The Mound of Sound

The Indian government has unveiled a series of climate change initiatives. The eight point programme focuses on solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, sustainable habitats, water conservation, sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem, developing a ‘green’ India, sustainable agriculture and building a strategic knowledge platform on climate change.

Yada, yada, yada – good luck with that. But what about greenhouse gas emissions? Well, there’s the rub.

India won’t commit to GHG caps except to assure us that per capita emissions in India won’t exceed those of the developed world.

Relax. For India and China to get to North American carbon footprint levels we’d need about three times the maximum sustainable energy our environmentally besieged planet can produce. Since that is a geological impossibility, we can see that assurance for what it is – telling the developed world to take their racist carbon policies and shove them.

Blowhard EnviroMin John Baird warns not to expect any climate change deal coming out of the G8 summit.

Bush and his Yo ‘Ho Clone of the North say no deal unless India and China sign on for equal cuts. I’ve already addressed their highly selective idea of what “equal” means but it ought to be more than enough to ensure that Big Oil isn’t given an enviro-wedgie anytime soon.

Leave Bush out of this. He’s finished anyway, a washed up malignancy. What about our own? No deal without China and India, eh? Okay then when will we see that kind of deal? How long can we wait? What are we going to do to entice/cajole India and China into a deal to our liking? Where’s our carrot and our stick? Better yet, what will be the fallout of insisting on a deal that India and China won’t accept?

Bairdo doesn’t like getting into these questions. He’s quite content to stonewall, depicting India and China as the recalcitrants without ever acknowledging any merit to their “per capita” arguments. Baird would rather throw up a smokescreen any day than clear the air.

I’m not much for telephones. I don’t like them. In my professional days I was practically tied to a phone but that was business. Other than that (and, I admit, long long-distance chinwags with my Dad), I pretty much consider the telephone something best suited to conveying necessary information with the grace of brevity. Don’t get me wrong, I am talkative. I love to talk to people, face to face.

I know I am of my own generation. I know how much technology, value systems and other cultural mores can shift from generation to generation. Although I just got a BlackBerry, I realize that I’m on that slope where I’m no longer keeping up with technology and it seems I’m no longer keeping up faster by the day. Oh well, at least I can fall back on being a curmudgeon.

Whether I’m out on the street or in a mall or any other place where people transit or gather, I’m constantly amazed at the numbers of young people walking along, seemingly oblivious to the world, instead gazing intently at their hands into one of which they’ve embedded a cell phone. Or, if they’re not checking their e-mail or texting someone they seem to have the damned things glued to their ears as they babble on while endlessly staring up into the sky. Not to pick on youth, adults have their own version of this game only it involves an extra element – the internal combustion engine.

What eludes me is who are all these people communicating with so often and what have they really got to say to each other? None of my business? You’re absolutely right or at least possibly right but, still, the question needs asking.

The weekend Los Angeles Times ran a review of Mark Bauerlein’s book, ‘The Dumbest Generation.’ Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, contends that the internet, far from leading to a more knowledgeable, better educated generation, has actually spawned a generation of dummies.

“In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day.

…The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.

…The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. “Social life is a powerful temptation,” Bauerlein explains, “and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out.

“This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the “pull of immaturity.” Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, “[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.'”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,6248930.story

And, of course, when kids can’t get behind a laptop they’ve always got their increasingly sophisticated and capable “mobile devices.” The good ones (with web browsers) make it possible for them never to be out of touch with the world of SpaceBook – never, ever.

Until the past decade or two, when kids wanted the companionship of their friends they sought them out. Back then, instead of buying their kids cell phones, parents bought them bicycles. You at least got a chance to know something about your children’s friends because they often wound up at your place. How do parents today have any idea with whom their children are really associating?

As I wrote last week, I fear that these technologies are making us smaller, less aware and far less resilient at a time when our world, our societies and we as individuals will be confronted with extremely complex challenges unprecedented in human experience. Decisions will have to be taken and, with them, adjustments of all sorts implemented. Whether we make those decisions or they’re simply taken by a chosen few for a chosen few may come down to whether we have an alert and informed populace.

On this last point, I’m not optimistic. I see young people today who have little understanding of our rights and the critical importance of them. Let me give one example. Recent studies have found that young people have a much different view of privacy than was held by previous generations. They don’t tend to care very much about government or, for that matter, corporate intrusion into their private lives. Their generation ought to be the strongest voice of outrage but, instead, it stands mute, preoccupied with scanning SpaceBook or text messaging people who may not even matter.

