(This blogpost has been slightly revised from the form in which it first appeared in response to a useful suggestion e-mailed in from a reader.)

Let’s say you’re a big European polluter, content with the status quo you’ve been used to for decades that allows you to pump out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you like at virtually no cost to your bottom-line. In 2010, though, it’s easy to see how this sort of laissez-faire is not long for a world ever-more aware and convinced of the detrimental effects of such emissions on the global climate. And while local/national measures to make you pay for your pollution are always unwelcome, the authorities who impose them will always be constrained by the fact that hampering companies under their jurisdiction this way raises their costs and so cuts down on their international competitiveness as long as other countries refrain from doing anything similar. No, the real threat to pollution-as-usual is any global anti-climate change accord.

What to do? Launching an appeal to your national or EU-level representatives – “Hey, could you slow it down a bit with the climate change stuff?” – isn’t going to work, since their job-description is the furthering of common interests over the parochial, and you and your CO2-emitting technology are definitely on the wrong side of History. But maybe there are some more imaginative measures available . . .

Consider today’s report from the French press-agency AFP (discussed among other places on the Swiss news website 24heures), on some innovative lobbying efforts being undertaken on the part of a consortium of leading European industrial firms – within the US federal government! Specifically, the article details how representatives in their employ have approached four US Senators famous for being global warming deniers to contribute money to their political funds, totalling $306,000 this year, to support their anti-climate change efforts – in the first instance their fight against any sort of “cap-and-trade” pollution-control regime. And then, in a nice cynical twist, these companies have then turned around to argue to European authorities that it makes no sense to push for any global climate-change measures now, because it is by no means certain that the US government will come on board!

Naturally, these firms – among which the largest monetary contributions come from the German companies Bayer and BASF – wanted to do this all secretly, but their dastardly deeds have now been exposed by the Climate Action Network (CAN), a international umbrella-organization encompassing around 500 climate/ecology NGOs, whose researchers took the trouble simply to read the mid-October report from the US Federal Election Commission that details which candidates got how much money from whom, and then to do a little arithmetic. The CAN report even pins the blame for the failure of the COP15 climate summit last December in Copenhagen on a reluctance for any accord on the part of President Obama and his administration that supposedly had been cultivated by these underhanded lobbying efforts.

That last assertion, of course, is rather doubtful; I’ll need much further proof than that before I’ll start believing that Obama was, in effect, on the take at that Copenhagen summit. Beyond that, though, these CAN charges as publicized by the AFP ultimately fall rather flat under any sort of closer examination. For starters, that alleged amount of $306,000 in combined campaign contributions to four Senators in 2010 (an average of $76,500 per Senator) is rather low on the Washington political-contribution scale. It’s highly doubtful that they really got much in exchange for that amount, besides maybe a brief visit to the lawmaker’s Capitol Hill office, a post-on-your-wall photo shaking hands with the politico, and maybe a set of state-seal-embossed ink-pens. (Admittedly, there’s no mention in the article of the amounts they may have paid in previous years.)

Secondly, it’s clear that the lobbyists in the employ of these European companies are behind the times, that they have not kept up with the new political rules resulting from last January’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case that declared corporations equivalent to private persons when it comes to political speech, and thereby enabled unlimited and anonymous contributions to political campaigns – if not directly to candidates, then to “independent” political advocacy organizations ready to spend money and advertise on specific candidates’ behalf. The European companies could have given as much as they wanted to their favorite US senators, albeit indirectly, and would never have had to worry about anyone from the general public (European or American) hearing about it, if they only had been better-advised. For heavens’ sake, gentlemen, call Karl Rove!

The impact these CAN revelations should ultimately have is therefore much like watching a youngster steal from the Church collection-plate: it’s a trivial offense in itself, but does indicate in the perpetrator the sort of crooked disposition and intent that definitely bear further monitoring.

