Month: April 2014

Elizabeth Kolbert reads through the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report:

The I.P.C.C. doesn’t conduct any research of its own—its conclusions are based entirely on already-published scientific papers—so it could be argued that there was no real news in the latest document. The force of the report comes simply from assembling all the data in one place; the summary reads like a laundry list of the apocalypse—flood, drought, disease, starvation. Climate change, the group noted, will reduce yields of major crops by up to two per cent each decade for the remainder of this century. (One of the reasons for this is that heat waves, which will become more common as the world warms, depress the yields of staple crops like corn.)

Since the global population is projected to grow throughout the century—to eight billion by 2025, nine billion by 2050, and almost eleven billion by 2100—this is obviously rather bad news.

John Upton explains what the IPCC report means for the US:

For North America, the report states there is “high confidence” of links between climate change and rising temperatures, ravaging downpours, and declining water supplies. Even if temperatures are allowed to rise by just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 C), which is the goal of current international climate negotiations (a goal that won’t be met unless everybody gets a lot more serious about curbing greenhouse gas pollution), such severe weather is going to get a lot worse. North America’s coastal regions will continue to face a particularly long list of hazards, with climate change bringing growing risks of “sea-level rise, warming, ocean acidification, extratropical cyclones, altered upwelling, and hurricanes and other storms.”

Brian Merchant notes the technological solutions the IPCC report endorses:

Judging by the choices listed, the scientists believe we’re primarily going to need technologies to make our resource use more efficient; to squeeze every drop out of our dwindling water supplies and increasingly stressed crops. About half of the recommended technologies fall into that category, which makes sense: drought and heat waves are on the rise, as are global population trends. Nourishing 10 billion people with rampant dry spells and desertification will be no easy task. So, better water reclamation technology will likely prove important; reverse osmosis processes, for instance, have improved to the point where it can transform wastewater into clean drinking water. It’s the stigma of drinking sewage water that needs be removed, mostly, and to scale up adoption.

Food and water will have to be stored longer, too, and science is tackling some interesting new preservation methods that may come in handy—using pressurization to kill harmful bacteria, for one.

Uri Friedman and Svati Kirsten Narula want to stop waiting for an international response:

[P]reparing for the worst actually presents major opportunities for the private sector and local governments. In its report this week, the IPCC is indeed calling for action—but not in the form of grand international declarations or promises. “Among the many actors and roles associated with successful adaptation, the evidence increasingly suggests two to be critical to progress; namely those associated with local government and those with the private sector,” the report states. The implicit message: Citizens should stop waiting for world leaders to legislate climate change away—because that can’t be done. Instead, individuals and communities need to show entrepreneurial initiative and figure out how best to survive in an increasingly volatile climate.

But what exactly does “adaptation” look like in practice? Americans have long practiced climate-change adaptation—by, for instance, commissioning public art to make hurricane-evacuation routes more visible, systematically planting trees to combat urban heat, and genetically engineering drought-tolerant crops. In many of these cases, people aren’t even aware that they’re “adapting” to climate change; they’re just doing what needs to be done to keep the water flowing or the business growing.

Additionally, Climate Central collects harrowing charts from the report, while Climate Progress shames conservative news outlets for downplaying the IPCC’s findings.

There are reports that the US is considering releasing Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. This extraordinary concession is being made … merely to keep the Israelis from ending the current “peace process”. That’s how comprehensively the Israeli government has the United States in its pocket. Crowley brings us up to speed:

He currently resides in a federal prison in Butner, N.C. Pollard is a Jewish-American who, while serving as a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, passed American secrets to the Israelis. In 1985, he was sentenced to life in prison—a sentence that many Israelis and some American Jews consider excessive, cruel and potentially tainted by anti-Semitism. Now the Obama administration is considering releasing Pollard from prison as an incentive to keep the Israelis at the peace table, according to reports from multiple U.S. and Israeli news outlets

Shane Harris provides more background on Pollard:

This isn’t the first time that Pollard’s release has been floated in the midst of U.S.-brokered Middle East peace talks. In 1998, President Bill Clinton was prepared to release Pollard during the summit at Wye River, Md., but the effort was scuttled when intelligence officials protested and then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet threatened to resign. That reveals the depths of U.S. spies’ animosity toward Pollard, whom many regard as one of the most harmful spies in recent history. Three decades after Pollard confessed to giving Israel a stack of documents that, by his own estimation, would have measured six-by-six feet and stood 10-feet high, intelligence veterans insist that Pollard did far more damage to U.S. national security than is generally known.

Pollard is a traitor. Releasing him as part of a deal to find some way forward in Israel-Palestine would be a low-point in America’s dealings with the Jewish state, and another sign of just how much contempt the Israeli government has for the United States. Koplow fumes:

[R]eleasing Pollard in the context of current negotiations is a terrible mistake. Pollard himself has nothing to do with an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He is not being held by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, his actions were in no way related to the conflict, and his status should be completely unrelated to the talks. That the Israeli government would link his release to its own willingness to resolving a wholly separate issue is shameful.

