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First
published on Caglecartoons.com, The Netherlands, August 27, 2019 | By Joep
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Há 21 horas
sábado, 31 de agosto de 2019
Cartoons ... da semana / OVOODOCORVO
'Boris From Bodmin to Berlin, crowds vent their fury at Boris Johnson’s ‘coup’ / VIDEO: Johnson, shame on you': thousands protest against prorogation
From Bodmin
to Berlin, crowds vent their fury at Boris Johnson’s ‘coup’
Protesters
ranged from students at the prime minister’s old Oxford college to retired
teachers, children and activists
Donna
Ferguson, Simon Murphy, Mark Townsend & Tom Wall
Sat 31 Aug
2019 19.30 BST Last modified on Sat 31 Aug 2019 20.40 BST
In
Cambridge’s Market Square, a crowd of families, young people and silver-haired
academics listened as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy was read
out. Many joined in, from memory, making a collective appeal for non-violent
resistance: “Rise, like lions after slumber... Ye are many – they are few.”
There were moments of more garrulous protest too. During a speech criticising
Boris Johnson, someone shouted: “Off with his head!”
From Bodmin
to Berlin, Bristol to Oxford, tens of thousands of people took to the streets
in towns and cities across England, Scotland and Wales on Saturday to vent
their fury at Johnson’s plan to suspend parliament. Around 1,200 people
attended the rally in Cambridge, where they booed the prime minister and his
adviser Dominic Cummings as though they were pantomime villains.
Demonstrations
more than 1,000-strong were seen in cities including Manchester, Newcastle and
York, where a crowd carrying EU and Yorkshire flags convened outside the famous
Bettys tea rooms.
Others were
held in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, outside the British embassy in Latvia’s capital
Riga, and beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In the German capital one
protester waved a banner that read: “The last time this happened, Cromwell
discontinued the custom of kings wearing their heads on their shoulders.”
The anger
was particularly vocal in London. Outside Downing Street, demonstrators chanted
“Shame on you”. Momentum, which backs Jeremy Corbyn, told its 40,000 members to
“occupy bridges and blockade roads”. Within hours, a sizeable group had brought
Trafalgar Square to a standstill by sitting in the road.
Three
retired teachers, Alan Costar, 65, Linda Abbott, 69, and Maureen Loney, 73,
brandished an EU flag and placards reading “defend democracy” and “remain,
reform, revolt”.
Loney, who
has a Slovakian son-in-law, said: “I feel that prorogation is cutting off our
legs for any form of protest and the legs of parliament. I think that Boris
Johnson is trying to hold Europe to ransom.
“What they
actually should be doing is someone with a brain needs to stand up and say:
‘Sorry folks, we actually got it wrong.’ It [leaving the EU] isn’t the best
thing for the country, it never was.”
Costar, who
is half-German, added: “I have a dual-national grand-daughter and I’m here for
her. She’s two-and-a-half.”
In Bristol,
a boisterous 5,000-strong procession marched through the city centre shouting:
“What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now!”, “Boris Johnson, shame
on you” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Boris Johnson’s got to go”.
Many were
old hands, who had been to lots of Remain protests. But others were taking to
the streets for the first time. Will Roberts, 39, who was with his wife and two
children, had preferred to let the democratic process take its course. “I was
disappointed with the result but this is worse than Brexit itself. Hand on
heart, this is really frightening. If you know a bit of history, you’ll know
this is the thin end of the wedge.”
Kevin
Byrne, a retired teacher, said: “I’m 80 and this is the first time I’ve been on
a demonstration. I’m feeling a bit hesitant but what is happening is appalling.
It is against all the democratic principles I’ve been brought up with.”
The prime
minister’s old Oxford college, Balliol, was targeted. Surrounded by
undergraduates, Lesley McKie, 55, said: “Being outside the very institution
where he developed a political profile with students at the college today
denouncing him sends a powerful message to Johnson and the others leading this
coup.”
