News roundup, 21 Nov 2024

- The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri. Of course it's unlikely that any of them will actually be tried by the ICC unless they take an international flight that unexpectedly has to make a forced landing in a country that recognizes the court.

- Gwynne Dyer thinks that Ukraine might still have a chance even following Donald Trump's victory, suggesting that South Korea has plenty of weapons to spare and might be willing to fill the gap created if Trump, as expected, cuts off the supply. Still seems doubtful, though; even Dyer admits that they would not supply the weapons to Ukraine if they thought it would annoy Trump, nor would other NATO countries be willing to have the weapons transported through their territory (much less supply them on their own) if Trump didn't approve. Combine that with the fact that the Russian campaign has been pretty successful of late, and things aren't looking very promising for Ukraine.

- Some Arab Americans who voted for Donald Trump are experiencing buyer's remorse as they see the kind of people he's preparing to appoint to key positions. One wonders if they actually didn't realize this beforehand, or if they just figured Palestine would be screwed either way (which it would) and just voted for Trump for other reasons (most likely relating to feminism and/or LGBT* issues). Or perhaps they just figured "oh well, our people are going to suffer regardless, so we'd best make sure everyone else suffers too" (a common reason for voting for Trump in general, I think).

- Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation in northern Manitoba has been under a state of emergency for more than a year as the community's leaders grapple with an outbreak of violent crime. The problems have not gone away, though, and the community is now tightening restrictions further. Whether these measures will be effective remains to be seen.

- The Smith government in Alberta has appointed former Prime Minister Stephen Harper as chair of Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo), raising concerns about the corporation's independence (i.e. its willingness to invest in things other than oil).

- Several potato companies, including Canadian based McCain Foods and Cavendish Farms, are being investigated by US authorities for allegedly operating a cartel to inflate the prices of frozen potato goods like fries and hash browns.

- The village of Ollolai in Sardinia is selling houses for as little as a euro each in the hope of reversing its population decline. The village has launched a website aimed at Americans hoping to flee the mess their country has become, however as folks in the associated Reddit thread point out, Italy does not seem like the place to flee to if you want to get away from fascism.

- A priest in New York City has been stripped of his duties after several indiscretions, including permitting the use of his church for the filming of a music video by pop singer Sabrina Carpenter. The video may be seen here.

The myth of scarcity is about to become a reality

Quite often, at least in progressive circles, you hear of "the myth of scarcity". Basically, the point being made is that most famines don't result from not enough food, but from unequal distribution of food. And it's true - there is enough food to go around, for the time being. Unfortunately, as Gwynne Dyer points out, climate change and other factors are likely to complicate matters:

Is this food emergency a result of global warming? Maybe, but all these droughts, heat waves and floods could also just be a run of really bad luck.

What is nearly certain is that the warming will continue, and that in the future there will be many more weather disasters due to climate change. Food production is going to take a big hit.

Global food prices are already spiking whenever there are a few local crop failures, because the supply barely meets demand even now. As the big emerging economies grow, Chinese and Indian and Indonesian citizens eat more meat, which places a great strain on grain supplies.

Moreover, world population is now passing through seven billion, on its way to nine billion by 2050. We will need a lot more food than we used to.

From the Georgia Straight. When this happens, a very ugly word will have to become a big part of foreign aid - triage. It's already happening because many NGOs don't have the money to help everyone who needs it; climate change will ensure that we don't have the food. How will such decisions be made? How should they be made? I sure wouldn't like to be the one making those decisions...

The UK election

Well, as we know the British election resulted in what the Brits call a "hung parliament". Myself, I prefer the more value-neutral term "minority parliament", but that's just me. (Interestingly, the British expression is not known to have been used before 1974, according to this article). Now Nick Clegg has said that he'll give the Conservatives the first opportunity to make a deal with him, given that they won the most votes as well as seats. However, one of Clegg's demands is electoral reform, something that the Conservatives are very leery of, so Brown may yet get the chance to hold onto power. Gwynne Dyer has a pretty good summary, but there is something in his article that I take issue with:

Clegg is talking to Conservative leader David Cameron first, since his party got the largest number of seats and votes, but Cameron’s best offer is "an all-party committee of inquiry on political and electoral reform". He cannot offer more, because his own party won’t let him.

