Category: Decoder Replay

  • Can the world wean itself off petroleum?

    Can the world wean itself off petroleum?

    It has been just six years since the Paris Climate Agreement set a race against time to rein in global heating. But the Earth is sending ever-harsher signals of alarm.

    When the accord was signed, we were on course for global heating of 4°C from the start of the industrial era to the end of this century. Now the figure is around 2.7°C. So something has been achieved, but relative safety comes at no more than 1.5°C.

    There is still a gap between the policies put in place over the past six years and what is needed to achieve that lower figure, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual outlook, published in October.

    Yet we know what to do: substitute renewable energy for the power we get from fossil fuels by mid-century; decarbonize industry and adapt land-use to trap carbon in soil and plants; adapt our means of transport and our growing cities to use less energy; and protect marine areas to enhance carbon absorption in oceans.

    “Two parallel and contradictory processes are in play,” wrote environmentalist and author George Monbiot in a Guardian opinion piece on November 3. “At climate summits, governments produce feeble voluntary commitments to limit the production of greenhouse gases. At the same time, almost every state with significant fossil reserves … intends to extract as much as they can.”

    Everything depends, he concluded, on which process prevails.

    Making strides in renewable energy

    Similar tensions are in play at industrial and economic levels. On the plus side, there is now a surprisingly strong backstory in renewable wind and solar energy, particularly solar, and particularly in the United States, the heaviest polluter historically per person, and China, the biggest polluter in absolute quantities of its emissions.

    The energy crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February has prompted policies that will boost clean energy, the IEA added in its World Energy Outlook, which projects trends out to 2030.

    While the crisis has created a temporary upside for coal, in the long run, production of renewable energy will outpace the production of energy derived from fossil fuels, the report said.

    Another positive sign is the nascent hydrogen industry.

    Widely occurring and carbon-free, this gas could decarbonize long-distance travel and industries that are heavy emitters. Producing it without carbon emissions implies using intermittent renewable energy when it is over-abundant, a virtuous circle.

    However, none of this is yet at industrial scale — barring a few hydrogen-powered trains. Not all claims for hydrogen can be borne out, and it is not yet a viable financial concern.

    There is a significant plus on the political front with the election of Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s next president. He promises to end the record deforestation of the Amazon under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, and is to take office in January.

    But there is no slowdown in fossil fuels.

    Yet investment in fossil fuels still dwarfs cash flowing into renewables, even though they offer economic advantages. The United States, for example, has ploughed over $9 trillion into oil and gas projects in Africa since it signed the Paris Agreement, The Guardian found.

    Africa, a continent starved of cash for energy but with vast potential for solar power, is now under pressure — including from international oil companies operating in its national parks — to exploit its fossil fuel resources just to bring electric power to its people.

    The fossil fuel industry’s damage doesn’t end there. There has been drastic under-counting of carbon emissions, a new tracking tool backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has found. Oil and gas companies have underestimated their emissions threefold, Gore said when launching the tool at the United Nations Climate Summit (COP 27) in Egypt this month.

    “For the oil and gas sector it is consistent with their public relations strategy and their lobbying strategy. All of their efforts are designed to buy themselves more time before they stop destroying the future of humanity,” The Guardian quoted Gore as saying.

    Investing in Africa

    Across the world, policies are in place to invest over $2 trillion in clean energy by 2030, half as much again as today, led by the United States and China, but also including the European Union, India, Indonesia and South Korea, according to the IEA.

    In the United States, solar was already becoming the star of the new energy scene, according to an annual report from Berkeley National Labs. The country added 1.25 terrawatts of solar capacity in 2021. That’s more than the installed solar capacity in the entire world, which reached 1 terrawatt in early 2022.

    That was before the Biden Administration enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which brings extra impetus for the sector. The United States plans to add 2-1/2 times its existing solar and wind capacity every year between now and 2030 and grow its fleet of electric vehicles seven-fold, the IEA said.

    At the same time, Africa is desperate for energy investment.

    To provide access to electricity for its population, the continent would need $25 billion per year, the IEA said in its annual Africa Energy Outlook, published in June. “This is around 1% of global energy investment today, and similar to the cost of building just one large liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal,” it said.

    The continent has 60% of the world’s best solar resources but only 1% of installed solar photovoltaic capacity. This is already the cheapest source of power in many parts of Africa and would outcompete all other energy sources across the continent by 2030, the IEA said.

    The energy watchdog projects that solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal energy would provide over 80% of new power generation capacity in Africa by 2030. No new coal-fired power plants would be built once those now under construction are completed. Half the cost of adding new solar installations out to 2025 could be covered by investments that would otherwise have gone into discontinued coal plants.

    Yet this assessment leaves out the plans for increased oil and natural gas developments on the continent.

    Pressure from energy companies

    A report just published by Rainforest UK and Earth Insight 2022 found that the area of land allocated across Africa for such developments is set to quadruple under existing plans. That report focuses on the Congo Basin, but in East Africa, French oil major TotalEnergies is pushing ahead with a large-scale oil project and trans-continental pipeline in Uganda.

