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I may have applied to study “Environmental Studies” but I was never really bought over by the global warming/climate change scare. Even when I am a bit more concerned about natural resources depleting, I don’t think it’ll be within my lifetime – and even if I reduced my consumption to ZERO (i.e. kill myself), it’s nothing compared to the world’s resource depleting industries. Pollution would be the most that I actually cared about — only because I wouldn’t want to eat toxic sashimi or breathe in fucking HAZE.
My guess is that true blue environmentalists don’t actually want the environment to improve. Because any improvement will lead to complacency, or rather a decrease in alarmism, and in turn their support and funding.
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“You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.“
Is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? Isn’t it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn’t it your responsibility to actually do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place?… If not us, who? If not now, when?
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Is it enough for a scientist simply to publish a paper? Isn’t it a responsibility of scientists, if you believe that you have found something that can affect the environment, isn’t it your responsibility to actually do something about it, enough so that action actually takes place?… If not us, who? If not now, when? [Here's a link to a summary of that meeting.]
Two NGOs for shark conservation, Shark Savers and Project: FIN, protested against Singapore’s unwillingness to ban shark fin products, at the Animal Welfare Symposium last Saturday.
Project: FIN founder Jennifer Lee quoting a WildAid letter in her question to Minister K Shanmugam and the panel at the end of the symposium, protested against trade interests behind the ‘marine life experts’ Hank Jenkins and Dr. Giam Choo Hoo, exposing their conflicts of interest with wildlife trade.
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The WildAid letter said:“Having known Dr. Giam for some time, I don't think he would claim to be a "marine life expert." He is a former vet who was in charge of the bureaucratic aspects of wildlife import and export in Singapore. I believe he still serves on the board of a reptile skin trading company and has served on a CITES committee where he was a tireless advocate against restrictions or controls on trade in threatened and endangered species."You would need to ask him who pays his expenses and consultancy now. Whenever I’ve asked him, he wouldn't tell."To my knowledge, Dr. Giam has never conducted any original research on sharks of any kind nor has he visited any of the shark fisheries to which he refers. At one point, I offered for my colleague, who had done such research, to make him better informed on sharks, and his response was, "Oh no, she knows too much."Similarly, Hank Jenkins is not a "marine life expert." I believe his expertise is in crocodile farming. He too has been a strong advocate for trade in wildlife and endangered species, such as "farming" tigers.They are, of course, like the shark fin traders they represent, entitled to their opinions, but to suggest they are experts in sharks or marine life is misleading.”
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The main reasons tackling the illegal wildlife trade is ineffective may be due to the fact that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), being a political organisation which uses economic trade as a tool to tackle the illegal wildlife trade, has conflicting trade and conservation interests, Professor Oakley noted.
On September 14, Al Gore will launch the Climate Reality Project, or “24 Hours of Reality” — this most recent project will have 24 presentations, done by 24 presenters in 13 languages, each broadcast one hour after the other, representing all the time zones of the world. Al Gore will be connecting the dots of climate change, extreme weather and pollution, among other things — but the innovative thing is that he wants to harness the power of his follower’s social media accounts in order to reach more people.
Gore is asking his supporters to lend him their accounts — the Project will be posting status updates in their name, trying to reach many more people as well as start a dialogue on the subject.
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But are there problems with this plan? Will harnessing social media seem like advertising, or does Gore have nothing to sell? Is there a reason to be worried about surrendering your online life to another person, or a corporation? Does one need to full-heartedly agree with the message before they choose to donate their account? Or is there simply nothing to worry about, and all that will be accomplished is a healthy, informative session on what could be the biggest problem humanity has ever faced?
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"Historically in any country and in any context it's young people who are at the core of protests," says Gopal. "But at this moment in history we're seeing a shared sense of deprivation among the young, a shared sense of there being a democracy deficit across the world. In all these places neoliberal economic policies have intensified their hold and affected young people most directly, young people looking for employment, study, prospects. I think it has cut young people to the bone, and they're confronting it directly."
