Madam Miaow on BBC World Service TV: China and Copenhagen Opening Day

Anna Chen in the studio for the BBC World Service "World Have Your Say" programme on the first day of the Copenhagen climate conference, Monday 7th December 2009.

Posted at YouTube in three parts.

World Have Your Say: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMXCfnju6c



World Have Your Say: Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJVdKb5N-o8


World Have Your Say: Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNeA8WZ6TyY


Read Madam Miaow on China, Copenhagen and climate change

UPDATE: Anna Chen on BBC World TV on the final day of the Copenhagen summit

Madam Miaow on BBC World Service TV: China and Copenhagen

Anna Chen in the studio for the BBC World Service "World Have Your Say" programme on the first day of the Copenhagen climate conference, Monday 7th December 2009.

Posted at YouTube in three parts.

World Have Your Say: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMXCfnju6c



World Have Your Say: Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJVdKb5N-o8


World Have Your Say: Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNeA8WZ6TyY


Read Madam Miaow on China, Copenhagen and climate change

UPDATE: Anna Chen on BBC World TV on the final day of the Copenhagen summit

China, Copenhagen and climate change

Monday sees the start of the Copenhagen climate conference, marking the end of a two-year period which aims to see a far-reaching and legally binding global agreement on how to combat climate change.

China is widely regarded as the Big Bad in this scenario, called “the world's biggest polluter”, and yet the West has been belching out carbon emissions for 160 years with no serious sign of abatement. The US is still the biggest polluter per capita with Americans still consuming a huge proportion of the world’s resources. I don’t know whether the figure of one American kid consuming the same as 100 Bangladeshi children still holds true, but the nation that wants gas at ten cents a gallon and persists in its divine right to drive Humvees is telling China to shut the fridge door.

That is not to say that China isn’t storing up some massive problems for itself if things stay the same. When I was taken around China with my family in the 1970s, everyone rode bicycles and the air of the cities was pristine. Now it’s so bad that one Chinese filmmaker was telling me that she had to get out of Shanghai after three weeks because her lungs were packing up.

But, no, China is whipping boy for the failures of the developed world to sort out the mess they made. Never mind that one of the G8 group of industrialized nations is doing its best to sink any agreement. Canada is currently sitting on the planet’s second largest oil reserves which it plans to release into the markets and the atmosphere, and is the first Kyoto signatory to renege on the deal. Also implicated in these Canadian plans are Shell, BP and RBS. Our RBS.

In contrast, Chinese President Hu Jintao signaled a change in policy in September, promising a "notable" decrease in the carbon intensity of China's economy by 2020.

"At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world," Hu said. "Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change."

Hu added that his country would plant forests across an area the size of Norway, and generate 15% of its energy needs from renewables within a decade.

China hasn’t given detailed figures as to how this will be achieved and I trust that environmentalists within and without will keep up the pressure until it does. I am, however, optimistic that China will end up leading the world in renewables technology if only for the reason that this is going to be a major global industry and fortunes stand to be made.

China has introduced a whole slew of newly released renewable energy and clean technology regulations, while all the West can come up with are delusional carbon market exchanges where rich nations buy carbon allowances from poor nations. Over five million people in the city of Dezhou, Shandong, use electric appliances powered by solar energy.

Each Chinese household will be expected to pay the annual equivalent of $64 to contribute towards the $30 billion dollars per year China needs to invest to meet its climate aims.

Let’s hope they succeed where we’ve failed. If not, China will have let us all down and helped finish the global destruction we started 160 years ago with the industrial revolution.

Ultimately, production based on need not greed is the only way out.

UK flood map here

Babeuf has just sent me the Wikipedia list of countries by carbon emissions per capita showing that Qatar is number 1, the US is number 9, and China is number 96.

UPDATE: George Monbiot on the climate change deniers.

Madam Miaow (Anna Chen) appears on BBC World Service TV tomorrow (Monday 7th December 2009) to discuss Copenhagen on "World Have Your Say" at 15:30-16:00. Also on World Service radio later in the evening. Can't watch it live in theUK but the BBC will be putting it on YouTube in a few hours, linked at worldhaveyoursay.com. The radio can be listened to on BBC iPlayer.

Sinophobia and the media following Copenhagen

Madam Miaow banned in the Guardian, Comment is Free. But speech isn't.

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!

Apocalypse Wow! 2012 film review

Caught the blockbuster disaster movie 2012 last night having been attracted by the wall-size cut-outs of California tipping into the sea on display at my local Odeon. Hollywood does the date-sensitive apocalypse predicted by various sects and dishes up a full meat feast for the eyes.