    A first cargo of liquefied natural gas has just left Mozambique after multiple delays caused by an insurgency in the region of the gas field, in a venture involving several oil companies.

    These oil and gas projects would lock the continent into fossil fuels for decades to come and blow a hole in the bid to keep global heating to no more than 1.5°C.

    These energy projects have wide support among African leaders, who contrast the immediacy of such investments and their benefits for their countries with the reluctance of Western nations to put up the finance agreed over a decade ago for energy transitions and preservation of biodiversity.

    African environmentalists question the wisdom of this carbon bomb. But it is hard to dismiss the idea that broken promises by the countries that have caused the climate crisis has driven Africa into the arms of the fossil fuel industry.

    TotalEnergies’ CEO Patrick Pouyanné argues that the world cannot quit fossil fuels before it has alternative sources of energy.

    “The mistake being made now is to think that the solution for the climate is to abandon fossil fuels,” he said in an interview with French TV station LCI on November 17. “The solution is first to build the new decarbonized energies that we need.”

    “If you do both at the same time, what happens?,” Pouyanné said. “Exactly what you reproach us for — prices rise because of the rarity of supply, because the demand for oil is not falling.”

    The monopoly power of fossil fuel firms

    These energy companies have long fought the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.

    Half a century ago, Total concealed a report it had commissioned that clearly explained how burning fossil fuels would cause global heating and the consequences we are seeing today.

    Other oil and gas companies, notably Exxon, acted similarly and responded to their findings by funding climate-denying think tanks and political lobbyists.

    More recently, as the evidence mounted, they turned their attention to lobbying for exemptions, even though the scientific consensus demands that to achieve the 1.5°C limit on warming, there can be no new oil, gas or coal exploration or extraction.

    A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists attended this month’s climate summit in Egypt (see the graphic here).

    Fossil fuels no longer make economic sense.

    The sector is a good example of reality flouting economic theory, which teaches that if a new technology reaches a point where it outcompetes an existing one, the new technology will replace the older one.

    This should be happening with solar versus coal, oil and gas — and indeed is predicted to happen by 2050. Meanwhile, harmful emissions continue to rise.

    Energy markets and the fossil fuel firms themselves do not obey basic economics for the simple reason that they are monopolies with the power to skew conditions in their favor.

    The oil producers’ monopoly, in the form of OPEC, has controlled production to keep prices higher for decades. In the 1990s, the big Western oil companies went through a frenzy of mega-mergers that created today’s top five — Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — whose sheer size gives them disproportionate bargaining and lobbying power.

    Now activists are trying to gain support for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty as a way of reining in the root cause of the climate emergency. The initiative was put before the United Nations in September and the COP 27 climate summit in November.

    “Will you be on the right side of history? Will you end this moral and economic madness?” Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate asked global leaders at the summit.

    On that, the jury is still out.

    Landmark deal opens way for loss and damage fund

    It has taken 27 climate summits, but the COP 27 in Egypt finally managed to pull out an agreement to set up a specific fund to aid poor countries hit by damage caused by climate disasters. The deal was approved on November 20 after a marathon negotiating session.

    The proposal had been fought tooth and nail by the rich industrialized countries whose emissions have fostered global heating, stirring resentment among poorer countries who have suffered the most extreme consequences and have the least ability to mitigate the damage. 

    Details will be hammered out over the coming year, and there is as yet no money in the fund. It was nevertheless a major step forward.

    However, the final agreement failed to call for phasing out all fossil fuels and for warming emissions to peak by 2025, both heavily opposed by oil-producing countries, raising fears that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C by mid-century will not be achievable.

    Questions to consider:

    1. Where is a major boom in solar energy taking place?
    2. What is Africa’s energy dilemma?
    3. Why do you think fossil fuel majors have so much influence?

     

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  • Religion and politics aren’t supposed to mix

    Religion and politics aren’t supposed to mix

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says religion was one topic his family never mentioned at the dinner table.

    That could be because he’s from the Jewish minority, or because the overwhelming Orthodox Christian majority was split into different branches.

    Ukraine’s Orthodox have gradually become more Ukrainian, to the detriment of a once-powerful pro-Russian Church, and the trend has sped up now that Kyiv and Moscow are at war.

    The conflict between the pro-Kyiv Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the pro-Moscow Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) gets lost in the international coverage of the drama on the battlefield.

    But with about 80% of Ukrainians identifying as Orthodox Christians, even if probably less than half attend church regularly, this split between the two Churches seeps into politics.

    Christmas in Kyiv

    The religious conflict crept into the news last month when the pro-Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished, rather than the traditional Orthodox date of January 7.

    The symbolism of allowing Christmas to be celebrated on the date used in the West was not lost on Ukrainian believers.

    The roots to this clash go back to the communist period. While Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it was under the umbrella of the Russian Orthodox Church.

    When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to operate in the newly sovereign Ukraine, but proclaimed its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate.