Two other common motifs run through this year's rebellions. First has been the collapse in authority of traditional institutions; from Mubarak's cult of personality to the seemingly incessant scandals engulfing Britain's arbiters of political, financial and cultural control – bankers, MPs, and the Murdoch media empire. The crumpling is contagious, fuelling rebellions in the most of places.
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The second commonality has been the tools used to mobilise dissent. Although the role of online social media in the Arab uprisings has often been overstated, there can be no doubt that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have enabled diverse groups to quickly garner broad support for acts of resistance – and that this means of communication has coloured the internal organisation of protest movements.
The IPCC is now one train wreck after another. After being embarrassed by the spectacle of a Greenpeace energy scenario being elevated to top level prominence in a recent report on renewable energy by an IPCC author from Greenpeace, the IPCC compounds that error by trying to explain it away with information that is at best misleading if not just untrue.
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In a letter to the Economist this week Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III (which produced the recent report on renewables) dresses down the magazine for not recognizing that the IPCC has procedures in place to deal with the possibility that authors might impose their biases:
The IPCC has now approved a formal policy on conflicts of interest as recommended by the InterAcademy Council, a network of national science councils. This is an already endorsed increment in a pervasive system and is not a first step in a whole new area. Our new special report on renewables continues the tradition of balanced, thorough assessments at the IPCC.
What Edenhofer does not mention is that the IPCC conflict of interest policy is not being implemented until some time after 2014, after the current (fifth) assessment report is done (of course, nor did it apply to the recent renewables report). The yet-to-be-implemented COI policy is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the renewables report. -
The IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri explained the reason for the delayed implementation recently to the Economist:
Of course if you look at conflict of interest with respect to authors who are there in the 5th Assessment Report we’ve already selected them and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.
If you think about it, fairness to IPCC authors who have conflicts of interest (most notably Pachauri himself) is an interesting concept. One might argue that the legitimacy of the organization outweighs a need for such fairness to conflicted authors, but I digress. - 1 more annotation(s)...
Hardliners on opposing sides in the battle over climate change are guilty of a weird "religiosity" which hinders a sensible debate, energy minister Greg Barker has said.
In a Guardian interview, Barker said sceptics were failing to accept the "broad base" of scientific opinion, while climate change campaigners could be guilty of behaving in an arrogant manner.
Amid frustration in Whitehall at the tone of the debate, Barker said: "If you look at the extremes of the climate debate, whether it is the extreme climate sceptics or the extreme climate zealots, there is a slight religiosity there which is weird."
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hardliners on both sides should reflect on the consequences of adopting such strident stances. "I think the broad base of sound scientific opinion, of sensible and respected science, supports urgent climate action," he said to sceptics who question the need for action. "Of course science is constantly evolving. The notion that you need to have 100% certainty on any given issue is unhelpful anyway. Acting now on climate is the prudent sensible thing to do."
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climate change campaigners needed to be careful not to dismiss sceptics such as the former Conservative chancellor Lord Lawson of Blaby. "We need to make sure don't behave in an arrogant or offhand way because that really pisses people off," he said.
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The same reporter for the NYT that wrote the February 27th, 2011 hit piece falsely suggesting Pennsylvania's drinking waters were poisoned with radionuclides is back at it. He has another NYT front page, sunday story attacking shale gas as a ponzi scheme and the industry as filled with Enrons. He just about calls for FBI raids.
The piece is already rocketing around facebook sites and the internet.
Reader beware. This reporter puts sensationalism ahead of fairness or truth. Pennsylvania's drinking waters are not poisoned with radionuclides, as substantial testing has verified, and the reading public should drink from this journalistic cup with great caution.
Could anyone imagine more sensationalistic narratives than Radiation, Ponzi, and Enron?
Consistent with this reporter's method, today's article uses often anonymous statements to paint a sensational narrative and leaves out or underplays critical information that is inconvenient to establishing the credibility of the dominant anti-gas narrative.
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The truth I suspect is something like this:
Substantial real and actual shale gas production has been a boon for consumers by driving down substantially the price of gas, saving them $1,000 or more in gas and electric bills.
