Like I've Been Saying . . .

Looks like Hamilton Nolan and I agree:

There are two real issues of primary importance facing America and the world today—two issues that lie at the foundation of many others. Two issues which must be addressed in a meaningful way if we hope to live in a just and thriving nation in the long term. They are economic inequality, and climate change.

Update (December 4):  Paul Krugman makes it clear that if nothing gets done about climate change, the Republican Party is to blame.

Update (December 7):  Chris Hedges calls the climate summit a charade.

We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.

Also, Steven Thrasher writes about a deliberate war on the poor.

The disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, and they can’t be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom. The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.

Update (December 9):  ExxonMobil funded climate disinformation for years, but now Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post reports:

With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.

Update (April 2, 2017):  ExxonMobil defends the climate agreement to a hostile administration.

The Paris accord is “an effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change,” a senior Exxon official wrote in a letter to the president’s special assistant for international energy and the environment. “We welcomed the Paris Agreement when it was announced in December 2015 and again when it came into force in November 2016,” Peter Trelenberg, Exxon’s manager for environmental policy, wrote to the White House.

Update (April 8, 2018):  Turns out Shell is another oil company that suppressed warnings about climate change for decades.

The Problem of Exceptionalism

Patrick Smith finds hope in the Princeton University student protests over Woodrow Wilson's racism--an act to recover a past that has been buried in silence.

The policy cliques and corrupt, know-nothing pols who now run Washington are allergic to history—and try to keep us away from it at all cost—for a very good reason. History is a weapon. In our past—another distinction I have made before—there is mythology and there is history. When you listen to these people, you hear the sound of mythology, of American exceptionalism. We need the sound of history now

Increasing Weather Disasters

A study by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction shows that 90 percent of major natural disasters over the past 20 years consist of floods, storms, heatwaves, drought and other weather related events. An average of 335 disasters per year from 2005 to 2015 is double the average over 1985 to 1995. Events since 1995 have killed over 600,000 people with over 4 billion impacted in some way at a cost of US$ 5 to 6 trillion.

Update (July 8, 2018):  As dramatic rescue efforts are underway for a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave by flash floods, there's also the news that "unprecedented" rain has lead to dozens of deaths in Japan. Humans have amazing ingenuity, yet we are still humbled by the forces of nature.

Climate and Peace

Jason Box and Naomi Klein argue that addressing climate change is the best hope for peace.

[M]any factors contributed to Syria’s instability. The severe drought was one, but so were the repressive practices of a brutal dictator and the rise of a particular strain of religious extremism. Another big factor was the invasion of Iraq, a decade ago. And since that war—like so many before it—was inextricable from the West’s thirst for Iraqi oil (warming be damned), that fateful decision in turn became difficult to separate from climate change. ISIS, which has taken responsibility for the attacks in Paris, found fertile ground in this volatile context of too much oil and too little water.

[C]limate change leads to wars and economic ruin. It’s time to recognize that intelligent climate policy is fundamental to lasting peace and economic justice.

Antibiotic Resistance

When random mutations in organisms produce traits that enhance the reproductive success of the organism, then "natural selection" allows those traits to spread in a population. A new mutation, called the MCR-1 gene, gives bacteria resistance to colistin, the antibiotic of "last resort". Especially troubling is that the resistance can be shared among different bacteria species. Timothy Walsh is a co-author of the study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

If MCR-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era.

Update (December 9):  A report from the United Kingdom warns about the global overuse of antibiotics on farm animals.

Paris

No one condones a terrorist attack. And yet, it's difficult to have a rational discussion about what to do. There is no simple answer--we can't just bomb them out of existence. Emotion gets in the way of fact, and I wasn't even aware of the attack in Beirut just the day before Paris. Yet only the latter is worthy of a national TV tribute. And it's rather jarring to watch that and be yanked right back into the comedy afterward.

There's a long and complicated history that we ignore at our peril. Ben Norton offers some perspective.

It was the U.S.-led war in and occupation of Iraq that created the conditions of extreme violence, desperation, and sectarianism in which al-Qaeda metastasized, spreading worldwide. The West, in its addiction to militarism, played into the hands of the extremists, and today we see the rotten fruit borne of that rotten addiction: ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of Western imperialism.

The Paris attacks, as horrific as they are, could be a moment to think critically about what our governments are doing both abroad and here at home. If we do not think critically, if we act capriciously, and violently, the wounds will only continue to fester. The bloodletting will ultimately accelerate.

Patrick Smith:

Yes, what has just occurred in Paris is an affront to all of us. But to invoke universal values is to sustain the error of understanding, of recognition, of acknowledgement, that lies at the heart of all this incessant hatred, attack and counterattack. ... [T]here is little ground to claim that they have determined how we have acted in the Middle East and treated its people

Update (November 16):  Paul Rosenberg criticizes Republican Presidential candidates for talking about a "clash of civilizations".

