The Onion, CJR do climate change
The Columbia Journalism Review and The Onion have both turned their attention to climate change, running a couple of good stories about how the topic is covered.
First, the CJR looks at the rhetoric of the term ‘carbon footprint’ and wonders if we adopt new terms far more easily than adopting the substance or actions behind them. The second addresses the five failings of environmental journalism, which was checked with the Society for Environmental Journalists and picked up by the blogs, coming as a response to the Wired article that ran in June on revisiting our ‘preconceptions of green’. Read more
Resurgence of the ‘Consensus’
This morning the Guardian carries Bjorn Lomborg’s latest perspective on global warming, suggesting that both McCain and Obama are barking up the wrong tree in their support for a US cap-and-trade system to curb emissions.
I’m reading similar critiques of the cap-and-trade argument by leading economists/scientists in Ernest Zedillo’s book Global Warming. The main thrust of the counter-argument is that people such as Lomborg, to quote Freeman Dyson, writing in the NY Review of Books:
are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.
This is Lomborg’s position, clearly communicated by this piece in today’s Guardian. Read more
Simon Hoggart’s ‘dogmatic and irrational’ mistake
Yesterday in the Guardian Simon Hoggart referred to the environmental movement as a ‘religion - dogmatic and irrational’ in a small aside about wind power as the last entry in his week’s sketch. The full quote:
We are to have across our still beautiful countryside thousands more ghastly, noisy, hideous wind turbines, which produce very little energy at enormous cost. Proof that the environmental movement has become a religion - dogmatic and irrational - in that it has now persuaded government that to save the environment, we must first destroy it. [my emphasis]
Not the kind of environmental journalism you expect from the Guardian, which has delivered a consistent and well-researched line of sober alarm on climate change. Read more
‘Water wars’ - it’s China/Tibet, not Spain/France
The New Scientist this week carries the headline ‘Is this the beginning of water wars?’ for its report on the story of Spain importing water from France, via the Port of Marseilles, to help alleviate the pain of drought in the Catalan region around Barcelona.
The article continues to discuss the other global pressure points concerning water, its contribution to tensions, and the potential for stoking ‘wars’ between nations. The article refers quite correctly to the control of water in the Middle East, where Israel controls 90% of the water supply to both Israeli and Palestinian territory:
“People will not fight over water,” says Mark Zeitoun, from the London School of Economics’ Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance in the UK. “But that’s not to say water shortages will not contributing to existing tensions.” This is already happening. Zeitoun advises the Palestinian authorities in their water negotiations with Israel. The latter controls 90% of the two territories’ shared water resources. “The fact that the Palestinians are deprived of their water doesn’t help the situation,” Zeitoun says. Like Spain, the Palestinian authorities are considering their options…
Bit of an understatement, that, “can’t help the situation”. If people can’t drink water… So, two things on this article.
1. If people will not fight over water, are they ‘wars’? Have we not seen the mistaken and propagandist use of this term too much recently (’war on terror’; ‘the long war’). Why not water apartheid, when the situation is one of one country controlling the other’s supply?
2. Is it clear that people and countries are not fighting over resources such as water, or say oil?
Yes, water management is going to be an increasingly important global issue. Which is why we need to be responsible with the rhetoric and use of the term ‘war’. Immediately, this article is about economic and agreed trade between two countries, Spain and France. It is not the start of a ‘war’ but of a means, as the quoted Zeitoun goes on to emphasise, of ‘efficient water management’ through trade. Not that I’m a big fan of turning to trade, but that’s besides the point and I’m wrong here anyway, still thinking of my Marxist ideals.
Anyway, let’s not use ‘war’ where it’s not the correct referent for that particular story, otherwise we muddy the waters, if you’ll pardon the metaphor.
Second, and critically, water ‘is’ the cause of clashes already, ‘water riots’ as Zeitoun’s colleague Elena Lopez-Gunn calls them, and are happening now… in Tibet.
One of the most underreported factors of the China-Tibet debate is the ‘why’ China is in Tibet. There are a number of reports that would seem to suggest or provide evidence that water is one of the key factors. For example, China’s plan to divert water from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the Yellow River (this from the Chinese Government’s official news source, Xinhua). It is also the cause of clashes (political at the moment) between India and China. Others believe the issue will not remain political for long: that the issue is a ticking time-bomb. And the Tibetans get no say?? For a statement from the Goverment of Tibet in Exile on their environmental issues, this is their white paper on the environment: Tibet is the watershed of Asia.
Well done the Independent for covering the story at the time, back in Nov 2006. But why not now, as part of the background to the Tibetan clashes?
And I can’t help worrying about the ‘nothing here’ message found at www.tibet.net, when Google searches clearly show that the issue of water is debated on the site: ‘Tibet is China’s Saudi Arabia for water’ is one such headline.
