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Benjamin McKeown

The most important thing about the new NAFTA deal is that it exists - 0 views

  • da has agreed to give United States farmers more access to its heavily regulated dairy market—thus assuaging Trump’s single most frequent complaint about Canada’s trade policies. Canada also signed on to stronger intellectual property protections sought by U.S. industries, and increased the dollar limit on the amount of merchandise Canadians can buy across the border before duties kick in (alas, we won’t be hearing about shoe smuggling any longer). However, the Trump administration gave Canada a win by dropping its demand to scrap a dispute-resolution system in which countries can challenge each others’ anti-dumping tariffs outside of each others’ courts. Overall, the changes are more than cosmetic, but perhaps a bit less than Trump promised when he vowed to renegotiate what he’s often called “the worst trade deal in history.” The deal is designed to benefit U.S. auto-workers by requiring that more of each vehicle be produced within North America to qualify for tariff-free treatment, and that a certain percentage of each car be built by employees making $16 an hour. It curtails the use of controversial investor-state dispute settlement panels. The IP protections are a boost—perhaps unfortunately—to copyright-holders and prescription drug companies. But progressive groups are already complaining that the agreement still lacks mechanisms to enforce labor standards in Mexico, among other issues. But more than the details, the most important thing about this deal is that it exists at all. One of the major questions about Trump’s approach to economic policy and globalization was whether he would simply light trade deals on fire, or use his sometimes unhinged rhetoric as a means to obtain some reforms. In the case of NAFTA, we have a solid answer. Whether you like it or not, it’s spelled USMCA. One more thing If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future. Join Slate Plus Join Slate Plus Tweet Share Comment Canada Donald Trump Mexico Trade
Benjamin McKeown

US trade war would make world 'poorer and more dangerous' - BBC News - 0 views

  • Most recently, China announced new trade tariffs on $60bn of US goods, including products such as liquefied natural gas, produced in states loyal to the US President Donald Trump.
  • There will be great and fast economic retaliation against China if our farmers, ranchers and/or industrial workers are targeted!" he said. US tariffs on $200bn of Chinese imports came into effect last month.
  • n this worst case scenario, the US economy would take a significant hit, while economic growth in China would drop below 5% in 2019, compared with a current prediction of 6.2%
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  • impose a 25% on all imported cars
  • While the IMF said UK interest rate rises would need to rise over the next few years to keep a lid on inflation,
Benjamin McKeown

A complete guide to carbon offsetting | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Carbon offset schemes allow individuals and companies to invest in environmental projects around the world in order to balance out their own carbon footprints.
  • designed to reduce future emissions
  • energy technologies or purchasing and ripping up carbon credits from an emissions trading scheme.
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  • oaking up CO2 directly from the air through the planting of trees.
  • Some people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight
  • visits an offset website, uses the online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus making the flight "carbon neutral".
  • £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset
  • carbon neutrality included as part of the price.
  • most of the best-known carbon offset schemes have long-since switched from tree planting to clean-energy projects – anything from distributing efficient cooking stoves through to capturing methane gas at landfill sites.
  • many people argue that offsetting is unhelpful – or even counterproductive – in the fight against climate change
  • Just as indulgences allowed the rich to feel better about sinful behaviour without actually changing their ways, carbon offsets allow us to "buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction"
  • "Our guilty consciences appeased, we continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet … it's like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it."
  • "a positive approach to offsetting could have public resonance well beyond the CO2 offset, and would help to build awareness of the need for other measures."
  • This boils down not just to the effectiveness of the project at soaking up CO2 or avoiding future emissions. Effectiveness is important but not enough. You also need to be sure that the carbon savings are additional to any savings which might have happened anyway.
  • The carbon savings would only be classified as additional if the project managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings of the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired low-energy bulbs by some other means.
  • The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute certainly, as no one can be sure what will happen in the future,
  • If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset company would cease to be additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset project had never happened.
  • To try and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various standards, which are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly traded or organic food
  • Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
  • One VGS-certified biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there reported a number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant, which was designed to run on agricultural wastes.
  • f we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the projects being rolled out by offset companies should be happening anyway, funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce their carbon footprints directly.
  • Only in this way – by doing everything possible to make reductions everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and offsetting in another – does the world have a good chance of avoiding runaway climate change, such critics claim.
  • some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting carbon-intensive activities such as flights two or three or even ten times ove
  • The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Benjamin McKeown

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXPLAINED - Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization - 0 views

