Stern words

The SMH is continuing its strong series of articles on climate change today’s front page reports an interview with Sir Nicholas Stern who seems to have cred with conservatrive politcians because he is an economist not a climatoligist. Stern didn’t mince his words:

“We don’t start from a good place, but it’s not too late,” Sir Nicholas said yesterday in an interview with the Herald in Sydney, where he outlined a far more aggressive program for action than either the Government or Opposition proposes.

As he prepared to meet the Prime Minister, John Howard, today and the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, Sir Nicholas warned that Australia faced a bleak future of increasing droughts, storms, sea level rises and the collapse of the Great Barrier Reef if the planet kept warming.

His message will be: “The costs of acting worldwide to combat climate change are much less than the cost of inaction.”

And Peter Hartcher the Herald’s chief political reporter is even more agressive in his comment piece:

SIR NICHOLAS STERN, the man dubbed “the rock star of climate change”, is performing in Canberra today.

Kevin Rudd will be doing a pretty good lip-sync to the tune Stern is singing and he’ll copy some of the moves. John Howard will try to hum along while tapping a foot in time.

But the inconvenient truth is that neither of Australia’s major political parties is fully ready to sing all the verses, with feeling….

But with a federal election looming in the next eight months or so, Australia’s political leaders are very coy about spelling out exactly what they will do about it. Neither Rudd nor Howard wants to be the first to tell voters in an election year that we will have to make difficult, even wrenching, changes in our fat-bottomed four-lane lifestyles.

This seeming committment to education about climate change didn’t stop the Herald a few weeks back publishing a stinging attack on Al Gore’s campaign to change minds and hearts. Originally published in the NYT the crtitique has been slammed by some media commentators. In an analysis for Alternet David Roberts had this to say:

This may be the worst, sloppiest, most dishonest piece of reporting I’ve ever seen in the NYT. It’s got all the hallmarks of a vintage Gore hit piece: half-truths, outright falsehoods, unsubstantiated quotes, and a heaping dose of innuendo. As usual with these things, unless you’ve been following the debate carefully, you’ll be left with a false impression — in this case, that scientists are divided over the accuracy of Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. I find it difficult to believe that Broad doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing here. (See RealClimate for a discussion of one of his previous travesties.) I could go almost sentence by sentence, but let’s just run through some of the highlights. I apologize for the length, but there’s really a lot of trash here to shovel through.

Cheney’s War

VP Cheney has made another blistering speech attacking the war’s critics. Cheney knows what emotional punches to pull and of course the biggest charge is “not supporting the troops”:

“When members of Congress pursue an anti-war strategy that’s been called slow bleed, they’re not supporting the troops, they are undermining them. And when members of Congress speak not of victory, but of time limits — (applause) — when members speak not of victory but of time limits, deadlines or other arbitrary measures, they’re telling the enemy simply to watch the clock and wait us out.”

But perhaps its a last harah as Time reports that Cheney’s influence is waning following on from the Libby verdict or as Time’s Michael Duffy cheekily calls it “the Cheney verdict”.

Cheney has become the Administration’s enemy within, the man whose single-minded pursuit of ideological goals, creaking political instincts and love of secrecy produced an independent operation inside the White House that has done more harm than good.

On an imaginary political balance sheet, Cheney is the Democrats’ most valuable asset. And reversing that situation is getting close to impossible….But for all the personal shows of support, more Republicans with each passing week have acknowledged privately what is felt across Washington when it comes to the Vice President: his time has passed.

Significantly this is actually affecting the decision making process in the Bush White House – a process Cheney once dominated. And this is a major shift with major implications for international foreign affairs

A senior Administration official told TIME last week that Cheney has been part of all the arguments and has simply begun to lose some. But that alone means ideas that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago — early engagement, muscular multilateralism, even patient negotiation — are becoming more acceptable in Bushland.

Blix’s question marks

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix’s interview with Sky News has been quoted widely. Particularly his claim that Tony Blair did in fact “sex-up” his famous dossier presenting the case for war:

I would never dare to accuse any statesman of bad faith unless I had absolute evidence of it. I do think they exercised spin.

They put exclamation marks instead of question marks. There were question marks but they changed them to exclamation marks. And I think they got the political punishment for that. They lost a lot of confidence. Both Bush and Blair lost a lot of confidence.

The bit about the question marks being turned into explanation marks is undoubtedly meant metaphorically but quoted as a grab will be taken very literally. Of course, in many ways it amounts to the same thing. Andrew Gilligan must be laughing long and loud.