If Israel does not think that it is in its own best interests to continue negotiating or if it genuinely believes that it has no reliable partner across the table, then it should end the negotiations irrespective of what the U.S. offers since to do otherwise would be to take a concession in bad faith. Conversely, if the Israeli government believes that negotiations stand a good chance of success and that a deal with the Palestinians would be in Israel’s best interests, then it is monstrously dumb to link the willingness to keep on talking to Pollard’s release. Pollard is a factor that has no impact at all on the substance of a deal. His remaining in prison or his walking out a free man will not make Israel any safer or any more trustful of the Palestinians, and so using him as a reason to either keep negotiating or cease negotiating makes absolutely no sense at all from a substantive perspective. Were I the U.S., I would call this bluff without blinking.

Furthermore, if the negotiations are going so poorly that Israel will only agree to keep them going if Pollard is let out, then the two sides stand very little chance of coming to an agreement. That being the case, why release Pollard for such an ephemeral concession?

Amen. The US should never be that weak – even when dealing with Israel. Goldblog also doubts that releasing Pollard would advance the peace process:

Pollard’s release would constitute a political triumph for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it would create feelings of gratitude for Netanyahu among the right-wing ministers in his ruling coalition. But these feelings would dissipate entirely at the exact moment when Netanyahu returns to the business at hand: trading land to the Palestinians in exchange for peace. These feelings would also dissipate, though not quite to the same degree, the moment Netanyahu once again began releasing Palestinian prisoners to the custody of the Palestinian Authority.

The right-wing of the Netanyahu coalition, and the right-most members of the prime minister’s own Likud Party, would like very much to welcome Pollard at Ben-Gurion International Airport, but they will not trade land for him, not one inch. To think otherwise is foolish. The cause of Middle East peace will not be advanced by the release of a hapless spy.

Larison weighs in:

Letting Pollard go early (he’s up for parole late next year) might please some hawks, but it would be a bad decision and one that ought to invite scorn regardless of one’s foreign policy views. Pollard’s release shouldn’t be part of these negotiations, but if it is the U.S. ought to get much more in exchange for giving up something that Israeli governments have sought for decades. Unless the administration wants nothing more than to convey just how desperate it is to get even the smallest concession from Israel on settlements, the deal as reported seems to be a very bad one.

Josh Marshall also wants more for Pollard’s release:

Pollard should be a chit. As I said, he’s served almost all of his minimum sentence. And it’s entirely reasonable to free even the worst of spies to secure critical US interests. This is certainly one. But here we seem even to be considering offering this prize in exchange for inconsequential concessions which can easily be taken back once Pollard is in Israel.

Aaron David Miller gets the final word:

If Barack Obama wants to release Jonathan Pollard because he’s paid his dues, then let him do so on humanitarian grounds. But don’t introduce other matters into an already dysfunctional negotiation, try to justify the release in the name of a peace process that isn’t going anywhere, undermine the intelligence community in the process, and pretend to be pro-Israel by doing something that even the most pro-Israeli president in U.S. history, Bill Clinton, wouldn’t do. Releasing Pollard won’t save the peace process. But not releasing him will spare us all a boneheaded move and yet another tactic in search of a strategy.

#Hollande‘s socialists badly beaten in France’s #Municipales2014 elections – a snapshot of Monday front pages pic.twitter.com/obKyt6E2aW

— NewsBellGlobal (@newsbellglobal) March 31, 2014

They managed to elect the first female mayor of Paris … and that’s about it. Consider:

At a second round of voting on March 30th, Mr. [Francois] Hollande’s Socialist Party lost over 150 towns, most of them to the opposition centre-right. … Among the more dramatic losses were Toulouse, a city in the southwest that it had thought was safe, Roubaix  and Tourcoing, two industrial cities in the north with a deep left-wing heritage, and a string of other cities, including Amiens, Caen, Tours, Reims and Limoges, held by the left since 1912. Even some towns in the Paris region, which had been governed by Communist Party since the second world war, such as Villejuif, swung to the right.

The centre-right UMP was the primary beneficiary of this disillusion, and of a high abstention rate. Overall, the second-round result gave the combined mainstream right 46 percent of the vote, compared with 40 percent for the Socialists, Greens and other left-wing parties. This translates into 572 mayors for the right in towns of a population over 10,000, to 349 for the left, reversing the outcome in 2008.

Robert Zaretsky calls the far-right Front National “the real winner” of the elections:

The party captured only around 5 percent of the popular vote, but presented candidates in only 600 of the 32,000 towns and cities that held elections over the weekend. This indisputable victory not only could lead to the capture of several city halls, but perhaps more importantly, has already redefined France’s political landscape.

