Case in Point: off-shore drilling in the US is worth very, very little in the grand scheme of things.

Came across this fantastic graph on the Environmental Defense Fund blog:



It just makes the case for what I was saying in my post last week about McCain's energy plans (Pale-in to gather oil like a stamp for rotten food).

Pale-in to gather oil like a stamp for rotten food

I would really seize on the opportunity to paint the McCain camp as rash in its decision making and that the executive power of the presidential candidate is outshined by those of his advisor's (much like Rove was for Bush), who are quite obviously making the decisions for him. You don't honestly think selecting Pail was as his running mate was his idea? McCain's lack of knowledge regarding Palin's background is testament to the observation that the decision did not come from him. He discussed her nomination for the first time on the 24th of August - five days before the announcement (according to Slate).

In any case, choosing Palin also fits quite neatly with McCain's plan to lift the ban on off-shoring in Alaska and his wider energy goals of reducing US consumption of foreign oil. What better advocate in Washington for off-shoring in Alaska than a vice from that state?

Alaska is a pinprick in US oil consumption and drilling in Alaska is not a solution to the growing international demand, dwindling global oil resources or US national security (if dependence on foreign oil is considered a national security issue). According to the Energy Information Administration's statistics that were released on 28 August 2008 with regard to US oil imports:

"The top five exporting countries accounted for 65 percent of United States crude oil imports in June while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 86 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports."

And here are your top ten:
Canada
Saudi Arabia
Mexico
Venezuela
Nigeria
Iraq
Angola
Brazil
Nigeria
Russia

Where is the logic in drilling Alaska when almost all your oil is foreign anyway? Its impossible for Alaskan oil to prop up the US economy on its own. Besides, oil is a dwindling resource and the only long-term sustainable solutions are renewables and, in the short-term, temporary fuel alternatives. McCain should face it: more drilling is a ridiculous goal and completely out of touch with reality and the future of United States in an interdependent world. McCain doesn't seem to understand the very basics of global energy interdependence - it means that energy independence or 'economic self-sufficiency' is not an option anymore.

P.S. I recommend McCain visit the Environmental Defense Fund for a more nuanced interpretataion on how exactly the cap-and-trade system can work to reduce carbon emissions. He can also just read the EDF's book 'Earth: The Sequel' on how to make the US environmentally sustainable. Cap-and-trade is the beginning to a long road ahead.

Big Tobacco African bottom line?

{also to be found at Kenya Imagine - 09/07/2008}

Duncan Bannatyne, famous in the UK for his dour attitude and sarcasm as one of the Dragons in the UK television show Dragon's Den recently put out ‘Bannatyne takes on Big Tobacco' on the BBC.

In Dragon's Den Bannatyne is one of a bench of investor judges at whom entrepreneurs pitch business ideas with the aim of securing investment and partnerships. In Bannatyne takes on Big Tobacco, his energies are spent instead on a most laudable personal activism against a particular type of business, Big Tobacco in Africa. The BBC programme in the link is available only to UK residents and YouTube has a very short preview here. If you find you are still unsatisfied, there's this article on the Guardian blog.

Whilst it is true that Duncan Bannatyne is not a documentary film-maker and that his account does indeed 'lack teeth', the premise of the argument and the investment he has made to get his message out is laudable.

Naturally, British American Tobacco (BAT), the bogey-man of Bannatyne's rant has released a statement on just how biased and unfair his programme is.

Tackling the BAT release point by point

British American Tobacco asserts that the BBC documentary was not a fair, impartial or balanced portrayal as required by the BBC charter.

"By the producers' own admission, it was "a personal view", putting across very strong opinions, subjective views and judgements made by one individual, a TV personality called Duncan Bannatyne, who has a campaigning anti-tobacco stance,"

Yes, this is true but, that is not to say that it doesn't serve the interest of a public agenda - the public agenda which the BBC serves because of its stakeholder's, the public - who not only own the broadcaster but who also fund it through their TV licence payments. In particular, the case can be made that the BBC should also aim to promote public good. Smokers are an increasingly small minority in the UK and a vigorous health campaign by the government has been stigmatizing smoking as socially unacceptable, especially because of the great cost to the public health service. It is also clear that one year on from the onset of the smoking ban here, Bannantyne's 'personal view as an activist' carries with it great moral weight. Just such activism as is displayed in the documentary led to the ban and subsequently to the more than 400,000 smokers who gave up the habit in its first year.