Substantial, real actual shale gas production has prevented a broad energy shock by keeping gas and electricity bills stable in the United States when oil prices jumped this spring.
But booming shale gas production has been a mixed blessing for investors in gas because the success of the industry has caused the price of gas to fall sharply.
As the price of gas has fallen from $13 per thousand cubic feet in 2008 to $4.30 today, investors have not fared as well as they had expected, because returns on investment of some shale gas plays are lower than had gas been priced at the predicted $8.
Administrator's Note: This email was sent to all Chesapeake employees from CEO Aubrey McClendon, in response to a Sunday New York Times piece by Ian Urbina entitled "Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush."
FW: CHK's response to 6.26.11 NYT article on shale gas
From: Aubrey McClendon
Sent: Sunday, June 26, 2011 8:37 PM
To: All Employees
Dear CHK Employees: By now many of you may have read or heard about a story in today’s New York Times (NYT) that questioned the productive capacity and economic quality of U.S. natural gas shale reserves, as well as energy reserve accounting practices used by E&P companies, including Chesapeake. The story is misleading, at best, and is the latest in a series of articles produced by this publication that obviously have an anti-industry bias. We know for a fact that today’s NYT story is the handiwork of the same group of environmental activists who have been the driving force behind the NYT’s ongoing series of negative articles about the use of fracking and its importance to the US natural gas supply growth revolution – which is changing the future of our nation for the better in multiple areas. It is not clear to me exactly what these environmental activists are seeking to offer as their alternative energy plan, but most that I have talked to continue to naively presume that our great country need only rely on wind and solar energy to meet our current and future energy needs. They always seem to forget that wind and solar produce less than 2% of America electricity today and are completely non-economic without ongoing government and ratepayer subsidies.
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Since the shale gas revolution and resulting confirmation of enormous domestic gas reserves, there has been a relatively small group of analysts and geologists who have doubted the future of shale gas. Their doubts have become very convenient to the environmental activists I mentioned earlier. This particular NYT reporter has apparently sought out a few of the doubters to fashion together a negative view of the U.S. natural gas industry. We also believe certain media outlets, especially the once venerable NYT, are being manipulated by those whose environmental or economic interests are being threatened by abundant natural gas supplies. We have seen for example today an email from a leader of a group called the Environmental Working Group who claimed today’s articles as this NYT reporter’s "second great story" (the first one declaring that produced water disposal from shale gas wells was unsafe) and that “we've been working with him for over 8 months. Much more to come. . .”
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this reporter’s claim of impending scarcity of natural gas supply contradicts the facts and the scientific extrapolation of those facts by the most sophisticated reservoir engineers and geoscientists in the world. Not just at Chesapeake, but by experts at many of the world’s leading energy companies that have made multi-billion-dollar, long-term investments in U.S. shale gas plays, with us and many other companies. Notable examples of these companies, besides the leading independents such as Chesapeake, Devon, Anadarko, EOG, EnCana, Talisman and others, include these leading global energy giants: Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco, Statoil, BHP, Total, CNOOC, Marathon, BG, KNOC, Reliance, PetroChina, Mitsui, Mitsubishi and ENI, among others. Is it really possible that all of these companies, with a combined market cap of almost $2 trillion, know less about shale gas than a NYT reporter, a few environmental activists and a handful of shale gas doubters?
Contradictions abound. Governments across the region have been identified as the problem, and yet the state is being called upon to address a social and political agenda that has not yet been fully defined. We are seeing the birth of a more democratic spirit among the region’s peoples, but a corresponding sense of democratic responsibility remains underdeveloped.
No matter how influential new media have been, they cannot replace the need for a region-wide “manifesto for change” that all who seek freedom can embrace. Any such manifesto must address the two elephants in the room – Palestine and the price of oil – as well as the extent to which regional water and energy resources, now rapidly depleting, should be shared.
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Cyber-activism has its limits; it cannot, in the end, deliver either democracy or prosperity. Communication may be instant, but, with no coherent animating ideology, the revolution proceeds in slow motion. The battle being fought for the soul of the Middle East cannot be won online, nor can it be subdued through the cynical manipulation of trust and fear. The quality of freedom in the Middle East, as elsewhere, will depend on its supporters’ commitment to liberal and democratic values.
