News round
My favourite headline of the past few days, though I was rather disappointed that the actual content of the story wasn’t what I’d hoped for, is: Prince quits as head of Citigroup (Update: like so many news sites these days, the FT appears to revise published stories rather than publish a separate update, making illustrative links rather hit & miss. In this case, the headline has changed, but remains funny).
The former head of Citigroup chooses his successor
Sadly it appears that it’s not a story about The Artist Once Again Known as Prince stepping down from his position as chairman of one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates in order to spend more time touring.
€38,000 – a token amount of money
Meanwhile here in Ireland, recently re-elected Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has accepted a €38,000 pay rise. This represents an increase to his salary greater than the average working wage and brings his total income to €310,000 per annum. He defended this by pointing out that the body that sets his salary “is an independent organisation and its recommendations will be implemented by the Government”. One wonders just how independent the review board would remain had they recommended a significant pay cut for Bertie and his cronies, and whether or not the government would be so keen to implement that recommendation.
To add insult to injury, however, Bertie dismissed the furore that inevitably followed the announcement of his 14% pay hike. Apparently it would be “pure tokenism” for him to refuse the increase. Maybe it’s just me, but when the leader of the nation can describe the average national wage as “a token amount of money” then he’s clearly lost touch with reality. It’s also worth bearing in mind the fact that Bertie’s team recently dug their heels in, and watched the nurses vote for industrial action over their “unrealistic” demands for a 10% pay rise.
Still, in his defence, there are those who would argue that the Taoiseach’s pay-hike should be even bigger. After all, 38 thousand is the sort of paltry sum that Bertie simply wouldn’t remember ever having received.
It’s no sacrifice
Meanwhile we hear that despite massive increases in fuel prices, Ryanair’s profits are soaring on a 20% increase in passenger numbers. At the same time Thomson Travel Agents have started up a new low-cost flight service between the UK and Israel. All the while, pretty much every relevant agency and government that expresses an opinion tells us that the battle against climate change is “too little and too slow“. And whenever the public are polled they insist that stringent measures need to be taken and sacrifices need to be made.
My own view (which I’ve expressed on numerous occasions here) is that catastrophic climate change is an inevitability and that in tandem with resource depletion we will see the collapse of industrialised civilisation (and a consequent large loss of life) within the next couple of decades. The process has, I believe, already begun.
So while I don’t believe that being an active consumer of low-cost flights will make a practical difference at this point, I do believe that it’s an offensively tasteless activity to be involved in. Just like the ex-soldier who urinated on a dying woman in the street, his actions had no discernible effect on whether the woman lived or died, but he’s still a nasty scumbag and should be vilified as such (link via PDF).
On the Prince thing, I still recount to people verbatim your line about Condoleeza Rice being a music graduate and how ‘I believe, for instance, that Prince is one of the handful of most talented musicians to have ever lived. I would nonetheless question the wisdom of putting him in charge of US foreign policy. I suspect he’d do a better – albeit weirder – job than is currently being done’.
Regarding the inevitability of climate change, I too think that there is, practically speaking, no way we’re not gonna get it big time. Almost every revision of the science says the window is even more closed than we previously thought. New research suggests only a the total elimination of carbon emissions by 2050 gives us a real chance of preventing runaway climate change.
But still, it’s all about probability. We don’t *know* what the tipping points are.
More, it’s a question of degree – it’s highly likely that the faster we emit, the more drastic the changes will be.
And even if a reduction in emissions just gives us the same changes over a longer period, it buys some time for adjustment. There are a lot of people and entire species whose survival is in that gap.
The future will have to be lower consumption. The more of us who start demonstrating ways to do it now, the more ideas will have developed and the further they’ll have spread.
So yes, even if it made no odds then we’d still be the pissing soldier, and that’s reason enough. But I think there are good reasons why lower consumption can make measurable positive difference.
November 6th, 2007 | 2:54pm
by merrick
Might want to reconsider using that photo, Jim.
November 7th, 2007 | 12:20pm
by Rochenko
Rochenko, I’ll be happy to remove the image if Prince wants me to. It’s being used, after all, merely to illustrate a humorous misreading of a news headline. But I think I’ll wait for the ‘cease and desist’ notice prior to removing the photo. If nothing else, I’ll need something to fill the empty space with.
Besides which, being threatened with legal action by one of my musical heroes is funny in it’s own right.*
We probably need to sit down and argue this one out, Merrick. But at the moment I honestly don’t believe that any of the action currently even being considered at the fringes of power will have any measurable impact whatsoever. More than that; I don’t believe so long as the current power structures exist, that the situation can change.
Hopefully I’ll have yet another blog post on the twin subjects of climate change and resource depletion up soon.
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* Obviously it’s only funny given the trivial nature of the ‘crime’ (posting a stock photo on the internet of one of the most photographed people in the world). I concede that it would be significantly less funny if I was the subject of legal action because I’d been mailing Prince the bodyparts of murdered fans, for instance.
November 16th, 2007 | 3:40pm
by Jim Bliss