Obama and the ‘war on drugs’

Beer glass

America’s spectacularly ineffective domestic drug policies have not succeeded in any of their aims, except perhaps keeping large numbers of law enforcement personnel employed. They do not help addicts, who would almost certainly be better off treated as sick than criminal. They haven’t reduced the strong linkages between drugs and organized crime. Further, they have helped to create and perpetuate some of the worst racial divides in America: most notably, by imprisoning large numbers of black men for crimes that those with better lawyers and backgrounds would walk away from with fines or community service. A transition towards harm reduction policies, coupled with judicial and police reform, seems to have promise for mitigating both the harmful effects of drugs themselves and those of past drug policies.

Given his background – working as a community organizer in Chicago, as well as his personal experience with drugs – it would be surprising if Obama turned out to be another drug warrior, pushing for abstinence and brandishing harsh jail sentences. At the same time, the drug issue is clearly not one that he can afford to focus his attention upon. It will be very interesting to see whether drug policy is an area where Obama will be able to inject a little sense, or whether urgent demands elsewhere will leave it languishing in the lamentable state it acquired during the Bush years.

Subsidizing Mackenzie Valley gas

Emily Horn in reflected window light

It is hard to read the decision of the current government to support the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline as anything aside from a disappointment. To begin with, it was inappropriate to have the decision announced by the minister of the environment. After all, he should be the one in cabinet demanding that the environmental impacts of the plan be fully investigated. Secondly, it seems inappropriate to offer such aid while the Joint Review Panel is still examining the likely social and economic impacts of the plan.

If we are going to successfully address climate change, we are going to need to leave most of the carbon trapped in the planet’s remaining fossil fuels underground. By the same token, we will need to develop energy sources that are compatible with that goal. At this juncture in history, I can see the case for providing government funding to help with the up-front capital costs of concentrating solar, wind, or geothermal plants. It is a lot harder to see why oil and gas companies that were recently pulling in record profits deserve financial support at taxpayer expense.

Greyhound’s pointless security

On my way to Toronto last weekend, I was subjected to Greyhound’s farcical new ‘security screening.’

People were made to stand in a line in front of a roped-off area. One by one, they removed metal objects from their pockets, placed them in a dish, and had a metal detecting wand waved over then. At the same time, another security person spent a couple of second poking around in the top few inches of the person’s carry-on bag. The person then entered the roped-off area, carrying their carry-on and checked bags with them, waiting for the rest of the line to be processed.

Ways to get a weapon past this system:

  • Get one not made of metal, like a ceramic knife, and put it in your pocket.
  • Put it below the top few inches of your backpack.
  • Hide it inside a hollowed-out book, inside a piece of electronics, etc.
  • Put it in your wallet. With a wallet that can take an unfolded bill, you could fit a few flat throwing knives.
  • Tape it to the bottom of your shoe.
  • Put it in your checked baggage, remove it while you are waiting on the far side of the line.
  • Go through the screening, ask to go use the bathroom, collect your weapon, and return to the ‘screened’ area.
  • Before entering the bus station, hide a weapon outside, in the vicinity of where your bus will pull in. Pick it up before boarding.
  • Use a weapon that is both deadly and innocuous: such as a cane, umbrella, or strong rope.
  • Get on at a rural stop, instead of Ottawa.
  • Get on in Toronto, instead of Ottawa, since they don’t seem to be bothering with the screening there.
  • Etc.

I am not saying that people should actually bring weapons on Greyhound buses, and I am most certainly not saying that Greyhound should tighten their security to make these tactics useless. I am saying that the new screening is nothing more than security theatre. It does nothing to make Greyhound buses safer, though it will add needlessly to ticket prices.

On a more philosophical level, it also perpetuates the kind of low-freedom, security-obsessed society that many people seem to expect. It would be far healthier to acknowledge that the world contains risks while also noticing that countermeasures to reduce those risks have real costs, whether in hard currency or in convenience or privacy or liberty.