That Bannantyne needs to balance the smoking industry's bias, effectively its sales pitch and lobbying, with an equally strong counter-bias in his anti-smoking campaign, highlights the difficulty of the battle for objectivity in this debate. It also highlights how endemic the belief that smoking is merely 'a personal choice' and not an addiction, has become in society.

"Our marketing is not aimed at ‘selling smoking',

This is patently untrue, pure spin and semantics. When your marketing is aimed at selling more cigarettes, to say that you are not selling smoking when you are selling cigarettes is like saying you are selling dynamite but not explosions. What else could one do with a cigarette?

"BAT does not sell single cigarettes,"

Fine, they don't do so directly, and we can agree on this. Still, BAT fails to address Bannantyne's criticism of BAT branded posters that advertise and display a pricing structure for single cigarette sticks.

"We try to educate retailers about the law and that they should never sell to children".

This is precisely the problem, this effort, this trying, cannot be quantified, what is clear from Bannatyne's journey and his interviews of people in Mauritius, Nigeria and Malawi is that children make a sizeable number of the tobacco company's clients. Trying is not enough any more - you either have ethical codes and follow through with them by not supplying cigarettes to countries who don't have sufficient laws and structures in place to protect the youth, or else you are tacitly supporting the sale of cigarettes to children. There is no such thing in such crucial matters as trying, it is a simple question of either/or.

"The sale of single cigarettes in countries where it is done, is not illegal," they say.

In the globalised business world, every corporation is itself responsible for the conduct of its subsidiaries, wherever they are. The absence of sanctions against certain codes, or weak enforcement mechanisms are not shields against a company's obligations to uphold such ethical codes as it promulgates as core to its business. If the BAT's internal marketing regulations and codes of conduct prohibit the sale of single cigarettes, it is unethical of the company to hide behind legal extenuations. Precedents on this and other aspects of a corporation's, even a multi-national one's, social responsibility were already set with regard to sweatshops and child labour.

More than these obvious failings, the BAT press release does not address a number of additional aspects that were highlighted in the film, including: its pamphlets depicting cigarettes as progressive and aspirational; the fact that brand awareness without advertising has taken root through other marketing initiatives; and the fact that advertising posters displayed prices on them. These of course directly contradicts any statements that they are not selling single cigarettes.

To inhibit this exploitation of the Third World, it is necessary that public awareness of the issue is promoted. This is not without challenges, much like the campaign pointing out the health risks associated with smoking, pushing for an informed public with regard to the negative impacts of smoking on children abroad is likely to generate a wave of antipathy. 'Smokers' it seems don't have a rational attitude to the chain of effects their addiction has on vulnerable people around the world. Bannatyne's documentary, specially prepared for the British market looks to make that chain evident and it should be shocking, even to smokers.

The bottom line is, cigarette smoking costs lives and it is up to governments and people to find a way to incentivise the tobacco industry to drop the crop and invest its money in ventures for the progression of human activity, not its destruction. Skimming through the Corporate Social Responsibility Report of BAT is looking through a universe of contradictions - how can promoting smoking be sustainable and responsible when it contributes to large-scale premature death and has potentially dangerous effects on human evolution?

"Like Duncan Bannatyne, we really do not want children to smoke, but sadly, we don't think this programme ever really got to grips with effective ways to prevent this from happening," BAT concludes.

BAT shareholders, some of whom Bannatyne confronted in his documentary should seek to agitate for their corporation's evolution away from tobacco and cigrattes. They cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the effects of the trade that yields them their dividenda, not even if the tobacco industry persists in messaging against the known effects of tobacco, branding it a matter of 'personal choice'.

There is not much of a choice when you are brainwashed as an impressionable child into taking up smoking; you don't have a choice anymore if you actually believe your life will hang in the balance without the cigarette, if you believe that social acceptability hinges on your taking up the habit. There is little choice when confronting psychological trauma that requires sustained and prolongued insight to change.

It's time for the industry to take responsibility, reorganise their efforts and decide to make money in a responsible fashion. It created the market and profitted massively from it. It can also undo the market over time: don't abdicate, innovate.

Lieber Man, are you kidding?

Seriously, I haven't been back in a while to write something but this piece of news aggravated me slightly...

With a about 40 news alerts coming in about who might be the vice presidential candidates of choice for Barack and McCain, some of the stories are just too incredulous to mention. But this interview with Lieberman is worthy of consideration because after all, if Lieberman gets the No.2 spot on McCain's ticket you're going to be hearing a whole lot of this sort of giraffe-high nonsense - leaves plucked at random out of a tree and then driveled irresponsibly the news:

Lieberman: Al Qaeda, Iran would control Iraq

Facebook: a response to Hodgkinson

Mr Hodgkinson's article 'With friend's like these...' is more a hodgepodge of corporate relationships and how they might pertain to the philosophical discourse of Facebook rather than a genuine discussion of what detrimental impact Facebook has on societal behaviour. His exploration of who's pulling the strings of our privacy is like pulling a good tooth from a decaying mouth.

