This is a chart for arms sales by country in 2005. USA is currently tops by far, but if you read the accompanying Boston Globe article from last year, Russia’s trying very hard to catch up.
This is the oxygen that keeps conflicts going a lot longer than they should, and also make them so much more destructive. Remember this when your favorite government (they’re all to blame here, no singling one country out) starts talking about “peace”.
Happy Friday!!
Eminent domain is the concept that governments can acquire private land for “improvement” and “development” purposes. But what happens when you combine
Well, in India, people die.
BBC NEWS | South Asia | ‘Seven die’ in India farm clash
At least seven people are reported to have died after police fired on farmers protesting at the acquisition of farmland for industry in eastern India. The clash happened in Nandigram in West Bengal state where thousands of riot police have been sent to quell protests against a planned chemical hub. Police say they met fierce resistance from thousands of villagers. Police say two people have died, but doctors in a local hospital say five more men have died of bullet wounds. ‘Land grab’ Farmers in Nandigram have been resisting the West Bengal government’s plan to acquire farms for setting up a hub for chemical industries by an Indonesian company.
As India’s manufacturing infrastructure and increasingly rapid industrialization starts to catch up with its already booming software economy, watch for these tensions to get worse. Indian governments are not used to handling issues like these in an equitable fashion. Hopefully, the sacrifices of these people will change something, but I am not optimistic. Lives are cheap in India. Nobody’s going to write a song about these 7 dead.
As armchair critics debate endlessly on the virtues and vices of carbon trading versus carbon taxes, they are in no danger of losing their armchairs (or their homes, or their money, or their livelihood). Africa and Asia, not so lucky.
Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms – New York Times
Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought. In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.
I read another story about Bangladesh recently, apparently in Bangladesh, there will be both flooding and drought due to cimate change!
We are fighting climate change on the front line,” Professor Nishat
told The Independent earlier this year. “But the battle has to be
integrated across all countries.”Bangladesh has good reason to feel aggrieved at global warming. Its
annual carbon emissions only 0.172 tons per capita, compared to 21 tons
in the US.If the rivers dry up, it would leave Bangladesh completely at the mercy of the rains.
What is to be done? There are no simple answers, but this is a global issue that requires a global solution. There needs to be a relentless push for efficiency and conservation, with technologies being made available sans intellectual property and patent protection to help India and China control emissions. Efficiency is where the low hanging fruit are. This wikipedia article is a decent compendium of options.
Europe has started on the control path already. The U.S has to act, will it do anything this year? Or do we have to wait for this? I am very cynical about the West’s ability and willingness to act in this regard. When the prime contributors and benefiters of a harmful action are not the same as the ones who will face the worst consequences, where’s the will? As life in the third world becomes more miserable, the rich countries can always build more walls.
No fun and games here!
Warning that the threat of climate change was real, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said future of people will be at peril if they do not change their lifestyles.
Singh’s warning came on a day when he constituted a high level advisory group to help the government take pro-active measures to deal with global warming.
“The threat of climate change is real and unless we alter our lifestyles and pursue a sustainable model of development, our future will be at peril”, he said in a message on the occasion of World Environment Day.
So, what exactly is the Indian position on climate change, something that threatens its coastlines, will put entire villages under water in the Ganga delta, screw around with the monsoon, and accelerate glacier melting in the Himalayas (among many other effects?)
Here’s India’s position from the talks with Brazil last week…
“We are willing to work in partnership in this process to cut emissions but we cannot accept equal responsibility (for the global mess caused by the industrialised nations),” an Indian official said.
The country’s top environmental official, Pradipto Ghosh, said yesterday that “legally mandated measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are likely to have significant adverse effects on the GDP growth of developing countries, including India”.
Yes, obviously. The world is in desperate need of a framework to make development and poverty alleviation happen without burning too much coal. But, as long as the leader of the free world vacillates, obfuscates and procrastinates, not much will happen.
Pesticide exposure in Punjab and Haryana is out of control. When I was growing up, the Green Revolution was idolized and idealized to degree that in hindsight seems a little excessive. But back then, this octupling of wheat and rice yields in Punjab and Haryana catalyzed the transformation of India from a country mired in famine and food shortages to one that occasionally runs out of room to store excess food. So, this story (courtesy of 3QD) caught my attention.
Green.view | Chemical generation | Economist.com:
IF INDIAN newspaper reports are to be believed, the children of Punjab are in the throes of a grey revolution. Even those as young as ten are sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind. In Punjabi villages, children and adults rare afflicted by uncommon cancers.
The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff.
Ignorance is part of the problem. The report includes details of a survey suggesting that nearly one-third of Punjabi farmers were unaware that pesticides come with instructions for use. Half of the farmers ignored these instructions. Three-quarters put empty pesticide containers to domestic uses.