Will there be an awakening, an epiphany among our youth? We can only hope. If not, if they surrender to the technological Soma, we may be in for a Brave New World indeed.

p.s. the photo above is of Morgan Pozgar, the 13-year old who became America’s texting champion. Pozgar defeated “West Coast Champion” Eli Tirosh, texting the message: “Supercalifragilisticexpialidoucious! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious“, without abbreviations.

p.p.s. I bought the BlackBerry online, cheap. I got it as a emergency communication system for when I’m motorcycling in the boonies. Beyond that, I have very little use for it, even if I did know how to text message.

Okay, we’ve got the script. No climate deal at the G8 summit. In fact, no deal at all until and unless India and China capitulate to our terms. We’ll cut 20% or 30% but they have to cut 20% or 30% or whatever it takes to match us.

Sounds fair, doesn’t it? Sure, as long as you don’t let facts get in the way. If you leave reality aside (and George w. & his Boy Clone of the North wouldn’t have it any other way) then it makes perfect sense. It’s when you add reality to the BUSHarper mix that it all turns really crunchy.

Sure China has just surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China’s population is also about four times greater than that of the U.S. That means, man for man, the average Chinese citizen is four times smaller – carbon footprint-wise – than his American counterpart.

So you’re being told by a guy who is producing four times as much greenhouse gas as you that you’re all going to have to make the same cuts. Even if you did that, the white boy’s emissions would still be quadruple the Chinese guy’s – in perpetuity to boot. White, yellow – sounds a tad racist, doesn’t it? You might not think so but I’ll bet you sure would if you were the Chinese guy.

Here’s the other little slice of reality. China has just surpassed the United States in overall GHG emissions, only just. It’s been the industrialized West that has contributed most to the problem we have today. It’s our accumulated greenhouse gas emissions that we’re now dealing with and we’ll be dealing with that for decades to come. We had a couple of very dandy centuries out of it during which we Euros became insanely wealthy and powerful and exercised dominion over just about any place we found worth the bother.

This isn’t lost on the Chinese guy or the Indian guy either. They know that the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers which threatens their key river systems that irrigate their agricultural heartlands that are essential to sustaining a population of more than a billion of their countrymen wasn’t their doing. They’ve already put that one on our tab.

One more little point. China has become the leading GHG emitter by virtue of Western companies shifting their industrial production to China in pursuit of the low wage labour force. China is now making the goods for us that we would otherwise be making ourselves with the associated greenhouse gas emission problems. It’s our consumption that’s driving China’s emissions as much as China’s production. I wonder what China’s GHG emissions would be if it was only based on domestic consumption?

We’re not just outsourcing jobs. We’re also outsourcing greenhouse gas emissions. Same thing with the Athabasca Tar Sands. We get the fallout, the U.S. gets the oil.

In any case, the Chinese, Indians and the Third World for that matter kind of feel like they’re owed something by us. What? Hard to put a finger on it but maybe they would settle for Western leadership grounded in realism.

It’s a global problem. That’s why it’s called Global Warming. The only way we’ll ever deal with it is through global solutions. Now you won’t get the consensus necessary for effective global solutions without rethinking our relationship to the world and each other.

Take our planet’s atmosphere, the place where much of the global warming stuff happens. Whose atmosphere is it, no one’s or everyone’s? If you say it’s nobody’s then everybody’s free to dump as much crud into it as they see fit because no one has any right to complain. That’s a key element to the BUSHarper approach.

If, however, you decide it’s everyone’s, that puts it in a whole new perspective. I then hold an undivided, one-six and a half-billionth share in it, and so do you. That would mean that the United States and Canada, together, would hold about a one-twelfth interest in it. Add Europe into the mix and we might get slightly better than a one-fifth share in the atmosphere. Oh dear, wouldn’t that set the cat among the pigeons.

There’s so much room for argument – and deadlock – when these realities come up. What if the Chinese offered to cap their per capita greenhouse gas emissions at just one-half of the North American footprint? That’d be pretty hard to argue with, wouldn’t it? They could easily do that today, go on about their business, and tell us to get back to them when we begin to reach that balance. That would make us look pretty damned stupid, wouldn’t it?

Washington still insists on dictating the terms of any global climate change treaty and it wants those terms to reflect its own interests first and foremost, not the planet’s. America can hold out – for now – but it won’t be able to dominate the agenda forever. In its quest for excess (imagine waging an enormously expensive war without end on money borrowed from abroad) it has lost both prestige and influence.

If America won’t accept terms that will bring the Chinese and Indians willingly onside there probably won’t be a climate deal until the U.S. declines a lot further. Eventually there’ll be an equilibrium under which commonality of interests will prevail. The question is whether we’ll get there in time.

Back from a few days in the mountain backwoods of Beautiful British Columbia to find Red Tory’s reminder that there are few things as stomach churning as a once, seemingly enlightened man who turned to the dark side of neo-conservatism. When it comes to that descent, the poster boy is surely Vanity Fair’s own neo-American, Christopher (“Bitch”) Hitchens.