    Ukrainian patriots objected and said they deserved their own Church. Their rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created in 1992, soon after Ukraine’s independence. It was recognized as autocephalous (independent) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul — the highest authority in Orthodox Christianity — in 2019.

    The politics of praying in Ukrainian

    The two Churches have the same theology, liturgy and even architecture as the Moscow Church. But the Kyiv Church prays in Ukrainian rather than Church Slavonic and declares allegiance to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul instead of Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill.

    Originally much larger, the Moscow Church saw parishes defecting to its rival, especially after the war began. Under this pressure, the Ukrainian branch declared its independence from Russia in May, condemned the invasion and refused to recognize Patriarch Kirill in its liturgies.

    It’s unclear now which Church is larger. But the head of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Metropolitan Epiphinius, told Religion News Service in May: “Every day, Ukrainians are gradually coming to understand which Church is truly Ukrainian and which Church is Russian.”

    The Moscow Patriarchate tried to shield off Russian-occupied Crimea by creating its own metropolitanate (archdiocese) there in June. The Kyiv Church refused to recognize this.

    When Putin annexed four Ukrainian territories in September — even though he did not completely control them — he tried to justify the move in religious terms, calling it a “glorious spiritual choice.”

    Sermons, spies and the Security Service

    But Kyiv increasingly saw the pro-Moscow Church as a fifth column, or spies of Putin. In October, the acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service revealed it had found 33 suspected Russian agents among the Moscow Church’s clergy in Ukraine.

    Some preached pro-Russian sermons, Kyiv said, some had anti-Ukrainian literature and some were army chaplains who passed on information about Ukrainian artillery batteries to Russian agents.

    That’s when the Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished. On December 1, Zelensky upped the ante by calling for an official ban on all activities of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Church in Ukraine. Parliament was asked to draft a suitable law, which may be difficult given the provision in the Ukrainian constitution of freedom of religion.

    In late December, Ukraine refused to renew the Moscow Church’s lease on the Cathedral of the Dormition at Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves, traditionally the center of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.

    On January 7, Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the pro-Kyiv Church, celebrated the traditional Christmas there to show he was the new man in charge now.

    And in its latest turn to faith, Russia called for a 36-hour truce to mark the traditional Christmas on January 7. Kyiv and its western allies rejected this as a cynical ploy, and both sides continued shelling each other as if nothing had happened.

    The battlefield struggle is still the main story, both in its ultimate importance and in the David-and-Goliath story that readers understand. The religious rivalry will always be secondary.

    But these pinpricks on the faith front add up to a new phase in the growth of local nationalism, which helps buoy Ukrainian morale. In hoping to defeat a country he thought would easily give in, Putin has done more than anyone to forge a united and defiant Ukrainian nation.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why do politicians often appeal to religion during a war?

    2. Do mainstream journalists make religious angles clear in a conflict?

    3. When do separate small events add up to a noteworthy trend?

     

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  • Why all the fuss about interest rates?

    Why all the fuss about interest rates?

    For the first time in more than a decade, interest rates across the world are rising from what some say were their lowest levels in 5,000 years.

    You heard that right. The idea of lending money — and charging a fee for doing so — is as old as civilisation. Central banks, the institutions now responsible for guiding a country’s rates, are much more recent. Sweden’s Riksbank, in 1668, was the first, closely followed by the Bank of England in 1694.

    Don’t worry. This spin through history is meant only to show that interest rates have a long, if not always respected, past.

    In our drama-filled present, the world is watching — with interest — where they will go from here.

    So why do interest rates matter? And why now, in particular?

    Why do interest rates matter?

    To vastly oversimplify the argument: lending rates matter because prices matter. And interest rates are the most tried-and-tested tool for keeping prices under control.

    Even those who prefer getting their financial advice from TikTok and YouTube, rather than consulting traditional financial institutions, would be hard-pressed to miss the fact that prices for essentials such as food, fuel and cooking oil are rising faster across the industrialized world than they have in decades.

    This can be particularly hard for those starting their working lives. Nearly half the Generation Zs and Millennials in a 46-country Deloitte poll said they live paycheque to paycheque. Of the thousands surveyed, nearly one-third (29% of Gen Zs and 36% of Millennials) said inflation was their most pressing worry right now.

    The global rise in prices is the result of a perfect storm of factors: among others, a food shortage caused by Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s ports, soaring energy costs and the effects of droughts, heatwaves and other climate-linked extreme weather on agriculture; a resurgence in consumer buying deferred during COVID-19 lockdowns; and a surge in demand for workers.

    And while wages are also rising after years of near dormancy, they are not increasing fast enough to keep pace with prices. So even the most carefully managed household budget is facing new strains.

    That’s where interest rates come in.

    Slowing inflation without stalling economies

    Central banks hope that by making it more expensive to borrow, they can slow the pace of inflation. That they have been able to keep rates at or near zero for so long is because the world was in an extraordinary period of extended price stability.