UPDATE: Look, Europolluters, let me help you out – or rather let former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson do so (in Foreign Money, National Security, and the Midterm Elections). He’s writing here about the Citizens United decision, of course; here are some extracts to give you a flavor:

We have effectively enfranchised foreigners in US elections. This is clearly and absolutely not what the drafters of the Constitutions [sic] had in mind. . . . And however you prefer to define our legitimate national security interests, how are they consistent with letting foreign citizens influence or even determine the outcome of our elections?

No joke, this – at least the report comes from the respected Dutch newspaper Trouw, not known for putting out spoof articles. The lede:

Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has called upon the world to boycott American goods and the dollar, because the US and other Western lands, according to him, are guilty of global warming. That is on a tape-recording that the television station Al-Jazeera played on Friday [today].

Yes, according to Osama the US economy must be brought to a halt if global warming is to be stopped. You’ll admit he is starting to get a bit more innovative now with his propaganda angles, what with this new “green” direction – although you should also keep in mind that the authenticity of this latest alleged cave-missive has not yet been verified.

UPDATE: Renowned Middle East blogger Prof. Juan Cole accepts that that latest Bin Laden message is for real, and in an extended blogpost highlights the Saudi fugitive’s hypocrisy, detailing how “[g]lobal terrorism is a high-carbon activity and very bad for the environment, not to mention humans and other living things.” (Some of you of proper age will hear in his word-choice a distinctive 1960s-echo that surely could not have gone unintended.)

I’ve got some good news for you, and some bad news.

It has to do with global warming, and since this is my weblog, I get to decide that I’m going to give you the bad news first. You probably didn’t hear about this – I know that I didn’t – but this past week has seen the World Climate Conference – 3 take place in Geneva, Switzerland. Journalist Richard Heuzé of the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro provides coverage and, as you can well imagine, the outlook is not good. It’s so “not good” that the conference participants had a wide array of things to choose from for panicking about.

On this particular occasion they happened to concentrate their foreboding on the state of the Arctic. Put simply, it’s much too warm there already. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon spoke to the conference just after actually conducting – as Heuzé puts it – his own “inspection tour of the North Pole,” and his tidings were dire. “The Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the Earth. There could be no more ice there in 2030.” One rather daunting result of that could be the unleashing of a positive-feedback effect that would cause the global warming process to accelerate, whereby the warming Arctic permafrost releases massive amounts of heretofore trapped methane gas into the atmosphere, which traps heat at the Earth’s surface even more effectively. (more…)

Pangnirtung: ever heard of it? The Wikipedia article claims it is known as the “Switzerland of the Arctic”; its mayor goes by the marvelous name of “Mosesee Qappik.” For our purposes here, though, all we need to know – besides the comforting fact that it’s OK just to call it “Pang” – is that it’s an Inuit town located on the Arctic Circle, on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut – and one that finds itself on the front line of world climate change. Le Monde correspondent Martine Jacot recently paid a visit to Pang to write about what is going on there (In the Arctic, the Inuits dread the network-effects of climate change); as world leaders haggle at the G8 in Italy over ceilings for temperature-rises and quotas for greenhouse gas emissions, it might be handy to consider for a bit what these people are going through already.

“Here as elsewhere in the Canadian Arctic,” states Ron Mongeau, a local government administrator, “climatic warming is not an illusion or a threat. Every day, it affects those who live there, who are dependent on hunting and fishing.” The average temperature there has indeed gone up by 1.4 degrees (that must be ºC) since the nineties, and the summer temperature has exceeded what used to be the hottest measurement on record (22ºC) five years in a row now.