Writing on Facebook, playwright and poet Alfian Sa’at said of the gay-affirmative event Pink Dot, “like so many things in Singapore, [it] has ended up reproducing the power structures that it should aim to challenge.” He was referring to the way Pink Dot has written all over it the social ascendancy of the English-speaking ethnic-Chinese middle class.
He reported a comment from a friend: “Pink Dot is as much a celebration of the LGBT community to love as it is a display of the self-love of Chinese, middle-class, English-educated liberals. What is inclusive in the term ‘LGBT’ is problematised by the fact that what is supposed to stand for the queer community in Singapore is almost exclusively ‘CMEL’!”
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Alfian’s critique may well be spot on. But the implicit assumption behind such a view — that any social movement aimed at objective A must first satisfy the nose test for objective B — is highly problematic. Does one expect an animal rights group to satisfy class-equality standards among all its members, volunteers and supporters? Does one demand that an anti-abortion campaign lean over backwards to ensure gender equality?
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He is not demanding that Pink Dot should be different, at least not in so many words. As he has written, “I don’t deny or dismiss how meaningful [Pink Dot] might be to some people. It’s just that it has a different meaning for me,” and that was why he chose not to attend this year. Nor was he stopping others from attending either.
Nuanced differently is another criticism of his — that Pink Dot “comes across as anxious to colonise and co-opt all the streams that exist out there.”
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The keynote speaker was Al Gore, who recently released ‘Our Choice’, his latest work on climate change, as both a book and an interactive app for the iPhone and iPad.
He touched on a few climate-related topics, and aside from much of his usual (and still right-on) spiel, he had a few interesting thoughts on the role of women in combating climate change — and why empowering women and girls is a key to stabilizing the global climate system.
Apologies for the shaky video
The role of the politically committed intellectual has a long and ubiquitous history. The Spanish-French novelist and screenwriter Jorge Semprún, who died recently, was for many years a member of the Spanish Communist Party’s Central Committee, and subsequently served as Minister of Culture in Spain’s first post-Franco Socialist government. Dissidents like Václav Havel had a decisive impact in the downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist regimes.
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The problem with all of this lies in the risk that Vargas Llosa and so many other Latin American public intellectuals run whenever they throw their considerable reputations and talents into the political arena. Whether they actually make a difference or are mistakenly perceived to have made even a minor contribution to a given cause (my own case with Vicente Fox’s election as Mexico’s president in 2000), they are held responsible for the results, for better or for worse.
If matters turn out well, they look like statesmen and visionaries; if things go sour, it was their fault for not foreseeing the obvious and inevitable. Ollanta Humala might keep his promises and complement Peru’s spectacular economic growth over the past decade with sensible social policies. Or he might not. One can admire Vargas Llosa for his courage in taking the plunge, without being entirely convinced that it was the right plunge to take.
Consider the following imaginary scenario.
NGOs and a few other representatives of the oil and gas industry decide to band together to produce a report on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as:
*Coal is the fuel of the future, we must mine more.
*CO2 regulations are too costly.
*Climate change will be good for agriculture.
In addition, the report contains some questionable scientific statements and associations. Imagine further that the report contains a preface authored by a prominent scientist who though unpaid for his work lends his name and credibility to the report.
How might that scientist be viewed by the larger community? Answers that come to mind include: “A tool of industry,” “Discredited,” “Biased,” “Political Advocate.” It is likely that in such a scenario that connection of the scientist to the political advocacy efforts of the oil and gas industry would provide considerable grist for opponents of the oil and gas industry, and specifically a basis for highlighting the appearance or reality of a compromised position of the scientist.
Fair enough?