    There is little that even the cleverest economic steward can do to fix the external factors affecting inflation — Ukraine, droughts, labour shortages — but they can try to put the brakes on internal drivers such as consumer demand.

    So that’s why rates are increasing in most major economies faster than they have since the latter part of the last century.

    The U.S. Federal Reserve, arguably the world’s most powerful central bank, has raised rates three times this year and is expected to increase them again this week. Peers such as the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are following suit, although some are taking a cautious approach because they want to slow their economies without stalling them completely.

    The question is: How far will rates rise and how will that affect a global economy that has been buffeted in the past few years by a pandemic, geopolitical turmoil and a supply chain crisis?

    Consider hypothetical futures.

    Economists say a few possible paths lie before us.

    The best-case scenario is what they call a “soft landing”: interest-rate rises could put a quick end to the price spiral without causing a halt or, worse, a reversal in economic growth. When prices stop rising, rates do too.

    There are potential pluses for the young in this brightest of hypothetical futures. It could allow wages to catch up with costs, boosting buying power. And if there is a halt or reversal in property prices, they could at last have a chance to buy without having to face cripplingly high mortgage rates.

    The second-best scenario is a brief recession that ends quickly and brings with it tamer prices and stable or lower lending rates. See above for benefits.

    “I am not confident in the soft-landing scenario,” said Greg McBride, Chief Financial Analyst at Bankrate.com. “A recession is very likely the price to be paid for getting inflation under control. And painful as recessions are — even mild recessions are not fun for anybody — that is medicine we are better off taking now in an effort to get back to price stability.”

    If interest rates rise too slowly or not enough, this opens the door to the worst of all possible worlds — a phenomenon known as stagflation.

    Stagflation is an ugly thing. Prices soar, economic growth slows and it becomes harder and harder to make ends meet. The fact is that economic growth will slow as rates rise, even in the best of our possible outcomes. But as long as prices follow, we will escape the economic purgatory that big economies faced in the 1970s.

    Now is the time for smart financial management.

    Whatever future lies ahead, McBride said, the best way to ride it out is to practice sound financial management. That applies whether you are a student, just joining the job market or starting your own business.

    “The fundamentals are critically important,” he said. “That is: invest in yourself and your future earning power; watch your expenses; live beneath your means; save and invest the difference; and don’t rely on debt to support your lifestyle if your income cannot.”

    This last is particularly important in a time of rising rates.

    “There are points in life where you need debt,” he said. “You may need to borrow to get through school. You’re probably going to have to borrow to buy a house.”

    But you must never lose sight of “the end game” of paying that debt off, particularly if, as with most credit cards, it carries high or variable interest rates. And don’t borrow for non-essentials.

    McBride said: “Leaning against debt, like a crutch to support a lifestyle your income cannot, doesn’t lead anywhere good.”

    QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

    1. What is stagflation and why is it the worst-case scenario?

    2. How can policymakers tame inflation?

    3. How have the prices for food, fuel and other goods changed where you live?

     

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  • Should a society pay for sins of the past?

    Should a society pay for sins of the past?

    The Church of England announced in January that it would pledge £100 million to address the past wrongs of its historic links with the colonial-era slave trade.

    The acknowledgment by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that it was “time to take action to address our shameful past” was a sign of a growing focus on reparations for the sufferings of slavery some two centuries after it began to be outlawed.

    At issue is the question of whether states, institutions and even individuals, whose predecessors and ancestors profited from trans-Atlantic slavery, owe a debt to the descendants of those who were forced to endure it.

    Up to 12 million enslaved Africans are estimated to have been forcibly shipped across the Atlantic from the 16th and 19th centuries by European colonisers.

    The now independent countries of the Caribbean and Africa that emerged from the colonial era have long pressed for an apology and restitution from those societies that were enriched by the trade.

    Slavery and civil rights

    In the United States, those pressuring for reparations to be paid to the descendants of slaves have highlighted the continuing economic and social pressures on many Black Americans, a century and a half after the institution of slavery was formally abolished.

    The U.S. debate has led to political controversy over who should receive reparations, with some campaigners in California pressing for potentially life-changing pay-outs to individual descendants of those exploited well into the post-slavery era. In January, Los Angeles County agreed to pay $20 million for a beach that was seized from a Black family in the 1920s and returned to their heirs this summer.

    Wider attention to the issue was spurred in part by the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, an African-American man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.

    His death galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement and prompted widespread demonstrations that spread from the U.S. to more than 60 countries.

    Within weeks of Floyd’s murder, anti-racism protestors in the UK had toppled the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century Bristol merchant and slave trader who, until then, was barely known outside his home city. Other monuments to those said to have profited from the trade were also targeted.

    One factor in the wider public’s previous ignorance of Colston and others might be that the history of the slave era had traditionally been taught in Britain and elsewhere from the perspective of the positive legacy of white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, rather than on the perpetrators of slavery.

    Restitution now for sins of the past

    The issue of reparations — should they be paid and, if so, to whom? — raises important moral and philosophical questions.

