Why don’t we manage climate change?

 

Imagine that after the 9/11 attacks, the conversation had been limited to the tragedy in Lower Manhattan, the heroism of rescuers and the high heels of the visiting first lady — without addressing the risks of future terrorism.

That’s how we have viewed Hurricane Harvey in Houston, as a gripping human drama but without adequate discussion of how climate change increases risks of such cataclysms. We can’t have an intelligent conversation about Harvey without also discussing climate change.

That’s awkward for a president who has tweeted climate change skepticism more than 100 times, even suggesting that climate change is a Chinese hoax, and who has announced he will pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says it’s “misplaced” to talk about Harvey and climate change.

Really? To me, avoiding the topic is like a group of frogs sitting in a beaker, fretting about the growing warmth of the water but neglecting to jump out. Climate scientists are in agreement that there are at least two ways climate change is making hurricanes worse.

Art and the truth of war

The flames of Guernica still burn in modern memory. In 1937, the Nazi German air force bombed this ancient city in the hills of Spain’s Basque region on behalf of the fascist side in the Spanish civil war. The attack took more than 1,600 lives and was a revelation of the horror of bombing raids on civilians, which would soon become the norm when world war broke out two years later.

This week former minister Andrew Mitchell called up Guernica’s ghosts. “What Russia is doing to the United Nations is precisely what Italy and Germany did to the League of Nations in the 1930s,” he said in the House of Commons. “And they are doing to Aleppo precisely what the Nazis did to Guernica in the Spanish civil war.”

The power of Guernica – to make us see the crimes of our own time more clearly – is a tribute to the moral efficacy of art. There is a reason everyone recognises Guernica as an image of the barbarity of bombing. The second world war saw far more murderous air attacks, yet Guernica is the most universally remembered example of the pity of air raids – because Picasso painted it.

The double bind facing women leaders

Photo: Jim Wilson, The New York Times

President Barack Obama recently commented that in 2008 Hillary Clinton had to do everything he did, but she had to get up earlier to have her hair done. This contrast, which applies in today’s campaign as well, is the metaphoric tip of a multifaceted iceberg of challenges facing Clinton because she’s a woman. Obama went on to note that the media unfairly “called her out” for being tough, while ignoring similar toughness on his side. That, too, can be traced to the double bind that confronts all women in positions of authority. These forces combine to explain why so many people see Bernie Sanders as more authentic and Clinton as less trustworthy.

Let’s start where Obama did: the burden placed on women by the focus on their appearance. Yes, Clinton must take time to have her hair styled, and even more time having it dyed and applying makeup. She also has to shop for, and then select from, a closetful of outfits—carefully! Sanders, like all male candidates, has only to make sure he has a dark suit, clean shirt and reasonable tie handy. He could easily wear the same suit and tie day after day, but she must wear a different outfit at each debate, while wearing shoes that are less comfortable and harder on her back. The real dilemma, though, is that the range of options from which a woman must choose—styles, colors, lengths, how much skin to expose—is so vast, that any choice she makes will strike many viewers as not the best, providing fodder for criticism and ridicule.

Does the UN need a relaunch?

There’s a big birthday bash this autumn when the United Nations turns 70, but as yet it’s unclear who’ll be buying the cake. If recent history is anything to go by, the Russians and Chinese will veto the baker, or at least try to sell him some weapons, the Americans will balk at the cost and invade the bakery, an overpaid bureaucrat will put the thing on expenses, and peacekeepers will burn themselves on the candles. As for the flavour, it’s bound to be a fudge.

Alas, the UN system, born in a spirit of Never Again in 1945, is not ageing well: a security council that seems to deal only in magnifying insecurity; peacekeepers who can’t keep the peace; a health body that failed in the face of an epidemic; staffers either paralysed by power and internal politics, or else growing nicely prosperous on six-figure salaries and some of the most grotesque per diems in the world; daft directorates like the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs; a publishing arm that spends millions each year printing thousands of reports on subjects such as State of the World’s Midwifery 2014 and Broadband in Latin America – Beyond Connectivity. And above it all, a byzantine, unaccountable, inscrutable, alphabet soupocracy of 85,000 people that has spent half a trillion dollars over the past 70 years, a significant portion of it on its own bureaucratic needs.

70 years and half a trillion dollars later: what has the UN achieved?

In Memory of Nelson Mandela

Peaceful Liberator of a Torn South Africa (NYT)

The Contradictions of a Leader (NYT)

Mandela Taught a Continent to Forgive (NYT)

Mandela Lives (NYT)

Why does NSA spying matter?

