March 2014 – Page 8

What’s Next For Afghanistan? Ctd

Jeffrey Stern notes that Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani’s running mate is a “brutal warlord” who boasts “one of the worst records of human rights abuses in all of Afghanistan”:

General Abdul Rashid Dostum tends to slip under the American radar because recently his interests have aligned with ours; his abuses have tended to be against people the US considers enemies, most recently, the Taliban. But he’s been responsible for massacres of prisoners, accused repeatedly of using mass rape as a weapon of war, and has a long list of other war crimes on his resume. And though some of the stories about Dostum are surely myths – it’s said that he eats 12 chickens and two quarts of vodka in every sitting – the war crimes allegations are serious, repeated, and furnished by multiple international organizations.

When news of the Dostum choice came out, casual Afghanistan observers in America who know and respect Ghani were confused; people I spoke to on the streets of Kabul were disappointed, and Ghani seemed to go from a new kind of candidate whose intelligence and commitment were unquestioned to a man on top of a ticket that didn’t look that much different from the other ones. There was, however, one obvious reason for Ghani to bring the warlord on board: Dostum is a figurehead for the Uzbeks, a small minority in Afghanistan, but one that tends to vote as a bloc. Including Dostum effectively guaranteed about a million votes.

Previous Dish on Ghani and the Afghan elections here.

Our Obsession With Economic Growth

Kate Raworth challenges it:

She argues that “inequality is really, quite extraordinarily at the heart of the way economies are growing.” Lane Kenworthy parses research on income inequality:

As best I can tell from the available data, income inequality hasn’t reduced economic growth. It hasn’t hindered employment. It may or may not have played a role in fostering economic crises, including the Great Recession. It hasn’t reduced income growth for poor households. It may or may not have contributed to the weakening of household balance sheets by encouraging too much borrowing. It may or may not have reduced equality of opportunity. It hasn’t slowed the growth of college completion. It either hasn’t reduced the increase in life expectancy or the decrease in infant mortality or, if it has, the impact has been small. It looks unlikely to have contributed to the rise in obesity. It hasn’t slowed the fall in teen births or homicides since the early 1990s. It may or may not have weakened trust. It doesn’t appear to have affected average happiness. In the United States it has had little or no impact on trust in political institutions, on voter turnout, or on party polarization. And while it may have boosted inequality of political influence, we lack solid evidence that it’s done so.

On the other hand, income inequality has reduced middle-class household income growth. It very likely has increased disparities in education, health, and happiness in the United States. And it has reduced residential mixing in the U.S.

Bring Back The Firing Squad?

Physician Matt McCarthy considers it:

I am against capital punishment, but I understand that it’s not going away anytime soon and we must figure out a way to minimize suffering as long as it continues. … A compelling case can be made that based on efficacy, diffusion of responsibility, and inexpensiveness, death by firing squad is a better option [than lethal injection]. (Or perhaps the guillotine.) Some organs would remain intact for donation, and although it might appear grisly, it’s quick, and it is the only method of execution for which we already train people. Interestingly, in states that have offered both shooting and hanging—which also fulfills many of the above criteria—inmates usually opt for the firing squad. One could argue that if properly done, lethal injection would be more humane than either of these methods, but we can no longer expect that it will be properly done.

Previous Dish on the contemporary use of firing squads here.

[Note: the original version of this posted incorrectly suggested that McCarthy was in favor of physicians becoming involved in executions, in order to minimize botched lethal injections.]

A Poem For Friday

A third set of landays, or folk couplets, from the women of Afghanistan:

May God make you into a riverbank flower
so I may smell you when I go to gather water.

*

Of water I can’t have even a taste.
My lover’s name, written on my heart, would be erased.

*

I could have tasted death for a taste of your tongue
watching you eat ice cream when we were young.

Earlier landays on the Dish here and here.

(From I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated and presented by Eliza Griswold, photographs by Seamus Murphy, to be published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. LLC. Text copyright © 2014 by Eliza Griswold. Photographs copyright © 2014 by Seamus Murphy. All rights reserved.)

