Category Archives: Web Article Review

Indonesia’s peat fires

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In Indonesia, land is burned seasonally to clear it for agriculture, and particularly for palm plantations which supply cooking oil used throughout Asia. Burning vegetation creates a smoky mess in the best of times (I have personal experience with this in Thailand), but what makes it much, much worse in Indonesia is the presence of organic soils that can also catch on fire and create an unbelievable amount of smoke. My family and I, including a newborn at the time, were exposed to this in Singapore in 2013, and we couldn’t see neighboring buildings out the window (buildings are close together in Singapore) when it was at its worst. 2013 was a bad year, but there have been even worse ones since then.

The media tends to blame the situation on small-scale farmers who are ignorant of modern practices. That might be part of the issue, but there are also huge international investors driving this trend to make profits on the palm oil, including investors in Singapore where the government routinely complains about “trans-boundary haze”.

This is a crisis of vast proportions – Greenpeace Indonesia identified a total burned area of 600,000 hectares of peatland last year. Indonesia’s fire toll during the severely dry years of 2015 and 2019 was even worse, at times emitting more carbon in a day than the entire U.S. economy did, according to the World Resources Institute. The dense haze emitted from these peatland fires contains smoke particles microscopic enough to travel from the lungs into the bloodstream, causing stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. A 2022 university study calculated that pollution from peatland fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan during the five years from 2013 caused annual premature deaths of about 33,100 adults and 2,900 infants along with thousands of hospital admissions and severe asthma cases in children.

In tracing the finances that flow to Indonesia’s fire-plagued plantation giants, one name that frequently surfaces is the Sinar Mas Group. Connected to many pulpwood plantations with the largest burned areas in Indonesia, the total burned area across all Sinar Mas linked pulp concessions was 314,200 hectares during 2015–2019.

Independent analyst Profundo, a research organization specializing in financial and corporate analysis, traced the funds received by Sinar Mas’s numerous companies from 2015 to 2023. In total, according to Profundo’s findings, the group’s companies obtained approximately $40 billion in credit deals from global financial institutions, with major creditors from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. In terms of shareholdings, investors from the United States have put $504 million into Sinar Mas Group since 2022, alongside investors from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the EU with shareholdings worth $407 million.

The Diplomat

You read that right – more carbon emissions on a bad day than the U.S. economy, which I think is still the world’s largest emitter! And the ecological destruction and air pollution would be horrific enough without the carbon emissions on top. This is one of the biggest issues in the world that doesn’t get much attention (a general pattern for Indonesia, which I have also said is the world’s largest and most important country that at least the U.S. general public has barely even heard of.) The palm oil is a useful product though that the region is not about to give up (this would be like the U.S. giving up, I don’t know, french fries?) so the solution has to be using better agricultural practices to reduce the impact, and this of course might lower profits for rich and powerful people and/or raise prices for consumers.

“arrogant” foreign policy

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I would tend to agree with Jeffrey Sachs’s description below of U.S. foreign policy as “arrogant”.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

U.S. foreign policy has been a playground bully. Nobody likes or trusts a bully, but they fear and respect the bully. This works okay for the bully as long as they are perceived as strong. But as soon as they are perceived as weak or at least weaker compared to competitors, they have a problem. They can’t keep others in line through fear or respect any more, and they don’t have friendship or trust to fall back on.

It’s hard to imagine repairing the relationship with Russia right now. Their action in invading a sovereign neighbor cannot be excused no matter what we have done. We can manage the relationship to try to make it less bad going forward, and we can try to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them with China and other (relatively, perceived to be) increasingly powerful countries. We can first put policies in place that can build trust over time. Nobody will trust as at first, but if our actions were to match our promises over a period of decades we could slowly rebuild our relationships. Here are a few ideas to bandy about: (1) a no-first-strike nuclear policy, (2) serious commitments to nuclear weapons reductions, and re-entering or re-establishing of treaties and agreements with other countries that have or potentially seek nuclear weapons, (3) nuclear power for countries that want it, in exchange for a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons and submission to a strict inspection regime, (4) a commitment not to invade sovereign UN member states ever again without a Security Council resolution, (5) a commitment not to interfere in other countries’ elections or seek “regime change” ever again through covert action, only through public diplomatic channels. There are plenty of things I leave off here (biological weapons and pandemic preparedness, food security, carbon emissions to rattle off just a few) but these are some basic war-and-peace ideas, and we need peace to have a shot at solving the other complex problems the world faces right now. Getting politicians to make these commitments or similar ones would be hard, and sticking with them for decades would be harder, but it needs to be done.

flame-throwing robot dogs

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I was skeptical at first, but apparently there are a number of flame-throwing robot dogs that you can buy. Flame throwers have legitimate uses in agriculture, forestry, and ecological restoration, and are very lightly regulated. These seem dangerous, but then again the backpack-mounted alternatives seem very, very dangerous (basically, a backpack full of gasoline or napalm). There are links to a number of questionable videos in the article I have linked to above, but the one I link to below is an actual manufacturer of these things.