It’s war of barbarism against civilization—except for one thing. We started it.

Update (November 17):  Smith follows up with more history to argue against the "decontextualization" Richard Perle advocated.

This is where the Richard Perle ethos gets us. Over time it leaves us ignorant such that we grasp less and less of the world around us. We do not know how to behave properly.

Ultimately Middle Eastern societies must be left to find their own ways, each one by itself. It is not an original thought. The West’s task, speaking very broadly, is to stop doing a lot of what it has been doing and start doing things it has neglected. In the latter category this means an emphatically disinterested effort—a long campaign, the kind that would be a feature of our time the way colonization was—dedicated to repairing the political, social, economic and cultural damage inflicted in the past.

Update (November 18):  In formulating a response (not just a reaction), we need to take a hard look at ourselves. Ben Norton reviews the history of U.S. intervention. Daniel Denvir examines our dark side of racism and rage.

ISIS and right-wing Westerners seek a similar goal of a world starkly divided between Muslim and Christian. Between us and them. An attack by one side always props up the other, a violent feedback loop that pushes each side away from one another and into fortified camps, stigmatizing diversity and making it dangerous. It’s a war where both opposing sides are constantly winning.

Here's one view of the complexity:

Update (November 30):  Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn describes the Iraq War as "a huge error" that lead to the creation of ISIS.

Update (December 3):  Thomas Piketty makes a connection between economic inequality and terrorism.

Update (December 12):  In an interview, Noam Chomsky discusses the Paris attack. "If you want to end [terrorism], the first question you ask is: why did it take place?"

Paul Rosenberg notes that the U.S. tops the list for the number of armed conflicts in the past two hundred years--most of them undeclared interventions. And we're paid a price for our addiction to war as the Hart-Rudman Commission found out in the late 90s. According to Senator Gary Hart, “We got a terrific sense of the resentment building against the U.S. as a bully, which alarmed us.” Those Commission reports were ignored in 2001.

There was, after all, another way. 9/11 was not an act of war. It was a crime. And we could have treated it as such. Doing so would have meant strengthening and intensifying international law, as a means for putting all those responsible for 9/11 on trial. A trial in which the utter innocence of thousands of victims would have shamed and humiliated the perpetrators so thoroughly that no one would ever think to follow them again. The exact opposite of a war in which we created thousands of innocent victims of our own, completely destroying the moral foundations of superiority that Kennan’s [containment strategy] rightly saw as fundamental.

This was the low-conflict path we turned our backs on. Rather than taking a path that has increasingly pitted security against individual rights and freedom, we could have taken that path, instead–a path that strengthened both. What we failed to do was to learn from our past mistakes—and that can only be done by those who are confident enough to admit to past mistakes, face up to them and make the necessary changes. We missed our chance to do this after 9/11, and the devastating attacks on Paris are just the most obvious bitter fruits of that missed chance. The 134 secret wars Turse wrote about are less obvious to us, perhaps, but no less bitter to those who die in them.

If we were really as good as we claim to be, wouldn’t we be good enough to face up to our mistakes—and begin to act to change them? If we can answer that one question, face that one challenge, then all the rest of them—however difficult—will be easy in comparison. Because we will have reclaimed our moral center, finally, after all these years.

Up One Degree Celsius and Rising

Britain's Met Office announced that the temperature rise due to industrialization will exceed one degree Celsius this year. And, according to the International Energy Agency, we're not doing enough to stay under the two degree target.

There are unmistakable signs that the much-needed global energy transition is underway, but not yet at a pace that leads to a lasting reversal of the trend of rising CO2 emissions.

Climate Change Will Increase Poverty

The World Bank estimates that 702 million people (9.6 percent of the world's population) lives in poverty--down from 902 million (12.8 percent) in 2012. But a World Bank report, Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty, warns that that progress might end.

The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climateinformed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate propoor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones:

Climate-related shocks and stresses, already a major obstacle to poverty reduction, will worsen with climate change.

In the short run, rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most (but not all) consequences of climate change on poverty. Absent such good development, climate change could result in an additional 100 million people living in extreme poverty by 2030.

Immediate mitigation is required to remove the long-term threat that climate change creates for poverty eradication. Mitigation need not threaten short-term progress on poverty reduction provided policies are well designed and international support is available.

Keystone XL Rejected

President Obama has decided that building the bitumen pipeline is not in the national interest of the US. This is a bit of good news heading into the Paris climate conference.

Update (November 9):  Edward Rubin notes that the real reason for stopping the pipeline is that we must stop increasing the consumption of fossil fuels.

Thirty-five Year Wage Trend

The Economic Policy Institute shows that the top 0.1 percent aren't quite back to their peak, but their income was up 8.9 percent in 2014. And over the past 35 years, they've done a lot better than the rest of us.