This does not make a lot of sense politically, since Labour, not the Conservatives, is the greatest beneficiary of the current voting system. But there I go again, expecting rational self-interest to determine political choices. The real reason that the rank and file of the Conservative Party hate the idea of change—any kind of change—is because they are conservative.

While I agree with Dyer that Cameron won't be able to offer more, I don't agree that Labour is the biggest beneficiary of first past the post. In terms of seat count alone, Labour does indeed benefit more than the Tories do, but in order to successfully govern under PR a party has to have potential coalition partners. Both might have a shot at the support of the Lib Dems, but under PR there'd be other parties represented in the House as well. And I suspect that Labour's base would be a lot less uncomfortable with them forming a coalition with, say, the Greens than rank and file Tories would be about a coalition with the BNP or UKIP.

The glaciers and the damage done

No doubt you're aware of the reports that the glaciers on the Himalayas are not melting quite as fast as one scientist predicted. (They're still melting, mind you). Gwynne Dyer tackles the issue head-on here:

People who know science and scientists will be disappointed both by the behaviour of Phil Jones and by the glacier incident, but they will not be surprised. This sort of thing happens from time to time, because we are dealing with human beings. But it does not (as the denial brigade insists) discredit the whole enterprise in which they are engaged.

Not all the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035, but a lot of the ones at lower altitudes will -- including some of the ones that keep the great rivers of Asia full in the summertime. That is important, because when they are gone, people start to starve. And we have all met people who are clever in theory but stupid in practice, like Foolish Phil.

The weight of the evidence rests overwhelmingly on the side of those who argue that climate change is real and dangerous. Some 97 per cent of scientists active in the relevant fields are convinced of it; all but a couple of the world's 200 governments have been persuaded of it; public opinion accepts it almost everywhere except in parts of the "Anglosphere." The United States, and to a lesser extent Australia, Britain and Canada, are the last bastions of denial.

Nothing too shocking here. The thing is, though, the "Anglosphere" has an inordinate amount of influence in the world. This "scandal", which is really about the details of climate change as opposed to the fundamentals, has the potential to seriously limit actions to deal with the problem:

U.S. President Barack Obama will do what he can, but his chance of getting even a very modest bill on emissions cuts through the Senate this year has just dwindled to near zero. The American public, worried about its jobs and its health care, doesn't want to hear about it -- and if it does hear, it doesn't believe.

If the United States is out of the game, then China is out, too. Without the participation of the world's two biggest polluters, jointly accounting for almost half of the human race's CO2 emissions, there's not much point in trying for another Kyoto-style deal, even a much better one. If you have any money lying around, put it on geo-engineering techniques for keeping the heat down. We're going to need them.

I have to say I'm not too keen on geo-engineering. Then again, I'm not too keen on the idea of taking drugs that interfere with cell division either, but if I had cancer I'd take them in a heartbeat. The stupid thing is, it shouldn't be necessary, but it almost certainly will be. Let's just hope that it works.

A not-so-grand idea reappears

You may or may not have heard of the GRAND Canal proposal. If nothing else, it deserves credit for its audacity. It was proposed by a chap named Tom Kierans, an engineer from Newfoundland who figures he knows how to solve the water problems faced by the American southwest and the Canadian prairies.