Youtube

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.’ (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451).

trans-boundary organized crime

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This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is true: Chinese gangsters with ties to the Chinese government are in league with Mexican gangsters to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, and in at least some cases enslave those smuggled people on farms operating in the United States. Relatedly, Chinese gangsters with ties to the Chinese government are known to be laundering drug money through Canadian banks including TD (i.e. Toronto Dominion) bank.

None of this should be an excuse for racism of course. The gargantuan and inasatiable U.S. demand for drugs is the root driver of these problems, criminalization of said drugs creates the profit incentive, and organized crime exists to exploit opportunities like this while minimizing risks (to itself). Organized crime tends to be ethnicity based because recent immigrant groups have social ties to each other and to people and organizations in their countries of origin. And particularly in the case of human trafficking, it is the immigrants themselves who are typically exploited by criminals belonging to their own ethnic group. The risk of violence to those of us not directly involved would seem to be low, other than people who get caught up in the illegal drug marketplace in one way or another.

Nonetheless, all this needs to be smashed. And it can be smashed by traditional law enforcement, inside our traditional borders. Human trafficking and borderline or outright slavery in particular just have to be smashed without mercy. The Oklahoma story above is particularly disturbing where it sounds like law enforcement knew for quite a while that armed guards were confining and forcing people to work against their will, within the boundaries of the United States.

the apocalypse

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This article by Schlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli prime minister, points out that there are religious fundamentalists among Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike who all think that ushering in a civilization-destroying war is a good idea. And in fact, some of these people are actively hoping that the current conflict in the middle east is the early stage of this war, and even actively working to make it the first stage of such a war. I’m all for freedom to follow one’s religious beliefs and practices, but let’s stop pretending that electing people who hold violent, homicidal, suicidal, and/or genocidal beliefs to public office could ever be a good idea.

the U.S. constitution’s resilience? or rigidity?

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Flexible things can bend without breaking, while strong, rigid things can withstand a lot of force up to a point, then break catastrophically. Is the U.S. Constitution the latter? This Lawfare podcast on the Constitution made some interesting points, and I wish they would post a transcript.

  • The U.S. Constitution is just outdated. Countries around the world looking to write a new constitution used to look to the U.S. Constitution as a model, but this is no longer the case. One U.S. Supreme Court justice in an interview suggested South Africa’s latest constitution as a good modern model.
  • Constitutions around the world are amended on average about every 20 years. Some even lay out regular time tables for review and updating.
  • The U.S. Constitution is the world’s hardest constitution to amend. Newer constitutions tend to make the most important rights hard to amend, but less important details easier to amend, with a few tiers of how large a majority is needed to approve various proposed amendments.
  • The U.S. Constitution mostly lays out negative rights, in other words things the government can’t do to you like take away your gun. Newer constitutions include positive rights, like a right to health care or a clean environment.
  • Interestingly, individual U.S. state constitutions are much more modern in terms of rights, and many are updated regularly.

The Congressional Research Service did a report in 2016 on the constitutional convention process, which is one way the constitution can be amended, theoretically by the states and outside the direct control of Congress. Here are a couple interesting paragraphs:

From the 1960s through the early 1980s, supporters of Article V conventions mounted vigorous unsuccessful campaigns to call conventions to consider then-contentious issues of national policy, including a ban on school busing to achieve racial balance, restrictions on abortions, apportionment of state legislatures, and, most prominently, a requirement that the federal budget be balanced, except in wartime or other extraordinary circumstances. Although they came close to the constitutional requirement, none of these campaigns attained applications from 34 states.

With the failure of these efforts, interest in the Article V Convention alternative declined for more than 20 years, but over the past decade, there has been a gradual resurgence of attention to and support for a convention. Advocacy groups across a broad range of the political spectrum have embraced the convention mechanism as an alternative to perceived policy deadlock at the federal level. Using the Internet and social media to build campaigns and coalitions that once took much longer to assemble, they are pushing for a convention or conventions to consider various amendments, including the well-known balanced budget requirement, restrictions on the authority of the federal government, repeal of the corporate political contributions elements of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and others.

