The Empty Gesture of Copenhagen

Our parents and grandparents fell down on the job.

“The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it.” A concise summary of how the world sees this week’s U.N. climate change conference, courtesy of the editorial board of the U.K. newspaper The Guardian.

The paper continued: “In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage,” wrote the Guardian’s editors. The implication is that time is short. And that there’s still time.

Only two sides of the climate debate get covered by the media: corporate-backed pseudo-scientists who deny the greenhouse effect or claim that it’s inconsequential, and liberal environmentalists pushing for the United States and other major air polluters to act to reduce carbon emissions.

Both sides of the “debate” are liars.

The energy company-financed stooges are barely worthy of contempt, much less serious rebuttal. Their claims have been addressed and thoroughly debunked, over and over, for decades. Cut from the same toxic cloth as those who collected paychecks from tobacco companies to testify that smoking was safe, they are to be pitied, reviled and, with a little luck, imprisoned after the revolution.

More problematic—and embodied by the Guardian quote above—is the Big Lie of climate change: the implication that there’s still time to stave off environmental disaster.

“The clock has ticked down to zero,” said Yvo de Boer, the United Nations climate chief. No. That happened years ago.

One interested party has been left out of the news from Copenhagen: scientists. “Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over,” reported George Monblot in the Guardian from Copenhagen. “The years in which more than 2°C [above average temperatures at the start of the Industrial Revolution] of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4°C. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.”

Leading scientists like James Hansen say the maximum safe upper level for the concentration of CO2 particles in air is 350 parts per million. We’re currently at 387. According to a study recently cited in Time magazine, we could ban automobiles and the internal combustion engine and abolish all industrial production, worldwide, and it would still take at least 900 years for CO2 levels to drop back below the 350 ppm tipping point.

Ocean levels will rise an average of at least six to 16 feet by 2100. Goodbye, lower Manhattan. Ciao, south Florida. The northern half of Antarctica’s giant Wilkins ice shelf has begun breaking off; it will be gone within a few years. In the highest mountains in and around the Himalayas, millennia-old glaciers have vanished in the last decade, causing water shortages for hundreds of millions of people in the cities of China, Central and South Asia.

The greenhouse effect is a simple model. The math is straightforward and devastating: so much particulate has been pumped into the air since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, so much energy has built up in the closed system that is our atmosphere, that the damage is irreversible. Human-built technology has billowed more than 200 billion metric tons of carbon waste into the atmosphere; we continue to add another six or seven billion annually.

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years,” said Susan Solomon, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years.”

The idyllic global climate that has prevailed for the last 10,000 years is going to change, is changing, and we won’t be around long enough to know whether it will ever come back. “Human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state,” wrote Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Environmental Institute in an article in the magazine Nature.

Catastrophe no longer looms. Catastrophe is upon us. For example, the polar ice cap is doomed. Summer ice will vanish entirely within 20 years; winter ice will be gone by 2085. Nothing can be done to stop it. It doesn’t matter whether the U.S. and other countries reduce CO2 gas production by 30, 50 or 80 percent. The Amazon rainforest feeds the Amazon River, which by some accounts produces 20 percent of the world’s fresh water; it has begin its death spiral. South Asian monsoons are shorter and arriving later. The American southwest will become a Dust Bowl.

The Greenland and northern Antarctic ice sheets are going, going, gone. Seas will rise between four and six meters above the levels cited above. It’s been nice knowing you, Boston and San Francisco. Thousands of animal species, including polar bears, will live in zoos or not at all. After a certain point, plants themselves will become a net source of CO2—all part of the feedback loop that occurs when you mess things up as badly as we have. Giant storms will rage, famine will spread, drought will be ubiquitous. Or maybe we’ll just choke to death. Whatever, at 6°C plus, the human race is outta here.

It is almost certainly too late to save ourselves. Like recycling and not littering, reducing CO2 output amounts to mere politeness. It’s a nice gesture. But it won’t make any difference.

Of course, the only sane action is to pretend otherwise and enact radical change that might/might have saved the earth. The human race is probably destined for extinction. But we might as well be courteous on the way out…and stop BSing about our chances.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Debate Freezes Out the Majority View: Get Out Now

The headline ran in The New York Times a month ago, on November 7th: “All Afghan War Options by Obama Aides Said to Call for More Troops.” According to White House insiders, Obama considered three choices for digging our way deeper into the “graveyard of empires”: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the occupation forces, asked for 40,000 additional soldiers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted 30,000 more. Other generals wanted to send 20,000 more.