    Should modern generations pay for the crimes of their ancestors, while others are compensated for wrongs they did not personally suffer? Even the Christian Bible is ambivalent about whether the sins of the father should be visited on the son.

    In the midst of the wider theoretical debate, however, some people have already made up their own minds.

    This month [Eds: February], the family of BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan announced they would pay £100,000 in reparations for their ancestors’ ownership of more than 1,000 enslaved Africans on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

    They also planned to visit the now independent state of Grenada to issue a public apology.

    Trevelyan and her relatives had been unaware of the slavery connection until her cousin, John Dower, uncovered it in 2016 while working on the family’s history.

    Can equity be achieved without reparations?

    Dower acknowledges the role of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter campaign in raising the profile of the reparations debate. But he says it was the publication of a database of slaveowners by University College London that led to the revelation of his own family’s connection.

    He told News Decoder the world continued to live with the legacy of slavery. Dower is a resident of Brixton, a London neighbourhood that attracted Caribbean immigrants from the 1950s.

    “I see the effects of slavery every day of the week in terms of people’s lives and job prospects,” Dower said.

    Laura Trevelyan meanwhile acknowledges she is a beneficiary of the activities of her ancestors of which she had previously been unaware. “If anyone had ‘white privilege’, it was surely me, a descendant of Caribbean slave owners,” the London Observer quoted her as saying.

    “My own social and professional standing nearly 200 years after the abolition of slavery had to be related to my slave-owning ancestors, who used the profits to accumulate wealth and climb up the social ladder.”

    From individual action to a societal response

    Dower said he hoped the family’s contribution would act as an example. “We are giving according to our means. And it will be going to educational funding. We are talking about mentorship and knowledge exchange.”

    The actions of individuals may indeed put pressure on others linked to the slave trade.

    The government of Barbados is reported to have been in touch with the multimillionaire British Conservative MP Richard Drax, whose ancestors were among the prime movers behind the slave-based sugar economy on the Caribbean island.

    He still owns a plantation in Barbados as well as the 17th-century Drax Hall that local politicians want to turn into an Afro-centric museum.

    Barbados and other states in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have long been campaigning for the payment of reparations from former colonial powers and the institutions that profited from slavery.

    It now seems that individuals might set a trend that politicians and institutions would be obliged to follow.

    The reparations debate remains a live one. It raises potentially divisive issues of Black and white identity that already feed the so-called culture wars. In the light of economic turmoil, it can also spur the rhetoric of those who oppose reparations on the grounds that ‘charity begins at home’.

    Those arguing for reparations perhaps have one trump card in their hand. One community was indeed compensated when the era of trans-Atlantic slavery ended. It was the slaveowners themselves.

    Money that should perhaps have gone to the victims of the slave trade went, instead, to those who had profited from their labours.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Should modern generations pay for the crimes of ancestors who owned slaves?

    2. Should people be compensated for wrongs done to their families long before they were born?

    3. If reparations are paid, should they go to individuals; governments; or to institutions that might foster greater inter-community understanding?

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  • Is international strife the norm?

    Is international strife the norm?

    A war that couldn’t be stopped

    When Russia invaded Ukraine, hopes for action by “the international community” were dashed within days when the UN General Assembly failed to pass a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of invasion forces: five countries voted against it and 35 others abstained.

    They included two of the five countries that have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Any of those five countries can veto any joint measure even if the entire rest of the world is in favour.

    But even as the UN failed to intervene in the Ukraine conflict in the role of “the international community” as it was perceived by many during the Cold War, a group of countries — led by the United States but including NATO and the European Union — have since supported Ukraine with billions worth of weapons and economic aid.

    On an anniversary of the civil war in Syria, meanwhile, the advocacy group Amnesty International blamed “the international community’s catastrophic failure to act” for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in that conflict. It was Russian air power that turned the tide of war in favour of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

    Assad might be a pariah in the West. But he was embraced by the Arab League in May. That’s a 22-member organization of nations in North Africa, West Asia and parts of East Africa. It had expelled Syria in 2011 for cracking down on anti-government protestors with a brutality so savage it was shocking even to an organisation with a poor record of concern for human rights.

    If the United Nations is powerless because it can’t reach unanimity of its members and if Russia and its allies have different world views than the member nations of NATO and these views differ from the concerns of the members of the Arab League, what “international community” is there?

    Democracy battles tyranny.

    As for the shared vision for a better world visualized by Annan: is it becoming dimmer or brighter?

    There is reason for pessimism. Around the world, democracy is in decline and authoritarian leaders, such as Syria’s Assad and Russia’s Putin, are literally getting away with murder.

    Freedom House, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation that keeps track of global freedom and peace, says in its latest report that global freedom has declined for 17 consecutive years.

    The United States was once considered a model for others to follow. But Donald Trump, in his four years as president, has encouraged authoritarian leaders. After he lost the presidential election in 2020, he attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

    Trump loathed international agreements and pulled the United States out of the International Criminal Court, the UN Human Rights Council, the global compact on migration and the Paris Climate Accords.

