Year: 2013

Lisa Margonelli regrets that “we are stuck in a bipolar discussion that casts fracking as either a panacea for the economy or as death to the environment”:

Well-regulated, fracked natural gas could be a plus for the environment—particularly if it were coupled with a ban on coal. The extraction of coal via mountaintop removal is extraordinarily damaging to the environment. Power plants that burn coal emit more radiation into neighborhoods around them than do nuclear power plants, and fine particle pollution from coal-powered plants costs 13,000 lives a year, while producing an enormous quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Coal, arguably, really does equal death. Fracking is not pretty, but there is more than one principled environmental conversation to have about it.

Relatedly, Lynne Peeples highlights opposition from anti-fracking groups to Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, MIT professor Ernie Moniz:

Moniz, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative, has chaired fracking studies funded by oil and gas companies and with members of industry as advisors. His team’s widely cited May 2011 report called natural gas the “bridge to a low-carbon future.” … “What Moniz has said appears to indicate that he does not understand climate science and the influence of fossil fuels,” said [Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University]. “I find that scary. Either he is a repeating the industry mantra, which raises concern over an apparent conflict of interest, or he is not aware of the science. If he’s going to take the position, he better understand the best science.”

Brad Plumer provides more specifics on Moniz’s position:

He outlined his views at length during a 2011 Senate hearing on a report he co-authored, “The Future of Natural Gas.” “In broad terms,” Moniz testified, “we find that, given the large amounts of natural gas available in the U.S. at moderate cost … natural gas can indeed play an important role over the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.”

Here’s how this “bridge” is supposed to work: In the near future, cheap natural gas will elbow aside coal in the U.S. electricity sector. Since burning natural gas for electricity emits about half the carbon-dioxide that burning coal does, this will curtail U.S. emissions a bit. (Indeed, that’s already happening.) That, in turn, buys us some time to make the more arduous shift to even cleaner forms of energy, like solar or wind or even nuclear.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s not-yet-released book Lean In is already spurring controversy [NYT]:

In her view, women are also sabotaging themselves. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” she writes, and the result is that “men still run the world.” Ms. Sandberg wants to take women through a collective self-awareness exercise. In her book, she urges them to absorb the social science showing they are judged more harshly and paid less than men; resist slowing down in mere anticipation of having children; insist that their husbands split housework equally; draft short- and long-term career plans; and join a “Lean In Circle,” which is half business school and half book club.

Melissa Gira Grant argues that Sandberg’s book ignores most women:

[T]his is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg’s bottom line. The “movement” Sandberg seeks to lead with Lean In resembles a social movement only so far as it supports the growth of her brand as leader. … It seems that the consciousness raised and solutions offered in Lean In Circles will be isolated to actions individual women can take to support their own ambitions and desires, rather than wondering about the ambitions and desires of, say, the women who keep house for the women spending their time “leaning in.” There’s simply no way for women to lean in without leaning on the backs of other women.

Deanna Zandt is similarly critical:

[P]lacing the onus on women to fix themselves up is problematic to the core. I’m all for assertiveness training and teaching women how culturally they aren’t as welcomed into conversations and power structures as men are. (Research shows that when women take up more than 30% of the conversation space, for example, they’re viewed as “dominating” the discourse.) But without simultaneously taking on the structures that keep those norms in place, women are both helping to reproduce those structures over and over, and are punished for challenging them.

Michelle Goldberg pushes back:

These attacks, largely divorced from anything Sandberg has actually written or said, mean that there’s already a lot of public misunderstanding of her book’s message. One would think she was peddling a multilevel marketing scheme, not the most overtly feminist mainstream business book ever written. True, she wants to work within the system rather than smashing it, and parts of her book, as she acknowledges, “will be most relevant to women fortunate enough to have choices about how much and when and where to work.” But so what? No book speaks to everyone, and leadership tomes by wildly successful male executives aren’t typically pilloried for ignoring the concerns of immigrant day laborers.

Jessica Valenti sees the criticism as representative of a more general problem within feminism:

What’s remarkable about these criticisms is that they’re not coming from the usual right-wing anti-feminists, but from feminists themselves. The feminist backlash against Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and a former vice president at Google, reveals a big and recurring problem within the movement: We hold leaders to impossible standards, placing perfection over progress. And a movement that does more complaining than creating is bound to fail. …

The view that Sandberg is too rich and powerful to advise working women is shortsighted; it assumes that any sort of success is antithetical to feminism. The truth is, feminism could use a powerful ally. Here’s a nationally known woman calling herself a feminist, writing what will be a wildly popular book with feminist ideas, encouraging other women to be feminists. And we’re worried she has too much influence? That she’s too . . . ambitious?

Sandberg’s view has been positioned opposite Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, covered on the Dish here. Recent Dish on female breadwinners here, here and here.

Reviewing Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing, Rob Horning captures the paradox of paperwork – the very bureaucracies initially created in the name of fairness and impartiality often become the scourge of the masses:

In a state where the DMV is the model institution, everyone is equal in that they are equally miserable. But paperwork also opens new avenues for the exercise of influence that are just as opaque as any earlier systems abused by elites. As documentation proliferates, so too do auditors auditing the clerks, and auditors auditing those auditors, and on and on to theoretical infinity. This network of data and overtaxed inspectors and processors has the effect of creating a miasma of competing claims for legitimacy, as well as ample opportunity for doling out preferential treatment, circumventing the law, subverting authority, serving oneself. Information becomes obfuscation, particularly under the pressures of “surveillance and acceleration,” which Kafka isolates as the contradictory demands of state power. The state needs to know more to function fairly, but with more information comes more urgency to process it all, yielding even more information to process and sending fairness further over the horizon.

The Guardian, in a 15-month investigation, has unearthed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld brought veterans from the dirty wars in Latin America, Colonel James Steele and Colonel James H Coffman, to empower sectarian warfare against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. He set up detention centers for Sunni insurgents that were run by Iraqis but monitored and checked on by two men, one of whom reported to Rumsfeld, the other to Petraeus. So we have the first solid evidence that Petraeus, the golden mediocrity of Washington, was also an abetter of the worst forms of torture imaginable:

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed [Iraqi General Muntadher] al-Samari, who worked with Petraeus’ and Rumsfeld’s designated men on the ground] … “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.” There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place, and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

But reporters witnessed horrifying war crimes in US-occupied Iraq, under the authority of those reporting directly to Rumsfeld and Petraeus:

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the commando-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’. But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

How did we find all this out? Bradley Manning’s leaks. Sometimes a whistleblower is not only a traitor. He can also be a patriot, uncovering war crimes. The full documentary can be seen here. A five-minute version is here.