In the latest VF, Bitchens samples what he claims to be the “technique” of waterboarding for a whole eleven seconds. That, it seems, is enough for the lard-assed clown to declare it full-fledged “torture.”

In reality, Bitchens never got close to actual waterboarding, not even remotely. Chubbo’s taste of the “technique” was as sanitized, safe and serene, yes serene, as it could possibly be made. He was brought into a room, blindfolded, and gently laid on a board. He was strapped down and given metal rods to hold in each hand, the release of which would immediately end the demonstration. He was also given a “safety” word which would likewise immediately call the whole thing off.

Bitchens started off knowing that it was all a stunt and nothing more. It was like Ronald Reagan’s experience with actual combat – non-existant, completely staged (unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Rice, Feith, Perle et al who didn’t even stage it but zealously waged it vicariously).

What Bitchens didn’t experience, in his manful 11-seconds of resistance, was the real red-hot poker of all torture – the psychological part, the abject fear and helplessness. He wasn’t bullied and tormented, for weeks or months; beaten and deprived of dignity, sleep or sanity; being made to believe he’d either be killed or that death was possible, even likely; before being manhandled into the place of torture or seeming execution, thrown on a board and relentlessly tortured, again and again.

In January, 2007, I did this post on waterboarding, an account that Bitchens and his ilk chose to ignore:

In Germany there is a complaint before the courts against former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld over torture during his time at the Pentagon. Included in the materials is this account of waterboarding taken from the 1958 memoir of French journalist Henri Alleg. Any doubts about waterboarding as full-bore torture are put to rest by Alleg’s account:

“Together they picked up the plank to which I was attached and carried me into the kitchen. They rested the top of the plank, where my head was, against the sink. Lo – fixed a rubber tube to the metal tap, which shone just above my face. He wrapped my head in a rag and held my nose. He tried to jam a pice of wood between my lips in such a way that I could not close my mouth or spit out the tube. When everything was ready, he said to me, ‘When you want to talk, all you have to do is move your fingers.’ And he turned on the tap.

“The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save myself from suffociation. In spite of myself, the fingers of my two hands shook uncontrollably. ‘That’s it! He’s going to talk,’ said a voice.

“The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw up the water I had swallowed. Befuddled by the air I was breathing, I hardly felt the blows. “Well then?’ I remained silent. ‘He’s playing games with us! Put his head under again!’

“This time I clenched my fists, forcing the nails into my palm. I had decided I was not going to move my fingers again. It was better to die of asphyxiation right away. I feared to undergo again that terrible moment when I felt myself losing consciousness, while at the same time fighting with all my might not to die. I did not move my hands, but three times I again knew this insupportable agony.

“In extremis, they let me get my breath back while I threw up the water. The last time, I lost consciousness.”

Bitchens, who revels in the expanse of his superior intellect, completely overlooks the real issue about torture – the link between the humanity of people and the real justice of their cause. Torture is abandonment of humanity and virtue and reduces what might have been a just cause to a sordid, mass infliction of carnage.

Yes, waterboarding is torture as anyone who has bothered spending even a couple of hours on Google will know beyond any doubt. Yes, the United States has used waterboarding and a vast repertoire of other torture techniques on “suspects” in its War on Terror. And, yes, our own government has taken sides, falling in with the waterboarders in January of this year:

“ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it “wrong” and demanding it be rewritten.

“I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training,” said Bernier in a statement.

“It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten,” said Bernier.”

After his publicity stunt on a plank, Bitchens came back to his senses, essentially dismissing waterboarding as torture “foreplay” and praising the heroes of the “highly honorable group” who serve as the practitioners of these Dark Arts:

“The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Safely back at the shop with his whiskey and cigarettes, the neo-con poster boy wasted no time in shredding any notion of contrition and instead lavished praise on torturers. This final paragraph, full of its own deceptions, speaks volumes for the character of this hack.

What is “heroic” about being a torturer? Is it that they run the risk of getting soiled by the bodily fluids of their victims? They don’t man ramparts, they scurry about the deepest cellars like vermin.

Bitchens presumes to speak for “a man who has been waterboarded” while not truly having been waterboarded himself, not even remotely. He uses his 11-second stunt as a benchmark by which torture can be measured, even dismissed. He even presumes that those actually waterboarded have undergone the same experience as he did – no softening up, no beatings, no alternate forms of torture – when that’s precisely what they get for days, for weeks or even longer. And sorry Bitch but a guy waterboarded will tell you anything, anything he thinks you want to hear and what you hear will bear little resemblance to fact. Even the FBI has shown that.

In Bitchens’ view, so long as the United States remains just shy of those who tormented and ultimately beheaded Daniel Pearl, any call to indict America’s leaders for torture is “lame and diseased.”

I don’t think eleven seconds was nearly enough.