, the absurd premise of which could only fully be appreciated if you’d used Google itself to find the article, in which case you had to concede that yes, on this occasion it had made you stupid.
Another prevalent form of Internet-bashing has been to take all the things which web-sceptics like to moan about – google, twitter, free stuff, those cocky bloggers etc – and somehow crush them together until you come up with an overarching set of characteristics that proves your theory that the Internet is inherently bad – or at least not as great as those naive, over-eager youngsters keep claiming.
A classic example of this appeared in the Sunday Times last week as a piece by Bryan Appleyard titled “Break free of this world wide delusion” which perfectly highlights the problems with this trend of mainstream-journalists-casting doubt-on-the-Internet. Appleyard’s thesis, in so far as one exists, is that the idea of the web as a revolutionary tool is wrong and dangerous. As proof of this, he takes the reader on an eclectic journey of the usual bugbears of net-bashers. Take, for example, his view on blogging:
In a few hours time, American President Barack Obama will welcome Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to the White House for talks that may well signal the start of a series of negotiations that will result in that most elusive of political outcomes: an independent Palestinian state.
Of course, we’ve been here before. The history of the Middle East over the past twenty years is a series of stuttering half-chances for peace; the promise of a solution just round the corner inevitably giving way to mixed progress and disappointment. But this time the signs are really there that the time has come for a peaceful resolution. In Barack Obama, America has a president who seems to be committed to getting his hands dirty and to doing more than just utter platitudes about the peace process. Around the Middle East, leaders are beginning to show signs of being ready and willing to play a meaningful role in a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. Moreover, there seems to be a growing sense amongst most of the parties involved that the current situation is no longer sustainable; that the region has run out of second chances and that there will never be a better time for an agreement that results in two states – the only solution where everybody wins.
But hanging over today’s meeting is a series of questions that that we don’t yet know the answer to: How willing is America to really apply pressure on Israel? Does Netanyahu believe in two states and if so how far is he willing to go? And the question that haunts everyone: how does Iran figure in all this? The answers to such questions may well determine whether today is the beginning of a new era, or just another false dawn.
The Huffington Post, literally cannot help itself sometimes.
For many, Obama is the messiah, brilliant awe inspiring a leader to all of us. Yes, I’m one of those rose tinted people but Andrew Sullivan’s
impassioned blog piece on gay rights underlines how important it is to look at things objectively. There is a sense that when Obama came in everyone could take a back seat as there was a leader in place, but remebering that his most-likened to figure, Kennedy would not have been the great liberal without a congress and beneath that the fierce demand for equality and social reform that boiled over in the 60s. Obama will be no different.
THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT’S DINNER!!
While few might live up to the notoriety of Colbert’s terrifying Satire (youtube it!) Obama was not found wanting on the jokes, with Limbaugh a recurrent theme throughout the night.
Andrew Sullivan takes apart the Republican party in just one paragraph and builds it up in the next:
Here’s the choice paragraph ( for a liberal :-p)
Big political stories are like buses: you wait ages for one to turn up… well, you know the rest . In America’s case, last week saw two huge pieces of news descend on Washington. On Tuesday, Republican Senator Arlen Specter announced that he was switching to the Democrats, giving them (in theory at least) a 60 seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (see my last post for more on this).
No sooner had the potential political ramifications of this news sunk in than another mammoth headline hit the press: Thursday’s announcement that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will be retiring from the Court come June. This means that Obama now has to find some time over the next couple of months to slot in, between his massive domestic agenda and economic efforts, that most controversial and explosive of a President’s tasks: nominating someone for the Supreme Court and getting Congress to approve them.
Though it might not be obvious at first, these two game-changing events – Specter’s defection and Souter’s retirement – are closely linked, at least in political terms. Specifically, both have the potential to seriously affect Obama’s “summer of reform”. Over the next few months the President will be working with Democrats in Congress to pass landmark legislation on, among other things, healthcare reform and climate change. The success of these bills will depend heavily on navigating what looks set to be a political minefield, thanks to a combination of an obstructionist Republican minority and the grandstanding of certain centrist Democrats.
In the case of Specter’s defection, it’s easy to see how this affects Obama’s legislative agenda- as long as Specter votes with his new party, then no Senate Republicans will be needed to pass the big bills. But the nomination process for Souter’s replacement, which will in all likelihood take place in June before any votes on healthcare reform or climate change legislation, could end up being just as significant for the President’s agenda.