OK OK, but what does that really mean on the ground – where the caribou’s hoof hits the road, so to speak? Well, speaking of, the caribou are all messed up about what is happening: during their autumn migrations they now find too many rivers not yet frozen-over, as they expect them to be from the past, and so have had to take wide detours. As for the humans living in the area (keep in mind, though, that they’re certainly outnumbered by the caribou), it seems everything they thought they knew about how their weather was supposed to be, year-round, has gone out the window. This past winter was somehow the coldest that anyone could remember; spring of 2008, however, was much warmer than usual, something that resulted in a “wall of water” flood hitting the town in June, after which the inhabitants had to live for months with potable water only available from trucks. Instances have now multiplied of snowmobiles traversing areas of snow and ice that turn out to be much softer than expected, so that both machine and rider get entrapped and have to be rescued, and everyone is afraid that the warmed-up soil will weaken the foundations of their buildings.

On the bright side, at least the Pangnirtung Fjord upon which the town is situated is now always ice-free in the summer, so that cruise ships have now made the place a regular stop on their itinerary. Many of those rich tourists like to visit in the first place to fish for the Arctic char (related to the salmon, and whose red/pink flesh is a rare delicacy), but the char population has noticeably thinned out lately because the warmer waters are no longer so suitable for the Arctic shrimp upon which they feed.

UPDATE: Here’s a related piece in English, about how they’re already having to cope with global warming in Greenland, from Yahoo! News (h/t to Some Assembly Required).

Whatever happened to the Zuiderzee?

Literally the “South Sea,” this was a characteristic geographic feature of Holland that many of you may have caught mention of when reading about Rembrandt, say, or about the Dutch East India Company (or, for that matter, the Dutch West India Company), whose ships generally set sail from Amsterdam through the Zuiderzee on their way to found/supply/exploit the various Dutch colonies in the world.

But you don’t hear about the Zuiderzee nowadays, and that’s for a good reason: it was eliminated back in 1933. No, that big body of water lying in the middle of the Netherlands did not just dry up, but in that year it was rather cut off from the North Sea and turned into basically a big lake by a modern and uniquely Dutch engineering marvel, the Afsluitdijk, or “Closure Dike,” spanning 32 km/20 miles from the provinces of North Holland in the West to Friesland in the East. The Zuiderzee was at that point renamed the IJsselmeer (after the IJssel, the main river to run into it) and slowly but surely turned into a fresh-water lake. (more…)

Department of Confirmation of Things You Already Realized: The Belgian newspaper De Morgen has an article out today about how Western Europe is at the front of the Global Warming pack, with average temperatures here having risen since the 1950s at least twice as much as those in the rest of the world. (The article’s headling speaks of Belgium – Belgium Warming Up Twice As Fast as the Rest of the World – because De Morgen writes for its Belgian audience, but it quickly qualifies the area it is talking about as “the area from France to Poland.” You already knew that Belgium was a unique sort of hard-luck state – see for example the Dutch-French speaker dispute threatening to tear it apart – but even still, you didn’t really think that it could experience such temperature patterns all by itself, like it has some permanent black cloud of misfortune hovering over its territory?) (more…)

“Whomever US citizens may choose: Europeans will wake up next year on a cold January morning – and find before them a government whose foreign policy decisions, although presented in new clothes, will appear almost like those customary to Bush.” That is the conclusion German-language readers of Spiegel Online get to digest today, in an article entitled Bush Leaves – His Foreign Policy Stays.

Crucially, though, take a look at who is the author: it is a certain Peter Ross Range, whose credentials are given in a short sidebar on the article’s first page: long-time Time magazine foreign correspondent, then editor-in-chief of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council – in short, in all probability an American. That means this article is intended to be a warning from the west side of the Atlantic to the east, not to expect much to change in US policy with the next administration. (more…)

Over here on the European continent we perhaps a bit self-righteously presume that we’re in a somewhat better position to act against global warning – and to deal with the inevitable coming gasoline price-hikes, whether there is a war with Iran or no – than, say, North America due to a transport network that is not so predicated on the personal automobile. But then the German newspaper-of-record, the FAZ, comes out like it did today with an article entitled Train Travel Does Not Protect the Environment. (more…)