    Every country in the world has signed the Paris agreement, making it one of the few actions that can be ascribed to the entire international community. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, signed the paperwork to bring the United States back into the Paris agreement on his first day in office.

    Can regional organisations come together?

    As far as the more routine use of the phrase is concerned, Richard Haas, long-time president of the New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations until he retired in June, once described the dilemma in unusually blunt terms:

    “The problem is that no international community exists,” he said. “It would require that there be widespread agreement on what needs to be done and a readiness to do it. Banning the term would mean that people and governments assume a greater responsibility for what takes place in the world.”

    In some ways governments are assuming greater responsibility, if not as one giant international bloc than by an alphabet soup of sub-groups. There is the G-7, an informal bloc of wealthy democracies (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan). There is the G-20 of 19 countries and the European Union. There is ASEAN, the Association of 10 South East Asian Nations. There is the OAS, the Organization of American States. Finally, there is the African Union which brings together 55 countries across that continent.

    In theory, they could work towards agreement on what needs to be done to make the world a safe, secure and prosperous place.

    Much of their emphasis tends to be on economic matters, none more than BRICS, an acronym coined by Goldman Sachs banker Jim O’Neill for a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Moves are underway to widen that group and turn it into a counterweight to the industrialized West.

    Could all those groups, working on parallel tracks, result in a true international community? Perhaps the next generation of politicians and citizen activists will succeed where their elders failed.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Can you think of a way to replace the phrase “the international community”?

    2. Do you consider your own country part of it?

    3. Can you think of cases where engaged citizens changed their governments’ policies?

     

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  • When nations go too far

    When nations go too far

    When one nation invades another as Russia did with Ukraine, or when one country attacks civilians and then in retaliation for attacks on its citizenry the other country launches disproportional violence, where does international law come in?

    What good is international law if countries continue to violate its basic premises?

    Even though going to war violates most international law, international humanitarian law (IHL) is designed to establish parameters for how wars can be fought.

    So, paradoxically, while war itself is illegal except for under unusual circumstances such as when a country’s very existence is at stake, international humanitarian law establishes the dos and don’ts of what can be done during violent conflicts. (IHL deals with jus in bello, how wars are fought, not jus in bellum, why countries go to war.)

    The basics of international humanitarian law have evolved over time.

    The development of proportional response

    One of the earliest sets of laws came out of ancient Babylon — which is now Iraq — around 1750 BC. The Hammurabi Code, named after Babylonian King Hammurabi, declared “an eye for an eye,” which was a precursor of the concept of proportional response.

    Proportionality means if someone pokes out your eye, you cannot cut off his legs, hands and head and kill all his family and neighbors.

    Most modern laws of war date from the U.S. Civil War and the Napoleonic wars in Europe. During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln asked Columbia University legal scholar Franz Lieber to establish a code for conduct for soldiers during war.

    At about the same time, after observing a particularly horrendous battle of armies fighting Napoleon, the Swiss Henry Dunant and colleagues founded the International Committee of the Red Cross which lay the groundwork for the Geneva Conventions, which govern how civilians and prisoners of war should be treated.

    The basics of modern international humanitarian law can be found in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocol of 1977. The purpose of the Conventions and Protocol is the protection of civilians by distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants and the overall aim of “humanizing” war by assuring the distinction between fighters and civilians.

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  • Decoder Replay: Gold is valuable. But you can’t drink it.

    Decoder Replay: Gold is valuable. But you can’t drink it.

    We’re marking World Water Week, a gathering in Sweden intended to solve water-related challenges such as droughts, floods and food security. Let’s invest in it.

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  • Is peace in the Middle East even possible?

    Is peace in the Middle East even possible?

    The State of Israel was created in 1948. The key word is created. While countries come into being in many different ways, such as violence, revolutions and treaties, the creation of the state of Israel was unique and has proven highly controversial.

    To understand the chaos that is now taking place in Israel and the Palestinian territories, one needs to return to that original creation.

    The British government ruled the territory known as Palestine under the League of Nations from 1922 until 1948. Already in 1917, the British government issued what is known as the Balfour Declaration which envisioned a Jewish state in what had been claimed a historic Jewish homeland.

    Jewish organisations had argued that the land called Israel has been the religious and spiritual center for Jews for thousands of years. While many countries recognized the new State of Israel in 1948, its creation did not effectively redress the dislocation of those who had been living on the territory that Israelis would inhabit.

    Following the end of World War II, European Jews who had been displaced during the Holocaust flocked to Israel. The United Nations divided the land into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, which further divided the Arab territory into three sections — the Golan Heights at the Syrian border, the West Bank at the Jordanian border and the Gaza Strip at the Egyptian border.

    The creation of deep divisions

    The division gave more than 50% of the land to Israel, leaving the Arabs with 42% even though they made up two-thirds of the population.

