Who Makes Policy Campaign 2016 Edition

I’ve been writing this entire semester about planning for a post-ISIL Middle East.

This article in Foreign Affairs highlights these divisions and discusses how conflict will linger long after ISIL is defeated. It’s important to note that there are not just disputes between different tribes in Iraq, but even conflicts within groups as well. The Kurds, some of the best anti-ISIL fighters in the region, suffer from severe infighting between the different political groups, the PUK and KDP.

The article points out that things will not be rosy and great in Iraq after ISIL is defeated. It is a constant theme in everything I’ve read this semester on the topic, tribalism and ethnic divisions truly dominate the region and these divisions will remain after ISIL leaves town.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/2016-11-03/iraq-after-isis

 

A New York Times article from today discusses the biggest risks and dangers that face humanity, and how the political discourse of our candidates focuses on dangers that are overblown and unlikely.

21 risk experts were asked to analyze what are the five biggest threats to the world. They stated:

1. Climate Change (overwhelmingly)
2. Use of nuclear weapons
3. Pandemics – growing resistance to anti-bodies
4. Cyberattacks
5. Problems with high Technology – crippling results if world loses its electronic and internet connectivity as we have “created a machine we cannot live without”

**These results matched a larger risk analysis of 750 experts from this year’s World Economic Forum

Experts criticize Trump who discusses the United States’ biggest dangers as immigration, terrorism, and crime, and Hilary who discusses financial insecurity and gun violence as her biggest dangers for the U.S. Their campaigns are missing the very real risks that face us. In fact, “Extreme Weather has killed more than twice as many people in the United States in the past 15 years, even including September 11th.” 

With our presidential candidates focusing their campaigns on issues that easily trigger emotional responses, instead of issues that may appear more abstract but are very real, serious danger can be waiting for us in our near future. We need to shift our country’s priorities.

In the face of Climate Change skepticism, I would simply ask someone to look at the world around us. Across the United States and the world, water supplies continue to be at risk and disputed.

• In Charleston West Virginia, 224,000 area residents, more than 7,300 business owners and an undetermined number of hourly wage earners are currently waiting for the pay out of $151 million dollar settlement because of a chemical spill that tainted local water
• Currently, the Nile River is yellow/brown, murky, and filled with silt because of days of heavy rain causing soil runoff. The flood’s pollution forced Water Treatment Plants to close and tap water is advised against.
• Recent Reports state Lake Chad in Nigeria that supplies water to millions of people has shrunk to a twentieth of its size.
• Villages along the West Bank are experiencing water shortages with as rainfall continues to decrease and groundwater levels drop. Tensions arise between West Bank villages and Isreal regarding share of water supplies in the region.
• Imja, a glacial lake in Nepal, has been continuously rising in level over the years. It rose to a dangerous level that threatened harmful flooding to several villages. Melting Snow Caps from the Himalayan Mountains are causing the lake’s rise. Soldiers and villagers dug through rocks to drain out 141 million cubic feet of water from the lake

These incidents were all reported from news articles published TODAY. This is alarming in and of itself.

A little over a week ago we all wrote polling briefs on the salience of our topic and what action, if any, should be taken by our principals. FiveThirtyEight.com reported last week pretty much what I told my principal- What you have done already has caused no noticeable change, so it’s time to do more. Click here to read what my polling brief could have looked like. 

As the election nears, many news outlets have reported on issues that they  feel were either not discussed enough or not discussed at all during the campaign trail. One of the issues largely touted as ignored is Climate Change. An article from Slate states “During the three debates, the candidates spent 5 minutes and 27 seconds (about 2 percent of the time) on the topic” [climate change]. While the fact that so little air time has been given to this global issue angers some, others see the benefit. Democrats and Republicans share opposing views on the climate change topic and many of its sub-categories (e.g: renewable energy), and it is possible that more time spent on this topic would work to refuel partisan beliefs. The lack of repetition about plans to tackle climate change from the candidates may in fact make it easier for the incoming president to push a climate policy as hopefully opposition won’t be so tied to a particular concept, since well they haven’t heard much about a particular concept.

 

 

This week Wikileaks released some 2014 e-mails involving John Podesta (Future Madame President’s campaign chair). These emails essentially depict the members of liberal think tanks attitudes towards a particular writer’s column on climate on four beloved fivethirtyeight.com- The writer, Roger Pielke questioned the link between rising natural disaster costs and climate change. Piece’s argument is that the rising natural disaster cost has little to do with climate change and more to do with the factor that the world is getting wealthier which just means we have more (infrastructure, housing, materials, etc) to lose. The emails found in Podestsa’s gmail account describe how Judd Legum (editor of  ThinkProgress) believed Climate Progress, the environmental arm of ThinkProgress, got Pielke to stop writing about climate change for FiveThirtyEight and thus eclipsing his reach. “I think it’s fair to say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538,” Legum wrote.

Sneaky Sneaky! More on that here.

In all honesty, I can’t  answer this question with certainty. The question will be answered by what energy and climate policy the next president adopts as we know the candidates differ.  An article published over a month ago titled “Memo to next president: Here’s how to avoid our history of energy policy mistakes”  is one that I would encourage the candidates advisers to read, if they haven’t already. The article goes on to discuss innovation and much more than the coal industry issues that are talked about in media all the time. It is essentially a list of all the times the American government has failed at an energy policy- Fun stuff!!

An article from Huffington Post  states that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed with the National Marine Fisheries Service in its decision to list a species of seals as “threatened.” The court made its decision based on forecast models that show climate change will drive melting ice and habitat loss. Maybe a marketing campaign on habitat loss as a result of climate change is what we need to increase the importance of this issue.

I’m just going to say it, I hate the cold frigid weather we have been having this week. Where is the Global Warming that they speak so dearly about ?  Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin-R has really touched my heart with his most recent climate change statement- “How many people are moving up toward the Antarctica, or the Arctic? Most people move down to Texas and Florida, where it’s a little bit warmer.”  Now we all know that global warming is a slow process and in tackling it one has to think of future generations, however many people see no urgency in the issue because well it’s not currently affecting them. Where is the America that liked to be prepared? How does one raise the alarm over this issue when well we all want it to be sunny an warm all the time.

Reliability of data put forth in research material has always been an issue and most recently an article exposed that a London University essentially pocketed money for climate change research. As if the climate change and global warming claims don’t have enough uncertainty surrounding them in this current election, now one must also be concerned with the statistics put forth by scientists. What if scientists have in fact been making these climate change claims because they were positioned, well paid, to do so?