Obama, reports U.S. state-controlled media, has chosen the “middle option”—30,000 more troops, bringing the total American occupation force to 98,000.

Obama is many things: cool, calm and collected. What he is not is unpredictable. Give the man a middle course, a happy median and a compromise to choose from, and he’ll split the difference every time. “Hope”? “Change”? Awesome campaign slogans. The posters will make handsome collectibles.

The weirdest aspect of this Afghan spin game is that everyone is buying into it. Most American voters, after all, are against the war in Afghanistan entirely. (52 percent say the war isn’t worth fighting, according to the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll. 44 percent say it is.) Objectively, therefore, the “middle ground” is immediate withdrawal.

(I don’t know what’s to the left of that. Retroactive withdrawal? We’d need Superman to do his flying around the world superfast thing for that, though, and I hear he got laid off last year.)

The real “middle ground” sure as hell isn’t Obama’s prescription: 30,000 more troops and completely out by the year 2017, by which time there’ll be flying cars and stuff, and he won’t be president anymore, and maybe the U.S. will be just a memory, so he’s writing a check he won’t have to cash.

What a joke! When you ask a bunch of generals and the secretary of defense for advice about a war, the results are pre-determined: more bang bang, more soldiers, more planes, more bombs, more coffins. The amazing part is how far we’ve traveled down the path towards all war, all the time: Obama didn’t even have to pretend to consider pulling out of Afghanistan. He didn’t even have to appoint a token peacenik to his cabinet. He didn’t even have to talk to one.

Which perfectly mirrors the media. You could read newspaper after newspaper, listen to hour after hour of radio and watch day after day of television news, and never once be exposed to the opinion that the Afghanistan war sucks and should be ended yesterday.

“I’ve seen the public opinion polls saying that a majority of Americans don’t support the [Afghanistan war] effort at all,” Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on August 26th. “I say, good. Let’s have that debate, let’s have that discussion.”

Nice sentiment. Very small-d democratic. And if you support the war, it’s essential—no society can win a war without strong support on the homefront. But we haven’t had any debate whatsoever, as notes Steve Rendell. “Rather than airing a full range of voices on the war, prominent media have downplayed proponents of withdrawal in favor of a debate that reflects the narrow range of elite, inside-Washington opinion,” Rendell reports in Extra!, the magazine of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Fareed Zakaria, a Washington Post columnist whose prognostications have consistently proven wrong since, well, always, encapsulated the corporate media’s blackout of antiwar opinions in his September 14th column. He began: “It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option.”

Which is exactly what they used to say about Vietnam. Until we withdrew. And guess what? Nothing happened. Southeast Asia didn’t turn communist. The dominoes didn’t fall. Nowadays, even ex-“sky pirate” John McCain receives a warm welcome when he visits Hanoi. Of course withdrawal is a serious option. It’s the only sane one.

The nation’s two leading newspapers set the tone for the lack of debate in Washington. “In the Washington Post,” found a FAIR study of op-ed pages during the first ten months of 2009, “pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views.”

It’s the same story—or lack of story—a six-hour drive up I-95. “Of the New York Times‘ 43 columns on the Afghanistan War, 36 supported the war and only seven opposed it—five times as many columns to war supporters as to opponents. Of the paper’s pro-war columns, 14 favored some form of escalation, while 22 argued for pursuing the war differently.”

There was only one major exception to the “bring ’em on” din. Times columnist Bob Herbert, said the report, is “by far the loudest antiwar voice in the study period, and the author of the majority of the Times’ seven antiwar columns.”

Alas, as it was in George Orwell’s Oceania—where the “resistance” was a figment of the ruling Party’s imagination—so it is in our own Ministry of Truth-run publications. Even though Herbert’s December 1st column opposed Obama’s escalation, he parroted the official state media line that Afghanistan had once been, in pundit parlance, the “right war at the right time.”

“There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001,” he wrote. “But that war was botched by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.”

Actually, there was no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan after 9/11:

On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He has been there ever since.

There were only two Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan on 9/11. Both had been closed. There were, and remain, hundreds of camps in Pakistan.

There were very few Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan on 9/11—by some estimates, fewer than two dozen. All were low-level. The big fish and the big numbers were and remain in—you guessed it—Pakistan.

