Changing Climate Opinions

Big-city mayors meet over climate change

Summit brings together officials and business leaders to cut greenhouse gases

May 16, 2007
The Straits Times

NEW YORK - MAYORS and business leaders from more than 40 of the world's biggest cities gathered in New York on Monday for a summit devoted to combating climate change and cleaning up the environment.

They joined former US president Bill Clinton and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, billed as helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop energy-efficient infrastructure.

The summit is expected to include several joint initiatives that harness the combined purchasing power of the cities.The event is being organised in conjunction with the Clinton Climate Initiative, part of the foundation set up by the former US president, who is due to address the summit today.

The first such summit was held in London in 2005 and had brought together environmental officials from around 20 cities. This year's meeting brings in business leaders for the first time.

Ms Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a non-governmental business leadership group organising the gathering, said that by bringing together the city authorities, companies with technological solutions and banks to finance new initiatives, the summit was more than just a talk shop.

'You have had lots of people that are abstractly talking about global warming and advocating policy change, but these are people who actually write cheques,' she said.

Other topics up for discussion include beating traffic congestion, making water systems more efficient, adopting renewable energy sources, increasing recycling levels, reducing waste and improving mass transit.

The theory behind the conference is that cities must play a major role in reversing climate change because they contribute 80 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions even though they cover less than 1 per cent of the Earth's surface.

'If one city by itself implements a policy to reduce its carbon emissions, I do not think it is going to convince anyone that that is going to change the world,' she said.

'But if the larger cities across five continents commit to do something, that could change the world, it could have a real impact,' she added, particularly welcoming the role of cities in developing countries.

Among the cities represented are Bangkok, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Delhi, Johannesburg, Karachi, Mexico City and Seoul.

The event, due to end tomorrow, coincided with Mr Bloomberg's visit to the state Capitol on Monday to pitch his 23-year environmental plan for New York, including the controversial congestion pricing scheme, to the state's lawmakers.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS, REUTERS

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Global warming and climate change has always been a persistent problem. However, only recently has the global population started realising just how important it is to set up measures against climate change. Man is the only one to be blamed for all unnatural problems. If we want to properly eradicate this problems, perhaps we should get to the root of it and examine the relationship between ourselves and the rest of nature.

Nature exists in an equilibrium state. It is an endless cycle because everything that happens in nature is there to help some other specie. In this way, nature is always equalised by something else. One animal helps feed another and another. The animal’s faeces returns back to the soil to become fertiliser for plants and the plants in turn provide the animals for food. Everything in nature is there for to help keep it balanced. But humans do not. Humans today are the only animals on this planet that has disrupted this cycle.

The problem is that humans are born with far superior intellectual capabilities than any other animal or plant in nature. This has resulted in us being able to outsmart any animal that becomes a threat to us. When tigers are rampant, we have guns to kill them all. We seem always have a solution for any problems that nature presents to us. It is perhaps because of this that we humans think that we are the king of the animal kingdom. We think that because everything is under our control and therefore planet Earth belongs to us. We think that everything on this planet is there to serve us. But that is not true.

During a talk, I was introduced to this Latin phrase, Natura Artis Magistra. The direct translation of it is “nature is the mother of art”. “Art” is used here to refer to man’s creation. It was this connection between man and nature that I found to be very true. Man and our creations would one day be extinct, but nature would forever be there. Even man depends on other animals and plants for support. If we were to kill all the other animals and plants before they can reproduce, then man would inevitably be extinct as well. That is what is precisely happening today. However, since nature exists in equilibrium, it would forever be supported by the different species of animals and plants.

Nature does not need man. All the other animals and plants can still survive, without us. Yet, we, the most intelligent being on this planet, depend on the rest of nature to survive. All other animals on this planet is there to serve nature, not us. We are just one of the many species of animal in nature. Like all other animals, we are there to nature, not the other way round. If we all can just change the way we view nature, then perhaps we would be more environmentally conscious.

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The Blairing Critiques

How will history judge him?

May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition

For all the disappointments, posterity will look more kindly on Tony Blair than Britons do today.

