All this shows it’s now official: the environment has been big business worldwide for years, with giants like GE and WalMart firmly seated on the green bandwagon; now it is key to mass-market politics too. In America “there has been a sea change in public opinion,” says Anthony Leiserovitz, an expert on the politics of environmentalism at Yale. John Edwards has promised to end America’s oil addiction and to create a million new “green-collar” jobs in enviro-friendly industries. Hillary Clinton has proposed spending a billion dollars to retrofit energy-wasting homes. And even some conservatives are getting in on the game. German chancellor Angela Merkel went on a highly publicized glacier tour in Greenland this summer before announcing she’d make climate change the priority for the rest of her term.
Rudd’s election ratifies a shift to a new kind of climate-change-driven green politics that has little to do with the tree-hugging environmentalism of old. While he favors cutting emissions and switching to renewable energy, Rudd has also promised to veto restrictions on logging in Australia’s remaining old-growth forests, out of fear of endangering jobs. This kind of balance provides an attractive model. In Canada last week, opposition leader Jack Layton of the New Democrats announced that he’ll campaign on a platform modeled on Rudd’s.
Ironically, the biggest losers are the real Green Parties, who are seeing their thunder stolen by mainstream pols. In Australia, the Greens won no seats last week. Germany’s Greens have been kicked out of the government, and with the two main parties now competing over who is greenest, the Greens have turned to defending the welfare state instead. Of course, whether the new policies are well thought out or just geared to appeal to voters and interest groups (think America’s corn ethanol producers) is an entirely different question. What has become clear is that going green is now a viable path to real power.
‘P.M. Bean’ Safe as houses: This was Gordon Brown’s defining strength, as a chancellor who presided over rock-steady prosperity. But in September the bad news began: a run on an ailing British bank, the disappearance of financial data on 25 million Britons and, last week, charges of unlawful donations from a property developer to Brown’s Labour Party. Then, as the defensive P.M. faced Parliament, Liberal Democrat Vincent Cable noted this “remarkable transformation in the past few weeks from Stalin to Mr. Bean—creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.” Brown seems likely to survive in office, but the core of his reputation—financial competence—is increasingly under threat. Britain’s estimated GDP growth rate is slowing to about 2 percent. Home prices in October experienced their steepest decline since 1995. Suddenly houses don’t look quite as safe.
The Blue Jailers A political prisoner of the United Nations? That’s what Albin Kurti and his supporters believe he has become. The 32-year-old Kosovar Albanian has been a thorn in the side of the United Nations mission in Kosovo for years, demanding a referendum on independence for Kosovo and a timetable for the U.N.’s departure. In February, he helped organize a pro-independence rally in which police shot and killed two protesters. Ever since, he’s been held under the authority of the U.N., charged with illegally organizing a crowd and obstructing justice. But human-rights groups say the charges and the judicial process look dubious, with no clear line between the prosecution and judiciary. For instance, prosecutors work in the same offices as judges, says Julie Chadbourne, at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. “There are indications [this case] is not on the up and up,” she says. “There are questions that Kurti is being brought forward as a scapegoat.”
Many Kosovars argue this is all an attempt to muzzle Kurti ahead of the Dec. 10 release of the U.N. mission’s final report on Kosovo independence to the Security Council. “They see me as an obstacle,” says Kurti. But Russell Geekie, a U.N. spokesman in Kosovo, denies Kurti is a political prisoner. He says the Kosovo judiciary is independent, and Kurti is using the case for his own political advantage. Kurti is due in court Dec. 4 and it looks like his case could drag on indefinitely. Just like the fight over independence.
Reality Check The United States and China are the biggest-polluting countries, but Australians are the heaviest-polluting people. Australians emit the most CO2 per capita—10 tons per person—according to the Center for Global Development, based on a pioneering study of 50,000 power stations around the world. Americans are second (8.2 tons), the British are third (3.2 tons) and the Chinese come in a distant fourth (1.8 tons).
Gore’s Green Dream Al Gore won a Nobel for environmental activism, but he also knows another kind of green. The former vice president had $1 million in the bank in 2000—now his net worth is more than $100 million. He’s an adviser to Google, a board member at Apple and a new partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He pledged his KP “salary” to Alliance for Climate Protection, but if he’s like KP’s other partners, he may get tens of millions more when start-ups go public or are sold. The move is another signal his politician days are over. KP is notoriously secretive, so unlikely to bring in Gore if it led to public scrutiny. And with all that money, why run for president?
Fast Chat: Smile For The Camera The notion that we’re watched at all times has yet to sink in. That’s what makes Adam Rifkin’s new film, “Look,” so shocking. Shot entirely through the point of view of security cameras, the film shows how public our private lives have become. Its characters are connected by surveillance footage that determines their destinies. Producer Barry Schuler, the former head of AOL, spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Jessica Bennett:
What inspired this film? We’re on camera nearly 200 times a day [in the United States], and those images are digitized and archived forever. Nobody’s stopping to ask questions about its propriety.
What should we be asking? Is it OK to have surveillance in bathrooms and dressing rooms? Shouldn’t there be some kind of disclosure?
If surveillance is a breach of privacy, why is there support? People see the lens, and I think it creates a sense of security. But I don’t believe there’s any real understanding of the power of this technology and its loose rules.
The Graphic Future Set in 2011, Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s “Shooting War” is a stunning graphic novel that skewers the war on terror, Islamic jihad, the mainstream media and the blogosphere in one fell swoop. Eighteen months after its debut as a serialized Web comic, it hit bookstores this month as a 192-page, hardcover version. Lappé, a documentary producer and freelance writer, began kicking around the idea in 2005 for a fictional project satirizing the war on terror. He toyed with doing a screenplay, and thought about writing a novel, but he knew he didn’t have it in him. He had a general story line: young blogger gets sent to Iraq as a big-media war correspondent.
A friend suggested he do it as a graphic novel. Lappé soon hooked up with graphic artist Goldman, and in May 2006 they began serializing the story as a weekly Web comic. It quickly gained a regular audience of more than 100,000 and got the attention of publishers. Lappé’s next work will likely go to press much quicker; the market for book-format comics in the United States exploded from $100 million in 2001 to $330 million last year.