Polar bears and climate change

Tristan's friend Nell in a beret

From the media coverage, it seems that attitudes at Canada’s recent polar bear summit clustered around two positions: that climate change is a profound threat to the species, and that the species has been doing well in recent times. While a lot of the coverage is focused on supposedly different kinds of knowledge, I am not sure if there is much factual disagreement here. The issue isn’t the current size of the polar bear population, or how it compares with the size a few decades ago. The issue is whether a major threat to the species exists and can be anticipated, as well as how polar bear populations ought to be managed in the next while.

One quote from Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, seems rather telling:

[Researchers and environmental groups] are using the polar bear as a tool, a tool to fight climate change. They shouldn’t do that. The polar bear will survive. It has been surviving for thousands of years.

This sits uneasily beside the knowledge that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are already higher than they have been in more than 650,000 years and they are on track to become much higher still. In short, because of climate change, the experience of the last few thousand years may not be very useful for projecting the characteristics of the time ahead. This is especially true in the Arctic, given how the rate of climatic change there is so much higher than elsewhere.

On the matter of polar bear hunting, the appropriate course of action is less clear. Hunting in a way that does not, in and of itself, threaten polar bear populations might be considered sustainable. At the same time, it might be viewed as just another stress on a population that will be severely threatened by climate change. Given the amount of climate change already locked into the planetary system, it does seem quite plausible that the polar ice will be gone in the summertime well before 2100 and that all of Greenland may melt over the course of hundreds or thousands or years. I don’t know whether polar bears would be able to survive in such circumstances. If not, the issue of how many of them are to be hunted in the next few decades isn’t terribly important. It seems a bit like making an effort to ration food on the Titanic.

If we want to save polar bears, we will need to make an extremely aggressive effort to stabilize climate. Meeting the UNFCCC criterion of “avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system” would not be enough, since polar bears are likely to be deeply threatened by a level of overall change that doesn’t meet most people’s interpretations of that standard.

The oil sands and Canada’s national interest

This Globe and Mail article on the oil sands and the new Obama administration makes a very dubious assertion: namely, that it is unambiguously in Canada’s interests for the oil sands to keep expanding and feeding US energy demands. It argues that, while most of Obama’s cabinet seems serious about restricting greenhouse gas emissions, General James Jones “may turn out to be Canada’s best ally,” because he supports the continued use of fuel from the oil sands.

In the long run, I think Canada will be better off if most of that carbon stays sequestered as bitumen an boreal forest. It certainly isn’t in Canada’s interests to see a delayed transition to a low-carbon economy in the US, given the extent to which it would increase the probability of abrupt, dangerous, or runaway climate change.

This is a case where short-term economic incentives have been trumping those based on a long-term view and a risk weighted analysis. In that sense, the oil sands boom is quite a lot like the housing boom that is in the process of unraveling worldwide. Canada would do well to accept how newly prominent environmental concerns (coupled with less access to capital) should combine to curtail the oil sands initiative before it becomes even more harmful.

[Update: 8 March 2010]. BuryCoal.com is a site dedicated to making the case for leaving coal, along with unconventional oil and gas, underground.

Obama and Israel-Palestine

Einstein doll

Expectations of the Obama administration could hardly be higher: both in terms of domestic promises (fixing health care, etc) and international ones (fixing climate change, etc). Successfully addressing a good number of the pressing issues facing the United States would make for a very successful presidency. That being said, it may be overly optimistic to hope for progress on all fronts. There is only a limited amount of time even the most energetic and capable administration has, and there is always the need to negotiate with other actors, most importantly the US Congress. In the end, it is better to make strong and durable progress on a smaller subset of issues than to make a weak and easily reversible advance on many more.

It seems to me that one area where Obama should consider limiting his engagement is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The region is undeniably in crisis, and there is most definitely both severe human suffering and considerable injustice ongoing. That being said, it is not clear that Obama could contribute usefully to reducing either, and it is clear that attempts to do so are time consuming and costly, in terms of political capital and energy. In order to get a sense of that, one need only look at the amount of effort some past presidents have put into the region (Clinton and Carter, for instance) and the very limited long-term results from them doing so.