Unfortunately, this is a film realised by giants and scripted by midgets. It's directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, so you know it looks good. But as usual, the CGI teams walk away with the accolades while the writers take the walk of shame as the weakest link.

Unusual solar flare activity is discovered to be causing the Earth's crust to shift disastrously as the centre heats up like a microwave oven, raising volcanic activity to primordial levels. As tectonic plates sink into the planet's molten magma a host of Hollywood stars are wiped out by a geological smorgasboard of earthquakes and super-tsunami. Audiences end up playing guess-who'll-be-around-for-the-end-credits with John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover (a black president, no less) and Woody Harrelson all vying for survival.

Who can fail to be thrilled by the brilliant effects as California slides into the Pacific Ocean and the world as we know it is destroyed by forces of nature beyond our puny control? Current American anxieties about a world turning upside down are presented in sci-fi form — literally in the case of the north and south poles being reversed with the south pole shifted to Wisconsin. (Hey, I have friends who moved to Wisconsin but they're coming back home to Old Blighty.) But the characterisation is featherweight and it feels like the filmmakers didn't know which tone to strike: a light-hearted Indiana Jones-style series of near-death adventures, or a sombre philosophical exploration of all our deepest existential fears as humanity and its decrepit offspring of capitalism lurch towards a horrible end.

Divorced author and part-time limo driver for Russian oligarchs Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) and his cute kids, Noah and Lily (geddit?) repeatedly escape imminent death by fleeing in an assortment of boy-toy cars and planes while chased by a mightily pissed off Mother Nature who harbours what looks like a personal vendetta against our little nuclear family. Roads and runways tear up behind their getaway vehicles, the Yellowstone Park caldera erupts all over him, but he can always miraculously outrun and outwit natural forces. These scenes are spectacular but silly and prove the law of diminishing returns: after the umpteenth time he cheats death, courtesy of the CGI maestros, you cease to care.

Curtis may be facing the elimination of the species but the family is a sacred institution so he has to restore equiibrium by getting his wife back. Human extinction is just an exciting background to getting the nuclear family, under threat from a hostile world, functioning as normal: Mummy, Daddy, two kids and a yappy dog. His final trial is to outlive the final biblical flood which engulfs Mount Everest, even. (Is there actually enough sea water to do this?) He does. Were we ever in any doubt?

I found the callousness of the film pretty disturbing. After all, while Curtis is being cute and avoiding wipe-out in scenarios reminiscent of fairground rides, you see people dying all around him. And yet the characters give no response. The deaths have no significance except to add a bit of colour. So much for no man being an island and us being part of the continent — the continent is crumbling and it's every man, woman, child and dog for themselves.

Reflecting a real-life tectonic shift in values, only those in 2012 with mega-money to buy themselves out of the situation stand a chance of survival: a billion euros for a seat aboard one of the vast "arks" being built secretly in Tibet by the Chinese ('coz it's the roof of the world, innit?). A bit like the current stratum of super-rich cleaving off from the rest of society, leaving us behind while they start wars, hoover up billions and treat themselves to million pound handbags.

Croesus wept! I mean, g'bye Dubai in the real world, that monument to selfishness and stupidity. Man-made islands built by slave labour, desalinated water shipped in so you can fill your swimming pool and play golf in one of the most arid areas of the world. No wonder some Supreme Force took one look that is the affront that is the palm-shaped island complex and the two-fingered salute of the tallest towers in the world and said, "Right, matey! I'm 'avin' ya!" (Is it coz I is Cockney?) Dubai's economic implosion may very well take us down with it.

I was shocked to read this week that so great is the wealth gap that the Fabian Society is warning that we are headed for Victorian-style poverty in the UK. In the world of the movie, we are all stuffed while the richest 400,000 human beings get to repopulate the planet in a novel form of de-evolution. Do you see what they did there?

BTW, I am writing this during yet another broadband outage at the Virgin server. A small taste of the end of civilisation to come, and it's very annoying!!!

John Mendelsohn: "My Country Tortured" video song

I just received the above from my friend, John Mendelsohn (Christopher Milk, Sparks, critic on Rolling Stone).

John wrote and performed My Country Tortured, a haunting song about the realisation of what America did under the Bush administration.

Another excellent track is The Afghanistan Song by Superbia, a two-man outfit I met at the St Ives Arts Festival in September. I have the band's permission to post it here but Blogger appears not to have the facility to upload mp3s.

In the meantime, please enjoy John's musical comment.