Sure, Citizens United has to go. Rather than the ghosts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson whispering in the ears of our nine unelected Supreme Leaders to tell us what the First Amendment and all the other amendments mean in 2024, we should come to consensus on new words that say clearly what we want them to say. But even more fundamental would be to amend the constitution to make it easier to amend in the future. Reviewing constitutions around the world for modern best practices sounds like a great idea. Instituting tiers for the level of consensus needed to pass various types of amendments sounds like a great idea. And adding a time table for regular review of the constitution seems like a good idea. For example, maybe Congress would have to vote on amendments proposed by the states at least once per session or once every X years, or else a constitutional convention would automatically be triggered.

vertical proliferation

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I am not the only one who has noticed the U.S. fanning the nuclear proliferation flames. This is Richard Haas, “President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations”.

another type of proliferation now merits attention: vertical proliferation, namely, increases in the quality and/or quantity of the nuclear arsenals of the nine countries that already possess these weapons. The danger is not only that nuclear weapons might be used in a war but also that the possibility of war would increase by emboldening governments – like Iran in the scenario above – to act more aggressively in pursuit of their geopolitical goals in the belief that they may act with impunity…

It all adds up to a dangerous moment. The taboo associated with nuclear weapons has grown weaker with time; few were alive when the US used nuclear weapons twice against Japan to hasten World War II’s end. Indeed, Russian officials have hinted strongly at their readiness to use nuclear weapons in the context of the war in Ukraine…

Three and a half decades after the Cold War’s end, a new world is emerging, one characterized by nuclear arms races, potential new entrants into an ever less exclusive nuclear-weapons club, and a long list of deep disagreements over political arrangements in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. This is not a situation that lends itself to a solution, but at best to effective management. One can only hope the leaders of this era will be up to the challenge.

We are not “pursuing our national interests” if we ignore actions other countries are likely to take in response to our actions. This is just simplistic, childish thinking.

more on the deteriorating nuclear war risk situation

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This article is on a site called Declassified Australia.

The accelerating arms race in hypersonic missiles and anti-hypersonic defensive technology was unleashed upon the world following the US unilateral decision in 2002 under George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and US. 

The ensuing weapons competition has pushed aside risk-mitigation measures, such as expanding the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiating new multilateral arms control agreements, undertaking transparency and confidence-building measures, and puts in jeopardy a cornerstone of world peace, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Unlike the USA’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review which asserted its right to a ‘first nuclear strike’ in “extreme circumstances”, China has a ‘no first strike’ nuclear weapon policy.

An objective outside observer, let’s say an alien since how could any resident of Earth be objective on this, might conclude that China is the more rational, less paranoid, and less belligerent party here. Does the leadership of China actually think there is a case where the leadership of the U.S. would launch a first strike? Hopefully not, but a little strategic empathy would seem like a good idea for the U.S. here – other countries are legitimately afraid of the United States. We have invaded sovereign states, interfered with elections, and broken treaties repeatedly, so we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment and begin to understand why they might not trust us and might fear us. Reducing fear and building trust could be some pretty good concepts to build a risk-reducing foreign policy around.

terrible news on nuclear risk

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The New York Times makes a very scary claim here.

The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.

This is awful news. The U.S. and Russia certainly have no moral high ground here. They could have proposed to reduce their arsenals to a minimum credible deterrent in exchange for China not expanding theirs. I am not a person of vast intelligence, but I can see that this would benefit the world. You would have to “trust but verify” with a heavy international inspection regime of course, but there is plenty of Cold War precedence and experience with that.

I don’t trust the New York Times (or rather, the spies on their staff masquerading as professional journalists and thereby undermining all credibility of their actual professional journalists), and the paragraph above is not even the main point of the story. The main point of the story is supposedly the U.S. preparing for the possibility of a coordinated attack by both China and Russia. The way this was leaked to the press has a whiff of propaganda to me, but the possibility of three planet-ending nuclear arsenals rather than two is terrible news for the world’s overall nuclear risk whatever the sneaky intentions of this particular article.

Jeff Masters on U.S. Climate Havens

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Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections has an article with a massive list of articles, books and tools on climate risks in various geographic areas of the U.S. You could really spend a lot of time drilling down through all these sources, even to research just one location. He does make the point, however, that moving away from extended family and other social ties can be bad for a person/family’s resilience in general, so you should consider that tradeoff before deciding whether to move.