  • More than 150 nations signed it back in December 1997 at a meeting in Kyoto.
  • eorge W. Bush was installed as President soon afterwards, and announced that he was pulling the US out of the deal altogether. Since the US is the source of a quarter of emissions of greenhouse gases that was a big blow, but the other nations decided to carry on and they finally reached agreement in Marrakech in November 2001.
  • ndustrialised nations have committed themselves to a range of targets to reduce emissions between 1990
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  • he base year, and 2010.
  • an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia.
  • European Union have agreed to share out their entitlement
  • atification of the treaty in national legislatures.
  • “flexibility mechanisms”
  • meet some targets by encouraging the natural environment to soak up more CO2 rather than by cutting emissions.
  • carbon sinks”
  • qualify for carbon credits by planting forests that soaked up CO2.
  • It was finally agreed that countries will be able to claim some carbon credits for planting forests in developing countries. And they will also be able to allow countries to claim credit for activities such as soil conservation, which will allow more carbon to be soaked up in soils.
  • carbon trading
  • But the fear is that some countries may find themselves with spare credits to sell just because their economies have slowed down, which would undermine the whole purpose of the protocol.
  • hot air”. Japan, Canada and perhaps others would like to buy up Russia’s spare permits.
  • But sceptics still see hot-air trading as a Trojan Horse for undermining the protocol.
  • lean Development Mechanism. This allows industrialised countries to claim credit for various activities in developing countries. It could become a major engine for getting clean energy technologies into poorer countries, so heading them off the dirty path to industrialisation that the rich nations took.
  • And the rules are biased towards small energy projects – solar cell systems, for exampl
  • he protocol allows industrialised countries to plant “carbon sink” forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.
  • The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets
  • it was intended to cut emissions by industrialised countries by an average of slightly over 5 per cent by the year 2010
  • hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks.
  • at perhaps 1.5 per cen
  • Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming? They will hardly scratch the surface. T
  • say it will buy us 10 years at most
  • . A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today’s levels.
  • Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.
  • The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century’s time, not today.
  • CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it’s there it is many times more potent.
  • This “hundred-year rule” has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.
  • the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne.
  • Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.
  • Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels – the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn’t affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.
Benjamin McKeown

Kayapo Courage - 0 views

  • five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
  • 9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
  • Kendjam,
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  • Xingu,
  • itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
  • shorts
  • kids wearing only
  • ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
  • Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
  • ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
  • Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
  • chief, Pukatire,
  • wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
  • English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
  • dispute about logging.
  • Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
  • a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
  • ngobe, or men’s house
  • shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
  • crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
  • loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
  • soccer ball
  • swallows; o
  • kingbird
  • evening baths,
  • caimans
  • persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
  • In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
  • 1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
  • Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
  • organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
  • even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
  • ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
  • the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
  • enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
  • 1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
  • Kararaô Dam
  • Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
  • the Altamira Gathering.
  • Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
  • e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
  • shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
  • hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
  • based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
  • 1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
  • Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
  • the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
  • At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
  • 400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
  • a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
  • . The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
  • n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
  • two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
  • a bow and arrows over his shoulder
  • Okêt a shotgun.
  • It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
  • plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
  • peacock bass and piabanha.
  • Bic lighters a
  • freshly whittled skewers.
  • flashlight.
  • he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
  • his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
  • Portuguese from missionaries
  • the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
  • “Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
  • “I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
  • You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
  • construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
  • he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
  • on the Xingu
  • Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
  • the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
  • nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
  • ho still wear the lip disk
  • carried a wooden war club,
  • woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
  • “I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
  • the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
  • money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
  • he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
  • More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
  • specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
  • pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
  • In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
  • FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
  • , 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
  • painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
  • chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
  • Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
  • In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
  • now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
Benjamin McKeown

Frozen conflict | The Economist - 0 views

  • IN 2007 a Russian-led polar expedition, descending through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean in a Mir submarine, planted a titanium Russian tricolour on the sea bed 4km (2.5 miles) beneath the North Pole. “The Arctic has always been Russian,
  • Denmark has staked a claim to the North Pole, too. On December 15th it said that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), some 900,000 square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland belongs to it (Greenland is a self-governing part of Denmark).
  • Canada, which plans to assert sovereignty over part of the polar continental shelf (
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  • he prize for these countries is the mineral wealth of the Arctic, which global warming may make more accessible.
  • an eighth of the world’s untapped oil
  • perhaps a quarter of its gas.
  • Drilling for oil and gas there is extremely expensive, and falling oil prices have made the economics of Arctic energy even less favourable. This gives would-be prospectors an interest in co-operating, not in adding to the risks and costs.
  • The melting of the summer sea ice has also opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe via the top of the world; 71 cargo ships plied the north-east passage last summer, up from 46 in 2012
  • Russia
  • carried out extensive combat exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the cold war
  • re-equipping old Soviet bases there and in July tested the first of its new-generation rockets,
  • Sweden spent part of the summer searching for a Russian submarine that it suspected of slipping into its territorial waters.
  • countries may control an area of seabed if they can show it is an extension of their continental shelf.
Benjamin McKeown

Food, energy and water: the politics of the nexus | Jeremy Allouche | Science | The Gua... - 0 views

  • Jeremy Allouche
  • In a paradoxical way, this was the first time that the business community came to realise the limits to growth.
  • modellers, farmers, and civil engineers have known about these inter-relationships for a long time.
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  • systems approach, where the interactions between different sectors are modelled as global and regional flows, ignoring day-to day realities, local priorities and needs; • A decision-making tool based on these interactions, which provides an economic valuation of these resources and a market mechanism to efficiently allocate them.
  • It treats the trade-offs between human needs for water, energy and food as a perfect equilibrium model, in which resource allocation can be decided.
  • This can encourage the commodification of resources, downplaying environmental externalities, such as biodiversity and climate change, as well as poverty alleviation needs.
  • The villagers affected by the Rasi Salai Dam are now experiencing water scarcity after losing these wetlands.
  • Originally, the government claimed that the dam would provide water for 5,500 hectares of land
  • look
  • This example highlights how elements of the nexus, whether food, water or energy security, take on different meanings at different levels of analysis, from the global to the local.
  • optimisation;
  • A different framing of the nexus is required: one which recognises that global priorities may not reflect local concerns; and that resource allocations are political decisions, which need to be decided through more open and transparent decision making. The nexus must become more inclusive, so that its interrelationships can be grounded in local realities and human needs.
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