If anything, the current situation in Israel and Palestine is even more fractured, unstable, and volatile than has been the norm in recent decades. In addition, the political leadership of the Palestinians is fractured in two, with Hamas openly advocating a second Holocaust. Given the absence of a situation conducive to negotiations, the prospects to do anything more than somewhat reduce the level of violence are very limited. With that in mind, perhaps the best course for Obama to take would be to send a respected special envoy to the region to try and contribute positively, while devoting his own time and attention elsewhere. Certainly, it makes sense to reiterate the most important points for an eventual resolution (a two state solution, demolishment of many settlements, an end to violence, etc), but pushing to achieve these things within the next four years seems far more likely to be a distraction than a path to accomplishment.

To those who will disagree, I ask what specifically Obama should do to produce outcomes that are better than those that would be achieved through the approach above.

Environmentalism: a faith or a fad?

Guitar and other instruments

If you want to seriously annoy environmentalists like me, there are two assertions that will rarely fail:

  • Environmentalism is a new religion.
  • Environmentalism is just a fad.

The first view generally arises from fundamental confusion on the part of the person making the assertion. Since they are used to seeing arguments about the morality of individual action presented in religious terms, they assume that anything that involves such arguments must be religious. The faulty syllogism is roughly: religion tries to tell me how to live, environmentalism tries to tell me how to live, therefore environmentalism is religion. This isn’t the case – both because the syllogism is fundamentally invalid, and because there are key differences in the basis for religion and environmentalism, respectively. The second argument does have some evidence to support it, but there is an overwhelming case for hoping it proves untrue in the long term.

Starting with the religion argument, the first step is to establish the nature of religion. The key element of ‘faith’ is a willingness to accept something without empirical evidence: whether it is the existence of a god, the existing of karma, or whatever. Religious beliefs of this kind cannot be empirically disproved. By contrast, virtually all claims made by environmentalists are dependent on their empirical correctness for strength. If mercury didn’t actually poison people, we would be wrong for avoiding it on that basis. The only non-empirical claims behind environmentalism are about what has value. If we didn’t value human life or the natural world, we would have no reason to be concerned about pollution or climate change, and we would have no reason to take action to prevent them.

Every environmental position and argument is open to as much empirical and logical scrutiny anyone cares to apply to it. Everyone is free to perform whatever experiments they like and, if those experiments produce interesting or unexpected results that can be reproduced by others, they can expect them to eventually become part of the body of scientific knowledge. Likewise, people are free to argue about the moral and logical premises of the ‘what should we value’ debate.

Moving on to the ‘fad’ argument, it is certainly the case that public interest in the environment waxes and wanes. Sometimes, catastrophic events draw special attention to the issue. At other times, people find their attention drawn to other happenings. That being said, I think Denis Hayes is right to argue that: “If environment is a fad, it’s going to be our last fad.” Right now, humanity is living with the following assumptions at least implicitly made: (a) the planet can support six billion of us, with more being added daily (b) at least for most of those people, material consumption can continue to rise at several percent per year. Even if we came up with some miracle machine to solve climate change tomorrow, some new issue would arise as the ratio between the total available mass and energy on the planet and the fraction used by human beings continued to fall.

We live in a finite world and, in at least some cases, we are starting to brush against the physical limitations that exist. For that simple reason, environmentalism is important and likely to be enduring. Thankfully, unlike religions which tend to get tangled up in their own history (witness all those trying to prove that the Bible is somehow historically accurate), environmentalism is generally scientifically grounded. As such, its content and prescriptions have the potential to improve as our understanding of the world deepens. For that, we should all be thankful.

“Chuckie” Taylor and torture prosecutions

An American court has convicted the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor for committing torture, sentencing him to 97 years in prison. “Chuckie” Taylor led a paramilitary unit during the time when his father was in power. His father is currently on trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. If there is any fairness in the world, “Chuckie” should eventually have some senior Bush administration officials for cellmates

The illegality of torture under international law is unambiguous. It doesn’t depend on which statutes a particular state has ratified; further, there are no exemptions granted for heads of state, senior officials, or people acting in a professional capacity. It certainly is not a legal defence to claim that the torture was necessary for purposes of national security or preventing terrorism.