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In this case the NGOs and other groups represent environmental and humanitarian groups that have put together a report (in PDF) on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as:
*Limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees (Celsius, p. 4)
*Extracting the World Bank from fossil fuels (p. 15)
*Opposing the inclusion of carbon sinks in the [Kyoto] Protocol (p. 22) -
It is troubling that the Chair of the IPCC would lend his name and organizational affiliation to a set of groups with members engaged actively in political advocacy on climate change. Even if Dr. Pachauri feels strongly about the merit of the political agenda proposed by these groups, at a minimum his endorsement creates a potential perception that the IPCC has an unstated political agenda. This is compounded by the fact that the report Dr. Pachauri tacitly endorses contains statements that are scientifically at odds with those of the IPCC.
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1. Pink Dot is highly commercialised.
It appears to be organised by a well-oiled machinery, with merchandising and all that. This does not appear to invoke romantic imaginings of the business of change that is LGBT activism (or at least how we expect it to be). -
2. Pink Dot does not represent the victims of homophobia.
It appears to be too "happy" with its celebratory and carnivalesque atmosphere. There are youths who are abused, beaten or thrown out of their homes by people who do not understand them. Pink Dot does not reach out to these victims of homophobia (or biphobia, transphobia, etc.) And what does Pink Dot do about LGBT people who lose their jobs or cannot find work because you-know-why/what? ... Add in more questions of similar nature... - 8 more annotation(s)...
To Mr. MacMaster, I say shame on you!!! There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country. We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us. Your apology is not accepted, since I have myself started to investigate Amina’s arrest. I could have put myself in a grave danger inquiring about a fictitious figure. Really… Shame on you!!!
To the readers and the western media I say, there are authentic people in the Middle East who are blogging and reporting stories about the situation in their countries. You should pay attention to these people.
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Because of you, Mr. MacMaster, a lot of the real activists in the LGBT community became under the spotlight of the authorities in Syria. These activists, among them myself, had to change so much in their attitude and their lives to protect themselves from the positional harm your little stunt created. You have, sir, put a lot of lives, mine and some friends included, in harm's way so you can play your little game of fictional writing.
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You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back. You single-handedly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause and you will be responsible for any LGBT activist who might be yet another fallen angel during these critical time.
I'm outraged, and if I lived in a country where I can sue you, I would.
Gay rights campaigners have urged mosque leaders in east London to ban homophobic clerics from using their premises, following a 21% rise in gay hate crime in the area.
Activists, including journalist Julie Bindel and Pride trustee Colm Howard-Lloyd, said some preachers at the East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre had "created an atmosphere in which hate is socially acceptable; they have spread a message in which maiming and violence is the most dutiful, honourable, devout thing to do".
Their concerns follow the £100 fine given to Mohammed Hasnath, who put up "Gay-Free Zone" stickers in the area; the case of Oliver Hemsley, who was paralysed from the neck down in August 2008 following a vicious attack; and Metropolitan police figures showing that gay hate crime had risen in the borough of Tower Hamlets – where the mosque and adjoining centre are located – from 67 attacks to 81 in a year.
Published in 1999 by Stanford professors Pfeffer and Sutton, “The Smart-Talk Trap” (PDF) is even more pertinent in today’s new media world where user-generated content is ubiquitous. The key to success is action but the authors warn that we are increasingly “rewarded for talking—and the longer, louder, and more confusingly, the better.” This dynamic, which substitutes talk for action, is responsible for what Pfeffer and Sutton call the knowing-doing gap. The purpose of this blog post is to assess this gap in the context of social media and to offer potential solutions.
heterodox Cambridge economist exposes 23 myths behind the neoliberal free-market dogma and urges us to recognize that "capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations," spearheaded by an activist state committed to sustainable economic development.
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Despite (or because of) the fact that he teaches at the University of Cambridge, has a distinguished publication record to his name, and is the author of a number of a best-selling books (including Bad Samaritans), Ha-Joon Chang is no mainstream, orthodox economist.
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In fact, he is one of the leading heterodox economists of our time. Drawing upon a wide variety of inspirations, ranging from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and from Karl Marx to Friedrich List, Chang has recently made some serious inroads into the field of development economics, and in 2005 was awarded the prestigious Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought, widely considered to be the Nobel Prize for critical economists.
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