I received an email from a friend with the article this morning and it angered me to the extent that I just had to write something.

First of all, 'isolation and computers' has been a central theme in social history and forms an integral part of that stereotype we've all come to know: the computer nerd. Didn't we also think that watching too much television led to isolation and societal impotence? Our 'computer nerd' who now has a new life on Facebook also has real-life friends who don't want to interact with his neurotic personality in person. These friends can reach out and build a relationship which is conducive and bearable for both. Hear this: Facebook is a computer nerd's only way to build some semblance of social skills that are transferable into real-life; giving him something techie yet acceptable to talk about in in face-to-face situations.

So much for my mockery of the negative effects of social networking. But Hodgkinson contradicts himself in several instances. Here just one example of Mr 'Hodgepodge': "why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of super-geeks in California?", in one sentence and later on claims that, "Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway." If I could put these confusion into words it would be called, erm, hodgepodge.

Let's face it: Facebook is a not a book and there are no real faces involved in it at all - merely pictures of faces and imaginations of what people think and feel they are. It is a tool to disguise, fake or make-up/makeup an online identity which amounts to increased individualism on the one hand and personal confusion for those of us who have a profoundly disturbing as well as limited awareness of self on the other hand. It is pluralism and conformity at once.

Most of all, it is an internet tool where destructive social forces are married with its most positive forces used both wisely, self-destructively, divisively, creatively and ingeniously. For some it fills that 'celebrity gap' and for other it is an easy way to keep the lines of communication open no matter where in the world they might be.

Indeed, it has become a source for positive activism - a change to the 'new world order' - and whilst corporations are harnessing the power of Facebook, NGOs, charities and pressure groups are making 'marketable' use of it too. He says that "clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them?". Just because companies are now latching and harnessing Facebook as a source of brand marketing and product placement it does not mean that Facebook users will allow it - Hodgkinson says that himself, although without much conviction. Who's to say that harnessing social-capital is not worth doing if it helps a cause or awareness?

On another level, Myspace chose to suckle on the corporate nipple and has now completely lost appeal to those users among us who looked to a wholesome experience in social-networking - an experience that retained some semblance of independence. Facebook is tampering with a large group of users who will pack up and leave if they feel they are being bugged by too much advertising and 'the corporation'. So far, choice-by-choice ads have begun to appear but are confined to a side-like bar on a blog - take it any further and Facebook will remain a fad - if that isn't what it is already becoming despite the growing number of users.

Mr Hodgkinson should be worrying not about some pimply boys who came up with a good idea and were then consequently funded by right-wingers but see, that liberals failed to capitalise on the wondrous market that is Facebook and are just coming late to the game. Saying that the internet is immensely appealing to Neocons is like hypothesizing that Facebook would have appealed to John Locke because it promoted individual freedoms.

I'm not going to deconstruct his entire article word for word but merely ask him to take a look at where our privacy is really at stake? People are voluntarily laying down their private lives to the scrutiny of others on Facebook and your choice not to join might reflect your desire not to be at the mercy of prying eyes. Just remember next time you go to the bank, swipe your credit card, talk to someone over the phone or call the AA (car break-down service): you can be heard and listened to anywhere in the world at anytime and that you have already surrendered your identity to the second, third and the fourth estate in this day and age of digital surveillance. In all the noise that is generated involuntarily by your existence in the information age, if you so will the argument, Facebook reclaims individual privacy by making it self-surrendered privacy.

I am at a loss when I read flaming-liberals who imply 'off-the-cuff' that the air-conditioning stands in the way of them and reconnecting with nature. I'm at a loss with my friends who are not joining Facebook for reasons that Hodgkinson outlines, especially, when such friends work in corporate self-serving industries that compound the privacy problem more than seek to alleviate it whilst hibernating in their condos in California.

In all seriousness, is Facebook really the philosophical evil-doer of big-brother-o-philes or is it an internet tool whose all-encompassing take-over bid for the world is somewhat limited to its 59 million plus users who make up about 4% of internet users worldwide? Besides, if you're so worried about your civil liberties my advice is: stay indoors, don't travel and by all means, don't talk to anyone, grow your own vegetables and don't buy anything from anyone.