Thailand and Elsewhere

Guest bloggers, Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit

The recent turmoil in Bangkok has hogged the headlines across Asia. But Bangkok is not the only city in turmoil. A few weeks ago, demonstrators in Athens fought an hours-long battle with police ending with three dead and scores injured. In neighbouring Turkey, police with batons had clashed with protesters hurling bricks and fire bombs. Just across the Mediterranean, the dispossessed of Cairo decided to occupy the city centre, sleeping on the streets. Further afield, the Maoists staged a massive protest in Kathmandu, and in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, an urban mob attacked the residence of the president, tore up the plants in his garden, and drove him from power.

Bangkok’s red-shirt protesters are demanding a general election, return of their hero, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, and an end to the “double standards” resulting from the concentration of wealth and power. It is easy to see all these struggles as unique.  The Greek riots are an offshoot of the country’s financial collapse. The Kathmandu demo is just one more stage in the country’s transition from monarchy. The Kyrgystani president had been elected to power on a surge of popularity, and had then turned out to be spectacularly corrupt. And so on. But what is really striking about all these incidents are the similarities. Big urban mobs. Fierce defiance. Security forces overstretched. States rattled. Middle class urbanites wringing their hands.

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Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics

Frank Ackerman

Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren’t there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you’d be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry’s liability for oil spill damages.

Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada’s politicians aren’t looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you’d be happy to learn about a law limiting industry’s liability for accidents, wouldn’t you?

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Climate Change and the Immigration Debate

Lyuba Zarsky

Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law has galvanized popular protest and reignited demands in many quarters for an overhaul of US immigration policy. For those hoping that Obama’s next big legislative battle would be over climate change, however,   the immigration firestorm could not have come at a worse time. Besides eclipsing climate change in public debate, the shadow of Congressional action on immigration scuttled the support of a key Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Senate climate bill. Without Lindsey, the climate bill doesn’t have a prayer.

But apart from political minefields, are immigration and climate change such separate policy issues? Not if climate change is understood, as it should be, as a problem requiring urgent action both not only to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions but also to adapt to much more volatile local and regional climatic conditions driven by global warming.

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Global Environmental Governance: Lessons in Herding Cats for Rio+20 Negotiators

Adil Najam

The first PrepCom negotiations for the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (popularly being called EarthSummit 2012 or Rio+20) began in New York at the United Nations on Monday and will end on Wednesday. One of the two themes for Rio+20 is institutional frameworks. I have already argued here that Rio+20 needs to shift the focus towards global governance for sustainable development. In order to do so, however, Rio+20 will also need to understand how we got to where we are in terms of global environmental governance.

In this video (made for the International Institute for Sustainable Development in 2008) I highlight the lessons of some of my earlier research on global environmental governance (GEG). I suggest that (a) GEG is like herding cats and if you want to herd cats you need to be nice to them; (b) the evolution of GEG is, in fact, a good story – it is not the story of a system that failed, it is the story of a system that has outgrown its design; and (c) better global environmental governance will necessarily require a redefinition of what we mean by “global environmental governance.”

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International Climate Change Lottery: a financing mechanism that could actually be agreed in Cancún.

Miquel Muñoz, Guest Blogger

It is increasingly evident that a comprehensive climate change agreement is unlikely at the next climate change meeting (COP 16) in Cancún, Mexico, on December 2010. Finance – that is how much money will be provided, where will it come from, how will it be used, and who will hold the strings of the purse – is one of the main obstacles to agreement, compounded by deep distrust between developing and developed countries. While a comprehensive deal is unlikely, there are financing instruments that could conceivably be agreed upon in Cancún; for example, an International Climate Change Lottery.

The idea of an international goal-driven lottery has been regularly raised since the 1970’s. A good starting point is work by Addison and Chowdhury in 2003 analyzing the prospects of harnessing the world lottery market (worth US$126 billion and generating US$62bn in gross profits) for the purposes of development.

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Getting Ready for Rio+20

Adil Najam

Officially speaking, the preparatory process for the Rio+20 Earth Summit to be held in Brazil in 2012 begins on Monday, May 17. But by real measures the discussions – even negotiations – on Rio+20 have now been going on for many weeks.

Certainly, the recent meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-18, 3-14 May, 2010) was largely consumed by the shadows of Rio+20.

The world has already decided that there will be a “Rio+20” conference: the official title is “The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.” They seem hesitant to call it a “Summit,” let alone an “Earth Summit” just yet, but it is nearly certainly that eventually they will. It is, after all, the 20th year commemoration of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, which itself had marked 20 years since the 1972 Stockholm conference.

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Stop Gambling on Hunger

Jayati Ghosh

The US Senate is currently debating an important financial reform bill that has the potential to rein in excessive speculation in commodities.  That speculation drives up the price of food all around the world, and helped contribute to the food crisis in 2008.  Some Wall Street lobbyists are working to weaken the bill, but its important for global food security that they aren’t successful.  To learn more visit StopGamblingonHunger.com and watch my videos on the subject:

Seeing Development: India in the Latin American Mirror

Matías Vernengo

China and India are often seen around the world as examples of successful developing strategies that should be emulated by other developing countries.  They are also often lumped together with Brazil and Russia, as part of the BRICs, the group of countries that would overtake the developed world by mid-century.  Brazil and Russia, however, are to great extent commodity exporters, and the Brazilian success story has been over-hyped.

The case of India is of particular interest for developing countries, since it suggests that high rates of growth are possible, in the context of a multicultural, multiethnic, democratic society.  Also, India seems to provide an alternative model in terms of the pattern of structural transformation of the productive sector, with a pronounced acceleration in the growth of the service sector in an early stage of the industrialization process.  The growth in services is, in part, associated with the expansion of services exports, which, in turn, are related to the offshoring process.

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Big Finance and the Greek Drama

C.P. Chandrasekhar

The Financial Times reports that banks in Europe have appealed to the European Central Bank to become a “buyer of last resort” of eurozone government bonds, to prevent another financial crisis. Though the European Central Bank (ECB) is yet to take a decision on the matter, the option has not been ruled out. The ECB is also planning on launching a loan facility which will offer funds to the tune of €600 billion to banks at a one per cent rate of interest to tide over the current funds crunch.

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