    This resulted in massive Arab displacement and is why the Jewish Independence Day of May 14 is followed by the marking of Nakba Day by Arabs, translated as “The Catastrophe”.

    Since Israel’s founding in 1948, there have been several outbreaks of violence between Israel and its neighbors. Among them were the 1948–49 War of Israeli Independence; 1956 Suez Canal Crisis; 1967 Six-Day War; 1973 Yom Kippur War; 1982 Lebanon War and various large-scale Palestinian uprisings known as Intifadas.

    None of these conflicts resulted in reparations for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs displaced by Israel’s creation, many of whom ended up in crowded refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and neighboring countries.

    Further inflaming tensions, Israeli settlers have continued establishing communities in the West Bank, which was conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The international community considers these colonies illegal, and some of the settlers have been found guilty of violence against the Arabs who live there.

    Working towards peace

    There have been several attempts to have peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors.

    The most important are the Camp David Accords of 1978 which was finally reduced to simple diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel, and the 1993 Oslo accords which established formal relations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, giving the latter self-governance over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Recently, there were talks about a larger regional agreement including Saudi Arabia.

    Then came 7 October 2023, when Hamas, an Islamist militant group, attacked Israeli settlers killing more than a thousand people, many of them women and children, and taking over 200 Israeli hostages.

    Israel’s response to the Hamas attack, which it justified as legitimate self-defense, has seen more than 32,000 Gazans killed with over 70,000 wounded, mostly civilians with many elderly and children. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed, including hospitals and humanitarian aid has been blocked. Fighting has continued for more than six months as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas and at the same time free the hostages.

    The emotions behind the conflict are extreme. The Israelis condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation whom they argue are out to kill all Jews and destroy the State of Israel. Hamas, which was the official ruling organisation in the Gaza Strip, maintains that Palestinians have been reduced to living in an open-air prison since it took control of Gaza in 2005 when Israel disengaged.

    Israel and the international community

    The fighting in Gaza has raised many questions relevant to international humanitarian law. South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of genocide. The Court ruled that there was “plausible” genocide and ordered several provisional measures Israel must follow, among them increasing access to humanitarian aid.

    Beyond Israel, Hamas and the International Court of Justice, various resolutions have been proposed before the United Nations Security Council concerning a ceasefire. Although the latest resolution did pass, with the United States abstaining and not using its veto power, no ceasefire has taken place, although increased humanitarian aid is now entering Gaza.

    But the situation of the Palestinians remaining in Gaza remains precarious at best.

    The Israel/Hamas conflict has spread to other countries in the region, including Iran, which has long been a supporter of Hamas. On 1 April 2024, Israeli warplanes destroyed a building in Damascus, Syria, part of an Iranian Embassy complex, killing several Iranian officers involved in covert actions in the Middle East.

    Shortly after, Iran sent hundreds of drones and cruise missiles towards Israel, which were largely intercepted by Israeli and U.S. air defenses. Subsequently, several drones were downed by Iran’s air defense system near Isfahan, but it is not clear whether they came from Israel or other sources.

    What is clear is that there has been enormous international pressure to de-escalate the current situation in order to stop the Israel/Hamas conflict from growing into a regional conflict involving Iran and other countries, or even a more global escalation of violence.

    Questions to consider:

    1. How did the United Nations divide Palestine to create the state of Israel?

    2. What happened to the people displaced in 1948 when Isreal was created?

    3. What kind of compromises do you think might have to take place for there to be peace between Israelis and Palestinians? 

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  • Decoder Replay: Let’s celebrate Mandela Day

    Decoder Replay: Let’s celebrate Mandela Day

    February 11, 1990 was truly a turning point in the history of South Africa.

    For decades the nation at the southern tip of the continent had been pilloried by much of the rest of the world. This was because of its apartheid racial segregation laws that hugely favoured the white population over the far larger and mostly black majority.

    Apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans, the language rooted in Dutch that evolved when the country was a colony.

    By 1989 — itself a remarkable year for the wave of revolutions in communist East Europe — South Africa had made significant steps in its effort to end its pariah status. International sanctions were costing it dearly economically, culturally and in sporting terms.

    As a taste of events to come, the government freed senior figures in the African National Congress (ANC), the exiled organisation waging a low-level guerrilla campaign against apartheid.

    The fight against apartheid

    A favourite weapon of the ANC was small mines. One of them exploded in a shopping mall in the commercial capital Johannesburg just as I had finished shopping there and was safely in the mall’s car park.

    But there was no word when ANC leader Nelson Mandela — who ultimately spent 27 years incarcerated, much of it in an island prison — would be freed.

    Lawyer Mandela entered the world stage with a famous speech at his 1963 trial for sabotage acts against the state in which he stated that freedom and equality were “an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

    Releasing Mandela from prison was a key card that South Africa could play to regain respectability, and the government would play it “soon,” Anton Lubowski, an anti-apartheid activist and human rights advocate, told me.

