Month: November 2010

Tunku Varadarajan interviews Bjorn Lomborg about his new global warming film. Lomborg's plan to combat climate change:

It would be preferable to have a global bargain, and I actually think it is possible to get one. Fundamentally, we should be asking for governments to spend 0.2 percent of GDP on research and development into green energy. This is 50 times as much as we spend today, yet it is much less than what is typically being proposed to spend on inefficient Kyoto-style policies. Since it is so comparatively cheap, it is much more likely that we could get every nation on board (and developing countries would be paying proportionally less). But even if not everyone were on board, it would still make sense to move forward. In that sense, some countries could move ahead, fund the R&D and take us much closer to tackling global warming, without everyone participating.

I have seen the movie and highly recommend it. The only dodgy moment for me was the film's depiction of cap-and-trade as solely corruption. It is corrupt, as anyone in the EU will tell you; but the film made the point without explaining the more fundamental point that cap-and-trade – originally seen as a free market solution to CO2 – could work, but at way too high a price for very modest drops in temperature.

What's great about the movie is its focus on R&D and how innovating new energy is more important than taxing carbon. In a mostly negative review, Andrew O'Hehir whines from the left but makes no substantive critique of what Bjorn argues. Yes, some climate change denialists latch onto his work, but Lomborg is not now and never has been a climate change denialist. He's a climate change realist and wants to address the problem through new technology while focusing aid on more pressing human problems:

The power of multinational energy companies is mentioned only briefly in "Cool It," and the right-wing political renaissance across the Northern Hemisphere, which has been happy to use Lomborg's work for its own purposes, is never mentioned at all. In some perfect, imaginary Adam Smith universe, Lomborg might be right that dispassionate, rational analysis would quickly yield the best solutions for all our problems at the cheapest price. Does he really imagine that we live there?

No, but he makes the case that we can. And why shouldn't we try?

A reader writes:

As a molecular evolutionary biologist can I just send you a primal "AAAARGGGGHHHHH!!!" in response to Sarah Palin, the figure-head of a regressive, anti-intellectual, anti-science movement, using the language of Natural Selection and behavioral biology to make the case for her vague "freedom" agenda?

No?  Then I apologize.  I'll return to head-butting my lab bench until the pain in my soul stops.

As far as Palin is concerned, the pain in one's soul never stops.

Further underlying the pure obstructionism of many Senate Republicans, Max Boot joins Bob Kagan in supporting the treaty. Good for them. It is a pretty insignificant issue in the grand scheme of things, and sabotaging the reset with Russia cannot be good for the interests of the United States, especially since Russia's support has been critical in tightening the screws on the Tehran coup regime.

A reader writes:

You and Kain are too right. The conservative movement's consciousness of itself as a movement has led to some of its victories — liberals are famously disorganized compared to conservatives — but also some of its worst impulses. The "movement" paradigm calls forth a siege mentality that inevitably results in a paranoia about policing the margins of the "movement." Thus do creative thinkers get denounced as heretics.

You love to talk about "theocons," but the true theological conservatism is not religious, in the traditional sense, but this quasi-religious view that many conservatives (and certainly the movement's leaders) take of politics. I am a conservative myself, but one thing I admire about liberals is that the term DINO (Democrat In Name Only) has no real meaning.

I know that liberal Democrats have their own sacred cows, but you don't generally see left-liberal opinion leaders troubling themselves to read heterodox liberals out of the party. I understand the concept of heretics in religion, but not in politics — at least not in any healthy politics, conservative or otherwise. When critics of the GOP say that the party has turned into a "church," I agree — but as far as I can tell, the most sacrosanct dogmas defended by the hierarchy are the immaculate conception of the free market, low taxes, and an interventionist foreign policy. It's far easier to get elected a Republican being pro-choice than anti-war.

The latest in this story: Murkowski prevails over Palin's anointed thug.

Ezra Klein yearns for one.

E.D. Kain explains:

I would suggest that perhaps the conservative movement itself is the most sacred of sacred cows here, and also the greatest impediment to conservatism as a ‘reality-based force in American politics’. More than anything, it is the movement itself which creates these closed information circuits, which revels in anti-historicism and the weaving of conservative illusion. In some ways it is also a great political force, but I also suspect that it is nearing its zenith in terms of both heat and light.

These sorts of movements by their very natures have poor immune systems which is why they guard themselves so fiercely, why they are forced to create alternative narratives, alternate histories. They are brittle. The conservative movement, for all its ferocity and political savvy, is brittle, because it relies too heavily on its own illusions – illusions which have been made in recent years all too convincing by outlets like Fox News.

And when such reality-divorced movements collapse, they collapse very suddenly.

Adam Serwer's take away from my argument with Greenwald:

I actually agree with Sullivan that this is substantively different from how we treat people in U.S. custody, but I think he's largely missing the point with his reminders that al-Awlaki is a really terrible human being. No one is arguing that he isn't. The question here is whether or not the government has the authority to kill an American citizen apart from any declared battlefield based on secret, internal deliberations that a judge will never be allowed to look at. But the fact that as principled a person as Sullivan on matters of executive power is swayed by the argument that al-Awlaki is simply a vile individual who deserves to die is a reminder of how isolated opponents of targeted killing actually are.

That's a ridiculous distortion of my position. I don't know whether Awlaki is a terrible human being. I do know he has targeted for death writers and cartoonists and has been deeply enmeshed with recent attempts to kill many Americans in what he believes is a war. Moreover, Yemen surely is a "declared battlefield" – at least as far as al Qaeda is concerned. Awlaki is currently issuing death threats against Americans who have had to go into hiding and is connected with several recent terror attacks. According to Nick Baumann, Goldblog sides with Greenwald.  From Baumann's "edited notes"on Jeffrey's remarks:

I don't think enough proof has been presented that [al-Awlaki] is an actual operator of terrorist cells, that he's actually directing the actual murder of others. I think he's fundamentally functioning as a propagandist…. The Israelis have never conducted an assassination against an Israeli citizen…. It would be interesting to look at what the Israel Supreme Court might say about the Prime Minister-directed killing of someone considered to be a terrorist, an Israeli citizen. I have a feeling, maybe I'm crazy, that there might be a more active judicial debate and Knesset debate on that than we have here.

… I don't want to be represented by a government that without judicial and congressional oversight and the benefit of courts decides to assassinate an american citizen. What I'm saying is I'd like to see more evidence….

I'd prefer an open administration argument as to the evidence linking Awlaki directly to terrorist murder. Baumann then writes that Goldblog's "position seems to clash with that of Andrew Sullivan, his fellow blogger and Atlantic colleague. Sullivan doesn't seem to have many serious qualms about the government killing al-Awlaki. " I have many qualms, and would prefer evidence against Awlaki to made public in court. Which I think is Jeffrey's position. From my long post on al-Awlaki:

I agree that the Obama administration's decision to shut down inspection of the evidence behind the decision to regard Awlaki as someone waging an active war against the US under "state secrets" is a step way too far. I think the president has a duty to explain in court why he believes this person must be treated as an active enemy at war with the US, and therefore treated as all such enemies in wartime as someone to be killed. Instead, they have told us much in the press, but not backed it up in court. I strongly disagree with this, and think reiterating in court what is already in the public domain could help, not hurt them. I will gladly join with Glenn and everyone else in this in demanding this invocation of state secrets end. I regard it as a core betrayal of Obama's campaign, just as I believe his refusal even to give torture victims a day in court on the same grounds is a war crime itself.

Nonetheless, I think Awlaki is a dangerous terrorist and traitor acting in a war zone trying to engage in mass murder. If he cannot be captured, he is a legitimate target for killing.