The environmental and ‘anti-war’ movements

Spiky plant in snow

Historically, there seem to be a fair number of areas of overlap between various aspects of the environmental movement and various aspects of the ‘anti-war’ movement. It seems important, from the outset, to stress that neither is really a unified force. There are a few people who still aspire to the complete abolition of war, while most others have the ambition of either stopping specific wars or curtailing some of the worst aspects of war in general (war crimes, nuclear weapons, etc). On the environmental side, there is arguably even more diversity. People differ on areas of concern (does animal welfare matter?), on the scale of action (local? national? global?), and on appropriate solutions. Overlapping with both camps are some groups (such as Marxists) who feel that changing some underlying aspect of society will address most or all of the problems of war and environmental destruction more or less automatically.

There are a few reasons for which the anti-war movement is a natural fit for the environmental movement. For one thing, they tend to galvanize the same type of people: predominantly students and older people of an anti-establishment bent. More concretely, there is also strong evidence that war causes environmental destruction and that some types of environmental degradation can encourage wars.

That being said, there are also reasons for which the environmental movement might be wise to distance itself from anti-war campaigners. For one thing, there is the danger of getting drawn into debates that are largely irrelevant from an environmental perspective: dealing with climate change is hard enough without needing to factor in the rights and wrongs of the Gaza Strip or Kashmir. For another, a lot of the anti-war movement functions in an extremely confrontational way. Of course, the same is legitimately said about elements of the environmental movement. While such agitation might be necessary to get things started and keep people honest, it tends to become counterproductive once you reach the point of implementing any specific policy.

Finally, there is a bit of a dated quality to the anti-war movement. It feels bound up with Woodrow Wilson, on one side, and the LSD of the 1960s on the other. Certainly, the idea that war can be eliminated as a phenomenon (or even as a tool of policy for rich democratic states) is no longer considered plausible by many people. Similarly, the idea that all wars are fundamentally unjust is hard to maintain given evidence of recent occurrences that (a) could have been stopped through the just application of force and (b) were themselves significantly worse than an armed confrontation would have been. What seems sensible in a post-Holocaust, post-Rwandan genocide world is the advancement of a ‘just war’ agenda, focused on using law and evolving norms of behaviour to avoid unjust wars as well as unjust behaviour in a wartime environment. In practical terms, this involves mechanisms like the arrest and trial of war criminals, interventions to stop genocide, and agreements to eliminate certain weapons and tactics.

A ‘just war’ movement would certainly find areas for profitable collaboration with environmental groups. Many kinds of weapons are of both ecological and humanitarian concern, for instance. What is necessary is a higher degree of nuance and consideration than exist on the activist side of both movements. Hopefully, more mature and sophisticated arguments and tactics will be able to generate progress in reducing the harm from both armed conflict and environmental degradation.

The Economist on the dire state of the world’s oceans

Mosque and power lines

A recent issue of The Economist features a leader and a special report on the state of the world’s oceans. As with a lot of their environmental coverage, it sits awkwardly beside the rest of their analysis. It is astonishing that the newspaper can argue that “the mass extinction, however remote, that should be concentrating minds is that of mankind” while not doing a lot more to advocate effective action. Like most of the policy-making community, they haven’t really internalized the fact that climate change is an issue of over-riding importance, and that nothing else can be durably achieved until it has been addressed. In addition to highlighting the dangers of climate change, their coverage includes discussion of how overfising risks rendering sharks and tuna extinct; how the oceans would require tens of thousands of years to recover from the pollution already released into them; how the Greenland is “on track” to melt completely, raising sea levels by seven metres; and how acidification, pollution, and climate change threaten to eliminate coral reefs.

Clearly, it is one thing to have accepted the collective judgment of the scientific community. It is quite another to have fully incorporated the consequences of that judgment into your structure of beliefs and behaviour.