This information has been known by experts on South and Central Asia, all of whom—not coincidentally—oppose the U.S. war against Afghanistan. But none of them have ever been invited to the nation’s op-ed pages…much less a meeting with the president.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back” and the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

a.k.a., Return of the Generation Gap

I’m a cartoonist, columnist, writer and editor. So most of my friends are cartoonists, columnists, writers and editors. And a few publishers. One topic towers all over all others in my circle of friends: the future of journalism. Print media is in trouble; online media is ascendant. But consumers don’t pay for online content and online advertisers pay much less for x readers online than they do in print. As NBC CEO Jeff Zucker famously warned last year, the media is “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

But not everyone is worried. Many aspiring journalists and cartoonists in their twenties have embraced the Web. They don’t dread a future without print—they welcome it. If newspapers and magazines are going under, say these e-vangelists, they have no one to blame but themselves. “Considering most political journalism is editorializing disguised as reporting, what would be the big deal,” asks Shawn Mallow, a blogger at Wizbang.com. “Does anyone have any illusions as to which way the New York Times leans in its political reporting?”

At Techcrunch.com Erick Schonfeld adds low quality to the list of old media sins: “The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked…News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck.”

Remember the “generation gap”? In the 1960s and 1970s, it described the cultural chasm between rock ‘n’ roll-loving hippie Baby Boomers and their stodgy Lawrence Welk-watching parents. It came back in the 1990s, when snotty twentysomethings wrote books like “Generation X” and “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids,” deriding their Boomer elders as sentimental, selfish and unaware.

Generational détente has prevailed since then. Gen Xers born in the 1960s and early 1970s are now in their 40s, America’s culturally dominant age group. Sure they’re inheriting the country just as it’s collapsing. But whining is unbecoming when one of your own has just been elected president. Laid-off Xers (many of them canned by media companies) are coming to grips with failure, causing them to go easier on Boomers, whom they’d previously blamed for everything from global warming to blowing the chance for a revolution back in 1968. Stuff happens. We get that now. How’s that alimony payment working out for you?

Besides, we Gen Xers get along with Gen Y types, who are roughly 25 to 35 years old these days. We’re both cynical, distrusting of authority, pessimistic about our economic prospects, and dig a lot of the same music and movies. Generation gap? We’re too cool for that.

Now here come the Millennials to wipe that smug we-still-listen-to-the-Dead-Kennedys look off our faces. Generational demographic gurus William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Millennials as Americans born after 1982—at this writing, people under age 27. Gen X never saw them coming. Now they’re challenging Xers—and the generation gap is back.

This generation gap is the opposite of previous versions, in which young insurgents attacked their elders for being too arch and moralistic. Like Mulder in “The X Files,” they desperately want to believe: their leaders, their government, their corporate executives. And they really want to believe in technology. In my little world of journos, they toil on blogs like the Huffington Post for pennies or nothing at all, perfectly happy because they’re sure it will pay off someday. How? They don’t know, but “someone”—some tech company, some entrepreneur—is bound to figure it all out. When those of us in our 40s point out that there’s no evidence to support contentions such as theirs—my favorite is that online ad rates are bound to go up someday, just because—these Young Turk Millennials mock us as washed-up has-beens.

Young people mocking old people for being too cynical is weird.

According to Mssrs. Strauss and Howe, however, this clash was inevitable. Xers are one of four recurring generational archetypes in American society and in Great Britain before the colonies. (They trace these cycles back to the War of the Roses in 1459.) Gen Xers, they argue convincingly, are a “nomadic” generation. According to Wikipedia: “Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders…” Serious columnists aren’t supposed to quote Wikipedia, but I’m Gen X. I’m ratty. I break rules.

Millennials are a “heroic” generation. They “are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority”—i.e., perfectly programmed to be intensely disturbed by Xers. If you’re the gullib—er, trusting—type, what could be more threatening than to have a generation that doesn’t believe in anything be your elders? “They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an unraveling, come of age as the heroic, team-working youth of a crisis…” That last part is dead on. When U.S. society came apart at the seams in the 1970s and 1980s, Millennials’ Boomer parents smothered and coddled them. Now they’re working for Teach for America. Or at a paid internship. Something will work out. Someone will think of something. Besides, with Boomer parents, money isn’t a big worry.

A recent blog post at DailyCartoonist.com brought it home for me. “I’m starting to not comprehend Ted Rall’s politics at all,” wrote Jesse Levin, almost certainly under age 27. “His current slate of strips basically targets Obama’s lefty ineffectuality. His blog rails against Bush…Things may not be black and white, but where on Earth do ya stand as a political cartoonist? Unless you’re just an independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures, I think Ted’s logic centers are failing on several levels.”

“An independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures.” Sounds like the perfect definition of a Gen X pundit to me. And perfectly calibrated to piss off up-and-coming Millennials.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL