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...goals are weaker than those of Obama or Clinton - who call for 80% reductions by 2050, in line with recommendations from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and weaker than the Warner-Lieberman bill, which is seen by many environmentalists as a compromise unequal to the scale of the cuts needed to avert dangerous warming. Though he didn't make this explicit in his speech, under his cap-and-trade plan McCain would initially give away most of the permits to emit carbon to industries, rather than auctioning them off, as Obama and Clinton would. (This means that...
...military, let alone agreeing to the presence of U.S. Marines on Burmese soil - as Thailand and Indonesia did after the tsunami. The trouble is that the Burmese haven't shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale - and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone's control. "We're in 2008, not 1908," says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. "A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder...
Catastrophes often have a double affect on those blessed enough to survive them. First, there is a numbness as the scale of horror sinks in. But then comes action, as the lucky ones turn to doing what they can to help the less fortunate, and, in time, to ameliorate the conditions that gave rise to disaster in the first place. This second reaction isn't just a personal one - that of neighbors trying to assist those who have been harmed. It can extend to an examination of whole systems of government. The Mexico City earthquake of 1985 was the catalyst...
...partisan Christians: Christ the Catholic will be honored in one church, Christ the Protestant in another. As both sides hymn Christian peace, they are also hesitant and fearful about the prospect of Christian war. For if the truce does not hold and violence erupts on a large enough scale, it will be a religious war as well as a political one, a throwback to the bloody Catholic-Protestant battles that followed the Reformation...
Nevertheless, the government seems to know that a natural disaster on this scale could trigger revolutionary change. Aung Thwin says this could be "a make or break time," and that there have been signs that the regime realizes it will be held accountable for what happens next. At the same time, though, she says they're trying to stage manage the entire process, skirting the fact that even if they do have the will to do what needs to be done, they have neither the capabilities nor the resources to pull it off. For at the heart of the junta...