Bush's final whimpers (#5 of 2008)

The Bush administration gave a coup de grace to 2008 in responding to the punitive Israeli attack on Gaza. When asked if they had been told of the attack in advance, a spokesman noted that a few days earlier the Israeli cabinet had flagged publicly that it could not tolerate the rockets from Gaza.

To date, neither Bush nor Rice have said anything about the assault on Gaza. One of Bush's signal goals of this term - peace for Israel and Palestine - has been quietly put out with the garbage.

Meanwhile, Laura Bush is making her own attempts at expiative rewrites of history. The Iraqi journalist who threw the shoe at Bush? It proves there is freedom in Iraq (never mind that he had his bones broken on arrest, and was tortured in jail). The "9/11" attacks: well, they didn't happen again under Bush's watch (never mind that they happened the first time, with clear warnings).

Bush doubled the US budget deficit in his tenure; the cost to the US of the Iraq occupation has been estimated at $3 to 5 trillion. That goverment spending deficit has been attributed almost entirely to security costs and tax cuts - see discussion here).

Bush's fondness for abstinence pledges over sex education and contraceptives has been a truly dismal failure. A study published in the journal Pediatrics (reported here) shows that those who took "the pledge" are equally likely to experience sex before marriage - but their use of condoms and other contraception is noticeably lower. The implication is that, in the US at least, this policy has simply resulted in more disease and unwanted pregnancy.

Spending any more time or energy on this is unwarranted. Frank Rich of the New York Times addresses this subject far more eloquently and rigorously than me (read in particular about Bush's own, risible, 'mission accomplished' publicity, which inter alia touts foreign disaster aid, while ignoring the Katrina fiasco in their own backyard).

2008 is simply the year that saw out a particularly bad and deeply unpopular president.

Garnaut on emission changes: too late?

In commenting on the Garnaut report, the Herald's Ross Gittens points to the obvious elephants in the room: the economic growth of India and China.

Yes, we knew this. But he also provides an breakdown of carbon emissions increase.

Garnaut notes that global carbon emissions grew at an average rate of 1.1% per year through the 1990s. This would have been what was taken into the 1997 Kyoto talks.

However, from 2000 to 2006, the rate of increase surged to 3.1% per year.

This change has been attributed to the following:

• Global economic growth was 5% per year rather than the anticipated 3.3%
• Growth became more energy intensive. In the 1990s, the "energy intensity" of global gross domestic product fell (improved) by 1.4% per year; however this decade, the energy intensity has been falling by only 0.2%
• Energy use became more emission-intensive. Through the 1990s, cleaner fuels were used and the emission-intensity of energy use dropped 0.2% per year; however this emission-intensity increased by 0.4% per year this decade.

And all of this is said to be due to India and China coming on-stream in the economic world.

It remains difficult to begrudge those countries their due, although it makes the job that much harder.

Simulations run for Garnauts team require global emissions to peak by 2010 if atmospheric carbon is to stabilise at 450ppm.

Unlikely? It needs leadership from the developed world: to cut emissions by example, and to forge partnerships with those emerging nations to tip the balance in the right direction.

Two years is too short. Ten years might have done it. And that's what we lost with George Bush being declared winner in the 2000 presidential election. And officially, that's 537 Florida votes.

You couldn't write fiction like this.

Mass extinctions in earth's past, when due to climate change, have taken much longer than we're taking.

The APEC Climate Change Con

It was pointed out that the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, held in Sydney over the past week, brought together leaders of 60% of the world's economy - ie China and the US in particular.

And their announcement on Climate Change talked of "aspirational" goals and "clean coal technology" - the very language favoured by George Bush's pet crony, Australia's soon-to-be-ex-Prime-Minister John Howard.

As weasely as Howard has ever been, the declaration doesn't commit anyone to anything. It hopes people will treat climate change a little bit seriously. They're aiming for a stabilisation that means, as new research has indicated, that Greenland's ice reservoir will melt in 300 years odd.

That's a rise in sea level of seven metres, folks.


We can only hope that the political demises of Howard and Bush will see more realistic action. This can only be achieved by firm national and international action, and those men are not the right leaders.

World: Iraq and ethical minefields

Bush invaded Iraq without international approval. Motivation? Pick one:
- weapons of mass destruction: not found; evidence was always dodgy
- terrorism: only very minor links found; no links to the world trade centre attacks
- get rid of Saddam Hussein: problematic; see below. Unlikely to be a direct motivation
- vengeance: wanted to attack someone: tenuous
- secure oil supply: far and away most consistent with Bush’s past stated aims.

Invasion to secure energy supplies is clearly not ethical.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanemo Bay, and the practice of “rendition” are probably in large part a direct response to the World Trade Centre attacks. Understandable in the context of a small child’s reprisals, but certainly not the hallmarks of an ethical administration, or leader.

I suspect that there’s an inherent difficulty in maintaining ethics as a world power. I suspect it would be quite difficult applying personal ethical standards to world politics. However, I'd say some are better at it than others. Scandinavian countries, for example.

What do you think of the ethics of the European Union? In toto, are they significantly better than the US? Discuss.

I also suspect that using power unethically will only, in the long run, exacerbate problems.

Bush is not ethical. Are you? Did you want to get rid of Saddam? Well, of course. He was a butcher. But world politics doesn’t work that way – otherwise we’d all be invading each other on the slightest pretext. So, what would have been the most ethical thing to do in Iraq?

More difficult: what's the best thing to do, now that we're in the current situation? Leave? Then by default leave things to the Sunni 'insurgents'? They were, after all, funded by the billions looted in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, before the US decided to try to exert some control.

Murdering thousands of innocents, and brutalising a whole populace, is certainly about the lowest you can get. And I'm talking about these 'insurgents', never mind what the US is doing.

And what ethical yardsticks should we apply to nations as a whole? Should different standards apply to world powers? In my heart, I'd say we should all purvey the same standards, but I get the feeling this is not really possible. In practice, I think smaller players in world diplomacy - Scandinavia, EU, UN - tend to try for more achievable goals rather than absolutes.