FEW Britons, it seems, will shed a tear when Tony Blair leaves the stage on June 27th after a decade as prime minister, as he finally announced this week he would do. Opinion polls have long suggested that he is unpopular. On May 3rd local and regional elections gave voters a last chance to give Mr Blair a good kicking. They took it with both feet, handing power to Conservatives, Scottish Nationalists, Welsh nationalists, anybody but distrusted Labour. Most wish he had gone last year—an opinion shared by his likely heir, Gordon Brown, who now faces a mighty struggle against David Cameron's Tories.

Either Britons are an ungrateful lot, or Mr Blair deserves his shabby send-off for having delivered too little and disappointed too much. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.

You used to love me...

On most measures, Mr Blair has left Britain a better place than it was in 1997 (see article). Uninterrupted economic growth has made the average Briton substantially better off, even if the tax burden has risen. There are fewer tatty schools and run-down hospitals. Although many exams lack rigour, more children are getting respectable grades and going on to universities. Thanks to the minimum wage and tax credits for poor working families, the forces relentlessly pushing up income inequality under Margaret Thatcher have been blunted.

These things are measurable; less easy to prove, but just as valuable, are the ways in which Mr Blair has helped make Britain a more tolerant, more cosmopolitan place. There is a human-rights act now; civil partnerships for homosexuals are recognised. Self-government for Scotland, Wales and now even Northern Ireland has extended democracy: peace in Ulster must rank among Mr Blair's greatest successes (see article). Class matters less: the fact that the Tories are gaining popularity led by an Old Etonian is, strangely, a sign of progress.

Under Mr Blair, fusty old Britain has become an international exemplar of openness. Large-scale immigration, especially from the former communist countries of eastern Europe, has boosted the economy without triggering a serious backlash of resentment. Embracing globalisation, London has become one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Mr Blair has changed the debate in Europe (Nicolas Sarkozy is another right-winger in his debt—see article) and he has also done more than any other Western leader to force people to pay attention to climate change and poverty in Africa.

You can go through this list, adding asterisks and footnotes: on the economy, not enough credit goes to the Tories who came before Mr Blair; on immigration, for every happy Czech waitress in Covent Garden there are several angry Muslims in Leeds; on civil liberties, he helped gays but not prisoners or young louts. Still, Mr Blair has improved Britain, on balance, and he has usually stood on the side of liberal progress. This newspaper, for one, has no regrets in having supported him.

Why then does Mr Blair leave a sour taste in Britain—and not only in the mouths of the old socialist left and the xenophobic right? For millions of people, only one word is necessary: Iraq. But the disappointments go further back than that.

This, after all, was the most gifted politician of his generation—certainly in Europe and (depending on your opinion of the foxier but less disciplined Bill Clinton) perhaps wider than that. Before coming to power Mr Blair already had one enormous achievement to his name: dragging the Labour Party to the electable centre. In 1997 he had not just a big parliamentary majority but a country that wanted what he wanted—an economy that combined the hard-won gains of Thatcherism with a greater emphasis on social justice and modernised public services. How could he fail?

By being astonishingly ill-prepared. In retrospect, it is hard to exaggerate the waste of Mr Blair's first term. Under the visionary rhetoric, the new government had little notion of how to improve public services, other than by dismantling its predecessor's successful attempts to raise their quality by injecting more competition. With one or two exceptions (among them primary schools), more harm than good was done to health and education. Unable to show solid progress, Mr Blair fell back on the techniques of opposition, spinning the news to convey an impression of activity and progress. His popularity continued to defy gravity, but authority was squandered, and public cynicism grew.

In his second term Mr Blair did eventually work out a model for public sector reform—one that involved refining the internal-market policies pioneered by the Tories, but with far more money from the state. But by then September 11th and soon Iraq were upon him. From the invasion in 2003, with his party squabbling and Mr Brown all too often sniping from the sidelines, public-service reform lost momentum. To his credit, Mr Blair tried to push ahead, risking his job over variable university tuition fees, for instance. But the fact is that, although services have got better, they are still worse than they should be; and a lot of cash has been thrown away. Britons will rue those wasted years as much as Mr Blair now does.