The article concludes by saying that the government is encouraging the use of techniques including organic farming, more crop rotation, etc, and how this is ironically “reversing” the green revolution. But two separate issues are getting mixed up here. The green revolution was not won on excessive use of fertilizers, monoculture, excessive water use, and so on. Instead, the development of new hybrid, high yielding varieties of rice and wheat kick started the revolution. The wholesale adoption of water and input intensive agricultural techniques came along for for the ride with the rest of the revolution.
Hopefully, the Punjab government will not stop at writing reports, but start grassroots education projects with the farmers to encourage sensible farming techniques that take the good parts of the green revolution and leave the bad parts out.
Where Thomas Friedman of the New York Times echoes a blog post of mine from a few months back about cheap cars, development models and India.
We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive. But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place. Cheap conventional four-wheel cars, which would encourage millions of Indians to give up their two-wheel motor scooters and three-wheel motorized rickshaws, could overwhelm India’s already strained road system, increase its dependence on imported oil and gridlock the country’s megacities.
No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us – New York Times
Here’s what I had to say…
Is it necessary that India and China tread the same path as the U.S and Europe? Does India have to make and use cars that are built using technology developed prior to our knowledge of global warming? The same company that gets cautious praise from the Union of Concerned Scientists for its “leadership” role in global warming will turn around and build factories in India that carry the status quo forward for another 30 years. When you’re starting from the foundation, and you know that the plans provided to you will lead to your house crumbling in 20 years, would you use the plans anyway because your contractor provides you with no alternative? The logical answer seems to be no, but is this process logic driven, or enforced by the existing power structure?
The answer should be “NO!!”. But Friedman goes ahead and offers some sensible suggestions via the very excellent Sunita Narain.
Charge high prices for parking, charge a proper road tax for driving, deploy free air-conditioned buses that reach every corner of the city, expand the existing beautiful Delhi subway system, “and then let the market work,” she added.
Good idea. Now, will Friedman turn around and offer the same prescription for the US? Apparently not. If the US cannot kick the car habit, or show other people how to, this kind of lecturing is pointless.
Blogged with Flock
Atul Gawande writes eloquently, about why certain advances are taken up very quickly. and some aren’t. Seven pages of crisp prose full of stories, examples and personal experience mixed with science later, I (re)learned a couple of important lessons.
via Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker.
One
This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.
The nature of the problem being fixed is important. Issues not immediately apparent to human perception, and which require human behaviour changes to fix are difficult.
We’re infatuated with the prospect of technological solutions to these problems <snip>As with most difficulties in global health care, lack of adequate technology is not the biggest problem. <snip> Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. <snip> To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change.
Two, clearly, inventing new technology/interventions is only second or third in a series of steps needed to actually solve a problem. We often laud the technological aspect, awarding prizes for new inventions and new science, while ignoring the much more challenging human dimensions to changing behaviour and norms.
What would happen if we hired a cadre of childbirth-improvement workers to visit birth attendants and hospital leaders, show them why and how to follow a checklist of essential practices, understand their difficulties and objections, and help them practice doing things differently. In essence, we’d give them mentors.
We are going in the opposite direction. Government spending, especially on hiring people to solve difficult problems over a medium-long term is now almost taboo. Take poverty, for example. Yesterday, there was a report of a groundbreaking study confirming that, contra the billions of dollars spent trying to win the “war on drugs”, poverty is much more harmful to children than their mothers’ cocaine usage. Clearly, Canada has enough money that no one has to suffer from poverty. Yet, my wonderful “heaven on earth” province BC has Canada’s worst child poverty. The BC government is running headlong in the opposite direction, consolidating services, and making assistance services almost impossible to reach.
We know what to do, give people money to live, give them cheap and accessible child care, help people with acute and chronic physical and mental health issues including substance use, and employ people they can talk to and learn from, mentors and more. Take the uncertainty out of their daily lives, take out some of the incredibly taxing daily decisions they have to make every day, and see what happens.
Instead, it is easy politically to spend billions on shiny cars, bazookas, drones, heat sensing equipment, computers, and more for cops to police poverty. My city’s cops ride around in cars that seem ridiculously over-designed given the city’s speed limit of 50 kmph, and Victoria is not even close to being excessive. Yet, it is impossible to spend money on the harm reduction workers that can actually provide the support services people need. We routinely criminalize poverty and hope that we will somehow solve it by harassing people for being poor.
Real poverty reduction starts with giving more money to the poor, unconditionally and non-judgmentally. But it also involves hiring many more people to act as advocates, teachers and mentors for people who will greatly appreciate and benefit from this increased social connection. If we want change, we need more people whose job it is to make the change happen.