Spying on climate change negotiations: waiter, there’s a bug in my soup

As the Guardian continues to reveal the remarkable extent of surveillance activities, both in the UK and US, I’m minded to return to a topic that crops up from time to time regarding climate change conferences. Apart from fatuous comments about delegates attending simply to enjoy staying at nice hotels in sunny places (Copenhagen in December, anyone?), an argument that appears to make more sense is that, consistent with the damage that air travel does to the environment, negotiations should be conducted using the technologies available, particularly video conferencing.

I have argued before that this suggestion, while well-meaning, does not reflect the messy realities of international negotiations, where most of the work is necessarily done behind closed doors. Why behind closed doors? Because all negotiations boil down to some pretty ugly horse-trading. That a conference is (nominally) about climate change does not mean for one moment that negotiations are restricted to that subject, that chips on the table are necessarily environmental. The horse-trading that actually takes place will encompass any and all current topics, from arms sales to food imports, from banking regulation to human rights, from solar panel tariffs to copyright and patent agreements.

I don’t think the public are aware quite how diverse, expedient and cynical such negotiations can be, but if you accept for a moment the probability, then it becomes immediately apparent that you would not want to make public the kind of back-room deals done to secure agreement on the environment, when so many bargaining chips have little or nothing to do with the apparent aims of the conference, and where the public might well be horrified to find things they value, issues they care about, reduced to their trading value alone irrespective of merit or meaning.

Climate change, PRISM, and why the NRA might (accidentally) be right after all

When I write about climate change, I often talk about it in terms of destabilisation. It occurs to me that perhaps I should frame this process of dislocation in a broader context; it isn’t just the weather that is being subverted – it’s the very stability of society itself.

Elsewhere I have described how the speed at which change is forced on us promotes anxiety and stress (The Wages of Fear, Join the dots: Marlon Brando, AGW, the next Olympics, Dan Brown and Wikileaks?). We can’t feel secure in the midst of global economic turbulence, job security we can no longer take for granted, terrorism from within and without, a political system so patently untrustworthy we are left disenfranchised, cynical and bitter, and the rapacious money-men in league with our elected representatives who conspire at every turn to rob us blind, cheat us and line their own pockets from the public purse after they’ve gambled away the funds we entrusted them with. On top of all this we have climate change  – something so all-encompassing (and apparently intractable) it just adds fuel to a bonfire of anxieties already raging near-uncontrollably.

Climate change and Heartland: will they ever tell the truth about anything?

Today’s climate change spat – there seems to be no end of them – revolves around a thoroughly specious claim made by the Heartland Institute. (If you don’t know who they are, just Google them – I don’t have time to document so many examples of egregious dissembling and a staggering lack of ethics evident when their ‘official’ views are bought and sold in the market like so much offal).

The story, in a nutshell, is this: Heartland funds an ‘alternative’ organisation which calls itself the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), although it’s also referred to more irreverently as  ‘Not the IPCC’. The principle actors on this stage comprise a handful of scientists well known for their fringe scientific views, whose names pop up in every climate denial blog, and all too frequently at the top of some pretty duff science.

Climate change isn’t ideological, it’s everywhere: right, left and centre

In today’s Guardian, under the title “How to get sceptical Tory voters to care about climate change“, Adam Corner writes about COIN  – the Climate Outreach and Information Network - and an initiative it is promoting. Here’s how Adam, who specialises in the psychology of communicating climate change, describes it:

In a new report for the Climate Outreach & Information Network (Coin), launched on Thursday, we argue that there is no inherent reason why climate change and the values of centre-right should be incompatible. However, there is a vacuum where a compelling conservative narrative on climate change should be – something which the report, entitled A new conversation with the centre-right about climate change [links to PDF], takes the first steps towards addressing.

No inherent reason? Perhaps not, but trying to find common ground isn’t quite the same as forming an analysis of why too many on the right of the political spectrum might disagree, albeit for reasons they might not be able to articulate. I want to argue here that the right is suffering from a kind of malaise, and unless we can convince the sceptics of this, they will have no interest in finding anything in common with those they describe compulsively as ‘the left’.

Climate change & Owen Paterson: animal, vegetable or idiot?

The following is a repost from Skeptical Science. Be warned, it’s pretty disturbing when you consider this features remarks of astounding ignorance from a current Secretary of State for the Environment…

UK Secretary of State for the Environment reveals his depth of knowledge of climate change (not!)

Posted on 12 June 2013 by John Mason

An extraordinary – and worrying – insight into the mind of Owen Paterson, Secretary of State for the Environment here in the UK, was provided during a June 7th edition of the political Q&A programme Any Questions, available on BBC Radio 4 here. The programme is broadcast from a different venue every week and consists of chairman Jonathan Dimbleby and a panel of four politicians and commentators plus a studio audience who ask a selection of topical questions. This edition was from my home town of Machynlleth in Mid Wales and more specifically from the Centre for Alternative Technology, which has been promoting renewable energy and other sustainability issues since the 1970s.

Climate change: if we can’t have evolution, how about revolution?

When it became clear to me that knowing the right answers was a tricky and rather subjective proposition, I concluded that it might be more practical to ensure that, at minimum, I was actually asking the right questions.

I’ve been writing about climate change for quite a while now, and despite my growing disquiet, the thrust of my arguments has always been to advocate some kind of evolution, where what we have now is, for the most part, retained. In other words, I have hoped that it was possible we could transition from the destructive, confrontational and often violent norms that have led us here, towards something more sane, balanced, and egalitarian. Why should our aspirations not reach for a better world, a fairer world? Is our undoubted inventiveness to be defeated by such a proposition. Are we really incapable of sharing wealth, of finding sufficient respect for each other and for the environment on which we depend utterly that we don’t severely fuck it up even as we extract everything of value from it, and fight with anyone who stands in our way?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gleick: Loose talk still costs lives.

I can’t help but feel Peter Gleick would have been better prepared if he had read a couple of John Le Carré books before venturing into the world of amateur espionage. If he had read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, for example – a chilling tale in which the British ‘Gentlemen’ spies were hoist on the petard of their own amateurism – perhaps he might have realised that covert actions are not for the faint-hearted, nor for those afflicted with an inappropriate sense of conscience (and who inevitably end up as cannon-fodder).