It’s Not Easy Being Grün

One country is learning the hard way:

Germany is in the middle of one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments a major industrial economy has ever attempted: To swear off nuclear power and run Europe’s largest economy essentially on wind and solar power.

There’s just one problem – it’s not really working.

The energy transformation, known as “Energiewende,” was meant to give Germany an energy sector that would be cleaner and more competitive, fueling an export-driven economy and helping to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. On that count, the policy has floundered: German emissions are rising, not falling, because the country is burning increasing amounts of dirty coal. And electricity costs, already high, have kept rising, making life difficult for small and medium-sized businesses that compete against rivals with cheaper energy. …

Business groups representing small and medium firms wring their hands over Germany’s high energy costs while Brussels frets that Berlin is subsidizing big German industry with rebates on inflated energy bills. Foreign leaders, and plenty of pundits, blame the Energiewende for Europe’s inability to answer Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Utilities, meanwhile, are bleeding money, slashing investments, and shutting down power plants.

Keating has more on the country’s troubles:

Despite Angela Merkel’s government’s focus on green energy, the country’s coal use actually hit its highest level since 1990 last year. With no conventionally extractable natural gas on its own, some are also recommending that the government consider hydraulic fracturing in Germany, which the government currently opposes on environmental grounds.

All of Merkel’s government’s goals—shifting to renewable energy, weaning the country off Russian gas, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents—have been admirable, but doing them all at once raises some questions about how exactly the country plans to keep the lights on in the medium-to-long term. It would be an unfortunate irony if coal and fracking ended up being the beneficiaries of Merkel’s green energy push.

Our Best Weapon Against Climate Change?

Charles C. Mann argues that developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology – or “clean coal” – is more important than developing renewables:

Conceptually speaking, CCS is simple: Industries burn just as much coal as before but remove all the pollutants. In addition to scrubbing out ash and soot, now standard practice at many big plants, they separate out the carbon dioxide and pump it underground, where it can be stored for thousands of years.

Many energy and climate researchers believe that CCS is vital to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Because it could allow the globe to keep burning its most abundant fuel source while drastically reducing carbon dioxide and soot, it may be more important—though much less publicized—than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come. No less than Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was US secretary of energy until last year, has declared CCS essential. “I don’t see how we go forward without it,” he says.

Unfortunately, taking that step will be incredibly difficult. Even though most of the basic concepts are well understood, developing reliable, large-scale CCS facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly. Engineers will need to lavish time and money on painstaking calculations, minor adjustments, and cautious experiments. At the end, the world will have several thousand giant edifices that everyone regards as eyesores. Meanwhile, environmentalists have lobbied hard against the technology, convinced that it represents a sop to the coal industry at the expense of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind. As a consequence, CCS is widely regarded as both critical to the future and a quagmire.

How You Fund Creationism

Part of your paycheck goes to religious schools:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.” And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

Check out several “science lessons from the Bible” here.

(Image via Stallion Cornell)

Sticks And Stones And “Homosexual” Ctd

Climate Catharsis

Emmett Rensin feels the rise of Bill Nye as a “climate change star” is “deeply rooted in how the left engages in debates over scientific reality”:

Bill Nye calls his new life as a political pundit a “patriotism.” It’s a war he probably won’t win. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can’t convince the diehard climate-change deniers, the Science Guy probably doesn’t stand a chance. But his performance so far hasn’t disappointed, and that’s exactly the point: It’s a performance. That may be exactly what the rational side, exhausted from years of outrage and alarm, needs today. If the deniers cannot be reasoned with like adults, then at least let’s be entertained by the dismantling of their arguments and exposure of their ignorance—if only to make us laugh, and thereby preserve our sanity. And given that reasoning, who better to debate these intransigent skeptics than an impossibly patient ex-comedian who not only made science fun for children, but made their parents laugh, too?

Month: March 2014

The View From Your Window