How much surveillance is too much?

The NSA collects and stores the phone records of millions of Americans. For thousands or millions of foreigners, it collects far more information than that, from the servers of US internet companies, computer networks, and more.

This much we know thanks to an unprecedented series of leaks from a 29-year-old security contractor: Edward Snowden. But the logic behind such mass surveillance, set out in his interviews, is in many ways as significant as the content of the leaked documents.

In a world where mass collection and storage of data gets easier every year, the nature of intelligence gathering changes. Snowden sets forth that the easiest way for intelligence services to operate is to collect as much data as possible, in case it’s useful later.

Do the police have the right to monitor communications?

Civil liberties: American freedom on the line. The fact that police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom.

A few months before he was first elected president in 2008, Barack Obama made a calculation that dismayed many of his ardent supporters but which he judged essential to maintain his drive to the White House. By backing President Bush’s bill granting the US government wide new surveillance powers – including legal immunity for telecoms companies which had co-operated with the Bush administration’s post-9/11 programme of wiretapping without warrants – Mr Obama stepped back from an issue that had initially helped to define his candidacy but was now judged to threaten his national security credentials. It was a big call. Even so, it seems unlikely that either supporters or critics, or even Mr Obama himself, ever believed that five years later a re-elected President Obama would oversee an administration that stands accused of routinely snooping into the phone records of millions of Americans.

Yet that is the situation at the heart of the Guardian’s exclusive story this week that America’s immense National Security Agency is doing just this on Mr Obama’s watch. The revelation that a secret order, issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requires one of the largest telecoms providers in the US to provide a daily diet of millions of US phone records to the FBI, poses Americans with a major civil liberties challenge. Under the terms of the order, everything about every call made during a three month period – excepting only the calls’ actual contents – is offered up to the bureau and the NSA on a gargantuan routine basis. It seems improbable that the order revealed yesterday is the only one of its kind. So the assumption has to be that this is the new normality of American state surveillance. The special courts set up to monitor and approve industrial data-harvesting appear to provide little check on the scale of the activity.

Few Americans believe that they live in a police state; indeed many would be outraged at the suggestion. Yet the everyday fact that the police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens – in secret – is a classic hallmark of a state that fears freedom as well as championing it. Ironically, the Guardian’s revelations were published 69 years to the day since US and British soldiers launched the D-day invasion of Europe. The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny. They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.

No one living in Britain should be naive about the reality of the terrorist threat against which such powers are deployed, least of all in the volatile aftermath of the Woolwich murder. Nor, in the light of the revelations from the US, ought we to be smug about the surveillance and data collection that goes on daily in our own midst too. By some readings, similar legal tools already exist here under the regulation of investigatory powers legislation. Both Conservative and Labour MPs have made clear they want new “snooper’s charter” powers over email records. And western European security services, Britain’s GCHQ monitoring agency in particular, have always regarded the ability to trade information with the US authorities as their life-blood.

But it is American civil liberties that are primarily in the spotlight now. Ever since 9/11, the US has allowed the war on terror to frame a new domestic authoritarianism that is strikingly at odds with America’s passionate sense of its own freedom. This week’s revelations have stunned millions of Americans whose justified outrage against 9/11 surely never led them to expect such routine and unrestrained surveillance on such a massive scale. US politicians have a poor post-9/11 record of confronting such powers. Even now, it is possible that many will look the other way. But this is an existential challenge to American freedom. That it has been so relentlessly prosecuted by a leader who once promised to stand up against such authority, makes the challenge more pressing, not less.

The Guardian

Why gun ‘control’ is not enough

In the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and the resulting renewed debate on gun control in the United States, The Stone will publish a series of essays this week that examine the ethical, social and humanitarian implications of the use, possession and regulation of weapons. Other articles in the series can be found here.

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Americans are finally beginning to have a serious discussion about guns. One argument we’re hearing is the central pillar of the case for private gun ownership: that we are all safer when more individuals have guns because armed citizens deter crime and can defend themselves and others against it when deterrence fails. Those who don’t have guns, it’s said, are free riders on those who do, as the criminally disposed are less likely to engage in crime the more likely it is that their victim will be armed.

Why we love politics

We live in an anti-political moment, when many people — young people especially — think politics is a low, nasty, corrupt and usually fruitless business. It’s much nobler to do community service or just avoid all that putrid noise.

I hope everybody who shares this anti-political mood will go out to see “Lincoln,” directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner. The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.