The idea is this: Kierans thinks that water could be drawn from Lake Michigan to supply the southwestern US, and from Lake Superior to supply the Prairies. To make up for this, though, we'd need to add more water to the Great Lakes, otherwise they'd eventually be drained. This is where Kierans' proposal gets... uh, interesting. He proposes building a gigantic dam to wall off James Bay from Hudson Bay, so that water from the rivers in northern Ontario and Quebec would be retained. Some outflow would be allowed at first, but no inflow from Hudson Bay, resulting in James Bay being turned into a giant freshwater reservoir. From there, the water would be diverted (and at some points pumped) into Lake Huron via the Harricana River, Lake Timiskaming, the Ottawa River, and the French River. Got that?

Of course, this sounds like utter madness. Even setting aside the environmental concerns (mixing watersheds is generally not good for biodiversity, and some have suggested that the resulting changes to marine currents in Hudson Bay could be harmful as well) the amount of effort, expense, and energy that would be required to do this is staggering. The idea has been floated a few times since Kierans proposed it in 1959, and was studied approvingly by some politicians, including Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and some guy named Brian Mulroney (remember him?) but fortunately these proposals haven't gone very far.

However, the idea is now being discussed again, in the mainstream media no less. Are they trying to soften us up for the idea? Certainly some, such as Gwynne Dyer, are saying that if we don't sell our water to the Yanks they'll just take it. But what if we don't build the GRAND Canal? Would the Great Lakes states stand for the lakes getting drained so that the southwest can keep their golf courses green and their pools full? I'd like to think not.

Of course, if it comes to that the US might resort to other means to get us to cooperate...

Will Afghanistan be Obama’s Vietnam?

You have to wonder, don't you? Gwynne Dyer certainly does:

You aren’t really the U.S. president until you’ve ordered an air strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two in his first week in office. But now that he has been blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?

Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy”, whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. It also annoys Pakistan, whose territory the United States violated in order to carry out the killings.

It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t). The question is do these killings actually serve any useful purpose. And the same question applies to the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan.

For those who would say, "But Obama didn't get America into Afghanistan", it's worth remembering that Lyndon Johnson, who gets the lion's share of the blame for Vietnam, didn't get America into that mess either:

The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the U.S. military “advisers” whom presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy sent to South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963.

Funny how a lot of people forget Kennedy's role in that tragedy, but that's another issue. What matters is what it might mean:

We already know how this story ends. There was not a lot in common between presidents Kennedy and George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win and did not need to win. They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.

That bequest destroyed Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn’t much else on offer in Washington at the time. Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the “war on terror” could do that for him, too.

Yes, LBJ actually did have pretty progressive domestic policies, at least by American standards. Most of the civil rights advances happened under his watch (even though Kennedy often gets the credit because there's footage of him talking to Martin Luther King or something like that).

As for us, the message we as Canadians should take from this is that we need to elect a government here that will get us the fuck out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. We've done enough of the Americans' dirty work already.

Sell water to the Yanks or they'll take it, Dyer says

So Gwynne Dyer is now saying that if we don't sell our water to the US, they'll just take it anyway:

Canada must start selling its water to the United States before the Americans decide to take it and the country should also pay Alberta to stop tar sands production amid an emerging global climate crisis, international affairs columnist Gwynne Dyer said Monday.

Global warming and its calamitous fallout coming over the rest of this century is the subject of Dyer's next book. He described the sober picture of what might happen in a lecture to a nearly full house at the Roxy Theatre in Owen Sound.

The London-based, Canadian-born syndicated columnist said British policy makers are secretly worried about a scenario in which even a 2 C increase in daily average global temperatures would turn today's agricultural breadbaskets into deserts.

The American midwest, the Mediterranean basin, the north Indian plain, the Australian wheat belt, "those areas will suffer catastrophic losses of rainfall and will see crop yields fall drastically," Dyer said, clad in his trademark worn brown leather jacket.

Funny thing is, the US is having a hell of a time fighting protracted guerrilla wars at a "safe" distance; having one on their borders would be more than they could handle. Of course, I really hope they're not stupid enough to try, because the consequences would be devastating for both countries.