The Bagdad blues

By contrast, on Iraq, the source of so much misfortune, history may be a little kinder to Mr Blair than his countrymen currently are. Nobody denies the manifest disaster of the past four years. It would be convenient for supporters of the war, such as this newspaper, to claim we were tricked into it by Mr Blair; convenient, but unfair. He did indeed put more weight on the scanty intelligence evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction than it could bear. But there is little doubt that he (and many others) believed in it at the time. Nor was it a bad thing to want to rid the world of a brutal tyrant. After all, Mr Blair had built the American-led coalition that ended the genocidal career of Slobodan Milosevic; and the invasion of Afghanistan had at first been a success.

As for the catastrophic mismanagement thereafter, Mr Blair should have insisted on far more in terms of post-war planning. And, yes, a bolder friend of America might have publicly pushed for Donald Rumsfeld to have been removed, for the nightmarish Guantánamo Bay to be closed, for George Bush to have tried harder to create a Palestinian state. But the greater fault lies with Mr Bush for refusing to listen to somebody who plainly knew more about the Arab world and indeed terrorism than he did. Given that obstinacy, Mr Blair had two real choices: to leave Iraq and America to a still-worse fate; or to stay in, hoping to repair some of the damage Britain had helped cause. On balance he did the right thing.

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mr Blair is that neither Mr Brown nor Mr Cameron wishes to change fundamentally the course he has set. Both will stay in Iraq, for a while, and Afghanistan. Despite his initial scepticism, Mr Brown is unlikely to unpick Mr Blair's public-service reforms. Mr Cameron's popularity is based on occupying the Blairite centre ground.

If Margaret Thatcher, in much more testing times, gave the country what it needed, Mr Blair can at least claim to have given it much of what it wanted. It is unlikely that he will ever be thought of as the great prime minister he could have been. It is almost certain, however, that Mr Blair will come to be seen as a better one than he is today.

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Mr Tony Blair will step down after 10 years as prime minister of Britain. There are speculations that few Britons will be disappointed at his resignation. Many have criticised the efforts spent on Iraq, the over-enthusiastic help given to America and the lack of fulfilling his potential throughout the 10 years in office, amongst other things. However they have only seen the down sides of Mr Blair’s term in office. Few have bothered to realise the contributions that Mr Blair has done for Britain. Why is this so?

It is like viewing an art piece in an art gallery. There are many angles to view the painting from, but because it is right ahead of us, we look at it straight on. Perhaps, the painting is best viewed from the sides, but most people do not know that. And so one after another, looks at the painting straight on, finds it rather disappointing and dismisses it. How many people would have actually bothered to look at the painting from another angle after getting a disappointing first impression? Would you? This is what is happening in Briton. The most apparent thing people have noticed is the faults of Mr Blair. And therefore, without considering his contributions, they have criticised his faults. It is the same for most scenarios, even if we are criticised for the most minute things by our friends, teachers, parents or anyone. We never seem to be praised for our contributions but always criticised for our faults. While, from our own angle, we often blame the other party for criticising you without due justification, perhaps we should just look at it from yet another angle.

Instead of insisting that your painting looks perfect, if you were to edit your painting such that it looks equally beautiful straight on, as it does from the side, then how many more people would enjoy your painting? It is not just for the sake of others enjoyment, but that others actually appreciate your work and that gives you a sense of self-satisfaction. Mr Blair has done the same as well. Instead of always rejecting his people’s criticisms, he has made that effort to improve on them. It is this attitude that Mr Blair has that has allowed Briton to progress.

Sometimes, you may feel that the other party is not justified in criticising you. Yet, if you would to just bow down and accept their arguments, not for the sake of ending that argument, but because you agree with them, then it would give you that determination to prove to them that you have changed from your mistakes. Ultimately, if you can change your mistakes, even though it to you it may not be there, only you, yourself, would stand to benefit from it and become even better. The issue here is not whether you agree or not with other people’s arguments, but to accept it and change from it, whether it is true or not.

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