He elaborates:

While no one has suggested shooting illegal immigrants from Romania or North Africa, the FN long ago called for the expulsion of three million “illegals” from France. More recently, FN leader Marine Le Pen has spoken about an “Arab occupation” of many French cities, while Florian Philippot, the FN candidate who is poised to win the mayor’s race in the Alsatian city of Forbach, insists on the term “invasion.” In response, the mainstream French right has adopted the same language, sometimes with even greater ferocity. … becoming the leader of the UMP, Jean-François Copé has upped the ideological ante, asserting that the children of illegal immigrants born on French soil should not automatically become French citizens. The so-called droitisation, or pushing to the right, of the UMP’s discourse, is clearing the ground for tacit alliances with the FN.

Dan Bilefsky also examines the National Front’s sudden emergence as a major third party:

“The French Far-Right Isn’t Scary Anymore and That’s the Problem,” declared an English-language blog in the French daily Liberation.

Renée Kaplan, the blog’s writer, noted that many were mortified by the realization that the tendency by the French intelligentsia to dismiss the National Front as marginalized pariahs no longer corresponded to reality. She wondered ruefully: “Maybe this France — a real voting part of which supports a far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-European, nationalist party — actually is France today.”

The telegenic Ms. Le Pen has sought to rebrand the National Front as mainstream by distancing herself from her father, the founder of the party, and a man widely viewed as anti-Semitic. She has even vowed to take legal action against anyone who characterized the party as “extreme right.” Yet the National Front has cleaved to its mantra of France for the French. Last summer, Mr. Le Pen called the Roma community in Nice, in the south of France, “smelly” and “rash-inducing.”

Meanwhile, Gregory Viscusi and Helene Fouquet view the election as “a referendum on Hollande’s almost two years in power,” noting that the current president is the least popular one to hold office in more than half a century. Alexander Stille blames Hollande’s mismanagement of the economy for his party’s poor showing:

The reasons for voter dissatisfaction with the Hollande government are not hard to find. … When he came into office, in May of 2012, he listed unemployment, economic stagnation, and declining economic competitiveness as his highest priorities. France’s economy actually shrunk slightly in both 2012 and 2013, still mired in the recession from which most other industrialized nations have begun to emerge. France’s unemployment rate is now at about eleven per cent, even higher than the approximately 9.5 per cent rate when Hollande came into office. Hollande seems to have tinkered around the edges—fulfilling some of his campaign promises, such as hiring more teachers and increasing scholarships and jobs programs for younger people—but he has lost sight of the bigger picture. He ended up taxing far more than the richest strata of French society to pay for policies that failed to deliver significant results. Hollande seems incapable of articulating a vision of what he wants for France and how he intends to achieve it.

Veronique de Rugy zooms in on how grand gouvernement contributes to France’s economic problems:

France’s tax haul stands at more than 45 percent of GDP-one of the highest in the Eurozone. Sarkozy did implement some small but beneficial pension reforms, which Hollande promptly overturned and replaced with a measly and insufficient increase in the pension contribution period. Not only is the new president unconcerned with the sustainability of the French pension system, but he refuses to follow the example of Europe’s periphery by liberalizing French labor and product markets.

Hollande’s commitment to big government hasn’t won him any friends. The French rank him as the least popular president of the Fifth Republic, and young people are voting with their feet. According to the data from French consulates in London and Edinburgh, the number of French people living in London is probably somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. That’s more than the number of French people living in Bordeaux, Nantes, or Strasbourg.

She has little faith, however, that any party will attempt to shrink the state:

[W]hile François Hollande and his irresponsible and backward socialist policies and rhetoric have accelerated France’s economic demise, in addition to several waves of brain drain, right-wing presidents Sarkozy and Chirac pursued many of the same policies when they were in power. Under Sarkozy, spending on everything from special interests to social welfare went up, while French people were subjected to over 200 new tax increases. While he made some gestures toward increasing the retirement age, he didn’t do much to free the labor market from regulatory asphyxiation.

John Lloyd sheds more light on the domestic scene:

At a time when many other European economies are showing some growth, output in France’s manufacturing and service sectors is contracting. Unemployment is rising, with a quarter of those under age 25 jobless. A recent report showed an uptick in manufacturing, but the country has a long way to go to make up for the declines of the recent past. …   Disenchantment with the EU is now sweeping France. The mainstream parties, where the official position has long been supportive of the EU, are challenged to be more skeptical. The liberal political philosopher Pierre Manent writes that “life for European citizens is determined more and more not by the familiar national debate … but by the outcome of a European process that is much less comprehensible.” This simple truth – that most people are unfamiliar with and thus cannot relate to the forces that govern their lives – has been the theme that Le Pen and her comrades have hammered at mercilessly, finally catching the popular mood.

Andrew Stuttaford looks ahead:

The next thing to watch will be the elections to the EU parliament scheduled for late May. On some projections, the National Front (which is, not so incidentally, committed to taking France out of the euro) will come top in the French vote , which would be another sign that economic incompetence and the stifling Europhile consensus of the EU’s establishment  is not only radicalizing increasing numbers of voters, but leaving them with few places to turn other than to parties that were pariahs just a few years ago.