Borders: Laurie Taylor explores the control of national borders. He talks to Nira Yuval Davis, Director of the research centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London and co-author of a new book which asks why borders have moved from the margins into the centre of political life and turned many ordinary citizens into untrained border guards. They’re joined by Jeremy Slack, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Texas, who charts the way in which Mexican deportees from the United States become the targets of extreme drug related violence upon their return to Mexico.
31 January 2020
Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins: Greed
Avarice, or Greed as we would call it today, now there’s a proper vice, one we can all surely identify with, claim and confess to. One of the defining quotations of the materialistic 1980s came from the fictional character Gordon Gecko, the junk bond pirate played by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Stone film, Wall Street. “Greed,” he tells a dinner of fellow financiers, “for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works”. It’s easy to dismiss this. Your instinct might be to shake your head sadly, or scoff angrily. Yet...
UnHerd: Populism in Italy is far from defeated
But now Salvini has been stalled. Cue much talk about the decline of populism. “Peak Populism?” asked The Times in its leader, in the shadow of his defeat. It is not the first time this question has been asked, of course. In the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s defeat to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, many observers drew the same conclusion; populism had finally been kicked into decline. But then it continued to consolidate across much of Europe, not only at the national level but also winning a record number of seats in the European Parliament last spring. [...]
But is this really the case? There is certainly no doubt that the vibrant, youth-led movement played a role but precisely how much of a role is up for debate. Compared to the last election the Left’s share of the vote only increased by 2-points. The Right’s jumped by nearly 14-points while Salvini and Lega walked away with a new record share of the vote, as did the ultra Right Brothers of Italy who saw their support jump more than four-fold. [...]
If Five Star continue to decline then the centre-Left may be the beneficiary as Italy becomes more polarised between Left and Right. Either way, the defection of Five Star voters to the Left arguably reflected not so much the discovery of a new liberal formula for fighting populism but more simply a governing populist party failing to manage the transition from being an outsider to an insider governing party.
UnHerd: How will Britain cope without empire?
On Friday, we will leave the EU. For the first time in our modern history, the United Kingdom will exist as a union of nations outside of empire. Guy Verhofstadt, the EU Parliaments Brexit coordinator, warned against it. “The world of tomorrow,” he said, “is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order based on empires.” Verhofstadt took the Napoleonic view. The modern European liberal state is only politically viable if it is part of an imperial union of nations. [...]
Now we are leaving. Brexit, the controversies of immigration, and the fraying of relations between the four countries of the United Kingdom, are symptoms of the long and chronic unwinding of Britain’s imperial role and identity. Just as the Union was constructed out of the growth of empire, so its post-Brexit reconstitution will need to evolve out of the making of the UK’s post-imperial role in the world. [...]
The new political era begins with the estrangement of the governing class from the country. Neither a liberal progressive Labour Party, nor a Conservative Party dominated by market liberalism has the necessary politics to forge a new hegemony. Both parties are products of the liberal settlement which favoured state driven, technocratic and legalistic responses to political problems. Institution and nation building democratic politics is an alien concept. Neither has shown the capacity to think big and strategically about Britain’s future role in the world.
Forbes: Is America’s Fossil Fuel Empire Collapsing?
The most ambitious clean energy project in history, Europe’s Green Deal marks the beginning of a new era in clean energy policy. Notwithstanding its challenges, Europe’s plan represents a “broad roadmap” for remaking its entire economy with the aim of creating the first climate-neutral region in the world by 2050. Underwritten by one trillion Euros in investment, the Green Deal calls for establishing the first-ever climate law anchored to the 2050 climate neutrality target. [...]
China is of course the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of cleantech, but it is also the world’s largest carbon emitter. As the world’s manufacturing hub, China remains the largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles, but it is also the top investor in clean energy. In addition to this, China is the world’s leader in renewable energy patents with the U.S., Japan, and Europe lagging behind. Together with China, the EU’s Green Deal could successfully remake the economy of Europe and much of Asia.
The larger significance of a green EU-China partnership is that it would provide the economies of scale and scope that the world desperately needs. Together, China and Europe could make it much cheaper for other regions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to decarbonize. China is already globally dominant in renewables, electric vehicles (EV), energy storage, rail infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), telecommunications, and robotics. Even as the country’s rapidly expanding heft now rivals the United States, its massive capacity for cleantech production could effectively move the world beyond fossil fuels. [...]
At home, the United States faces the real possibility of social and political implosion. Its market-led society has given birth to a kind of corporate feudalism that has effectively nullified its democracy. As Jeffrey Sachs points out, each U.S. election cycle now costs $8 billion or more, and is routinely subverted by billionaires, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and the private health-care lobby. To put this in perspective, the richest four hundred Americans now have more wealth than 185 million of their fellow citizens.
Social Europe: Moving beyond coal: policy lessons from across Europe
The transition from coal to renewable energy is gaining pace throughout Europe. In 2015, the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to announce an explicit end to burning coal for energy production. Since then, an additional 14 EU member countries have announced that they will phase out electricity generation from coal—and a few, including Finland, France and the Netherlands, have enshrined this in law. While its end date of 2035-38 remains inadequate, Germany will also legislate a coal phase-out early this year. [...]
1. Ambition is key: we cannot address climate change or the extremely heavy cost of its impacts without a rapid phase-out of coal. The ambition of announced phase-out dates and pathways must be judged against the backdrop of the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national coal dependence. No matter how attached they are to coal, all European countries must be coal-free by 2030 if we are to keep the temperature rise below 1.5C. While this demands major changes in infrastructure, policies and finance, a decade is more than enough time to make it happen. [...]
5. Gas and biomass are not bridges: the climate benefits of gas and bioenergy are not what they promise—natural gas is still a climate-damaging fossil fuel, which leaks methane, and biomass life-cycle emissions are far from zero. Due to the high Dutch renewables target, no new fossil-gas plants will need to be built there, and the use of existing gas plants will likely reduce by 2030. [...]
The Finnish experience shows that polluters cannot count on compensation. In a significant ruling, its Constitutional Law Committee decided that companies and other traders could not reasonably expect the legislation governing their business to remain unchanged. Furthermore, it ruled that ‘responsibility for the environment’ overrode commercial claims brought forward by the energy companies.
FRANCE 24 English: Math genius Villani frustrates Macron's effort to win Paris
Opinion polls show Villani, 46, a mathematician who turned politician three years ago, is a long shot to win the election in March. But he could frustrate efforts by President Emmanuel Macron to claim the mayor’s office, one of the biggest prizes in French politics, by splitting the vote and handing the mayoralty to someone else. [...]
Villani - a winner of the Fields Medal, often called the nobel prize of mathematics - says if elected he will invest 5 billion euros in a green programme and shift the terminus for long-distance trains out of central Paris.
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