    Lubowski did not live to see his forecast fulfilled. In September 1989, gunmen pumped AK-47 rifle rounds into him, with the coup de grace a pistol bullet. He was the latest in a long list of opposition figures in southern Africa to fall victim to unnamed assassins.

    Freedom as news

    Knowing that Mandela was expected to be released — his freedom would be a huge news story — but not knowing how or when it would happen was particularly frustrating for a news agency reporter like me.

    Reuters and its rivals compete tooth and nail to get stories first, and to get them right. Being just one minute behind another news agency on a major story rates as a failure.

    What I dreaded most was that Mandela would be released from prison unannounced, just as his ANC colleagues had been. This possibility made it necessary for me and my colleagues to be constantly alert, straining to catch the first authentic information.

    The problem was that, then as now, the pressure to get hard information was compounded by a fog of fake news and hoaxes, saying that the release of Mandela was imminent or indeed had actually happened.

    These claims were typically relayed on pagers, the messaging devices of the pre-smartphone age. Such messages, no matter how bogus-sounding, had to be checked. This took time and energy and shredded nerves.

    Recognizing a hero

    It was one such scare that prompted reporters to flock to an exclusive clinic outside Cape Town where Mandela was known to be undergoing treatment.

    It was then that another problem surfaced: Nobody among us knew what Mandela looked like after his marathon spell in prison. There had been no pictures of him. Would we even recognise him if he walked out of the clinic?

    The hilarious result was that every black man leaving the clinic — whether porter, delivery man, cleaner or whatever — came under intense scrutiny from the ranks of the world’s press assembled outside.

    But on the timing of the release, I had a lucky break. A local journalist friend introduced me to a senior member of a secretive police unit who was willing to share with me whatever information he had on when Mandela would be a free man.

    The police official’s name was Vic — I did not then know his full name. But he was no fake policeman. He introduced me to his staff in his offices, which were in a shopping arcade concealed behind what looked like a plain mirror but was in fact also a door.

    Verifying fake claims.

    All cloak-and-dagger stuff. With enormous lack of originality, my Reuters colleagues and I referred to Vic as our “Deep Throat,” the pseudonym of the informant who provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information about the 1972 Watergate scandal.

    Some time in the latter half of 1989, Vic told me in the less than cloak-and-dagger setting of a Holiday Inn coffee shop that Mandela was likely to be released in January or February of 1990.

    This was not precise information, but at least it was better than anything that I had, or apparently anybody else in the news business.

    In later meetings, Vic refined the information without disclosing the exact day of the release, which apparently was known to just four people in the South African government.

    One of the ways Vic was valuable to us was that whenever a fake claim about Mandela’s whereabouts surfaced, I could call him, day or night, to check. And it was Vic who told me on February 10 that “it looked like” Mandela would be a free man the next day.

    And so it proved.

    Mandela instantly became universally recognisable, South Africa disbanded apartheid, elections were held in which all races voted, the ANC won, and Mandela became South Africa’s first fully democratically elected president.

    February 11, 1990 is indeed a day to remember.

     

    Three Questions to Consider

    1. Why did apartheid last so long?

    2. What was the reaction of South African whites to Mandela’s release?

    3. Can you think of someone today who is trying to fight against an system of oppression?

     

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  • How important could one court be?

    How important could one court be?

     

    A polarized electorate

    The first Italo-American to serve on the Supreme Court, Scalia had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, a Republican president. Of the eight remaining justices, four were appointed by Republican presidents and four by Democrats.

    Both parties recognize that Scalia’s successor could tip the scales in close votes. Cases currently before the Court involve climate change, affirmative action, abortion, unions, immigrants and contraception — issues where the electorate is deeply divided.

    Although the Constitution stipulates that the president nominates Supreme Court justices, Republican candidates for the presidency have said the choice of Scalia’s successor should be left to whoever succeeds Barack Obama in the White House next January. Obama, a Democrat, has said he will send a nomination to the Senate in due course.

    That partisan split can be explained by the weight of the Court’s decisions and the polarization of the U.S. electorate.

    Whereas historically the two major parties have been able to agree, sometimes begrudgingly, on the choice of justices, the process has become far more partisan and divisive in recent decades.

    Unfavorable opinions

     The gaping ideological split in the current Congress and an increasingly vitriolic presidential campaign ensure a bitter fight in coming months.

    The political acrimony was reflected in a nationwide poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center.

    Following recent Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, unfavorable opinions of Court have reached a 30-year high, the survey found. And opinions about the court and its ideology have never been more politically divided.

    “Republicans’ views of the Supreme Court are now more negative than at any point in the past three decades,” it said. Little wonder that Republican presidential candidates are keen to put a conservative in the vacant seat.

    While the Supreme Court is an independent branch of government, its composition is not — and has never been — immune from politics. The nomination of justices is part of the system of checks and balances.

    But at the end of the day, the system requires the willingness of voters and their representatives to adhere to laws, executive orders and court rulings, however deep the political divide. If that faith ever crumbled, the U.S. experiment in democracy would be under threat.

     

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