McKie
added: “I’m here today with my family. My teen daughters deserve to live in a
democracy and we’re here to protest against the undemocratic actions of Boris
Johnson and Dominic Cummings.”
In
Newcastle, Chris McHugh, from Gateshead, said he was attending to “protect
democracy”. The 33-year-old, who works for the Labour MP Liz Twist, said: “The
fact that thousands have taken to the streets of Newcastle today is so telling.
People from all walks of life have come together … there’s a real sense of
unity, whether you voted Leave or Remain, this is about protecting the very
fabric of our democracy.”
Protests
were also held in Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Swansea, Leeds, and Aberdeen.
Jeremy Corbyn addressed large crowds in Glasgow’s George Square, stating: “No
way do you take us out without a deal – we will stop you and give the people
their rights and their say to determine their future.
“[We are]
angered that the government and a prime minister elected by 93,000 members of
the Tory party is trying to hijack the needs, aims and aspirations of 65
million people. Well, think on Boris, it’s not on and we’re not having it.”
In
Cambridge, Jasmina Makljenovic, who is British, was tearful as she said: “This
is about my children and their future. Boris Johnson is dangerous. This is not
how democracy should work. There are dictators everywhere in the world. How on
earth do people think they got into power? This is how it happened: slowly and
gradually. We are like boiled frogs. Slowly we are being cooked and our
freedoms are being taken away.”
Back in
central London, as the protest continued into the late afternoon, demonstrators
outside Downing Street became increasingly creative with their descriptions of
the prime minister. Chants included: “Trump’s puppet, shame on you”, “Liar
Johnson shame on you”, and “Fascist Johnson shame on you.”
Diane
Abbott, the shadow home secretary, spoke from a stage positioned near Downing
Street, saying: “Let me tell you, before too long Jeremy Corbyn will be in 10
Downing Street and Boris will be gone.”
Laura
Parker, national coordinator of Momentum, told protesters: “This is our
democracy and we will not let an unelected prime minister manage this power
grab. He wants to shut the system down and hide … We know where you live, Mr
Johnson.”
Writing in
today’s Observer, Michael Chessum, an organiser of the protests, said they were
merely the start of a national fightback. “We are now witnessing the growth of
a huge movement in defence of democracy. From Monday, we will be protesting
every single day at 5.30pm all over the country. You can join us at stopthecoup.org.uk.”
Further
mass demonstrations, organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, are
planned to take placeon 3 Tuesday to coincide with MPs returning to Westminster
from their summer break.
The
protests were triggered by Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for up to
five weeks before the 31 October Brexit deadline, which opponents say is
designed to stop MPs preventing Britain leaving the EU without a deal.
Ana Telma Rocha sente-se “invisível”. A história da portuguesa que interrompeu o directo da Sky News / Portuguese Brexit woman: Being hit and nearly run over made me risk arrest to protest
Ana Telma Rocha
sente-se “invisível”. A história da portuguesa que interrompeu o directo da Sky
News
Ana Telma Rocha é
a portuguesa que interrompeu o directo da Sky News para falar “apaixonadamente”
sobre o “Brexit”. “Não aguentei mais, tive de sair à rua e falar”, diz a
imigrante, cujo processo de pedido de residência permanente está a ser
acompanhado pelo Estado português.
Sofia Neves 30 de
Agosto de 2019, 21:19
Telma Rocha chegou a casa, já tarde, na
quarta-feira, 28 de Agosto, e escutou a voz da colega de casa, carregada de
sotaque britânico, a pedir-lhe para “não ligar a televisão” ou iria “ter um
ataque cardíaco”. Mesmo depois do pedido “dramático”, ou não fosse a amiga
actriz, Ana decidiu ouvir os jornalistas a relatar o que se tinha passado
durante o dia: Boris Johnson pedira à Rainha Isabel II uma suspensão do
Parlamento britânico durante cinco semanas — e a monarca aceitara.
Horas depois, um
vídeo da portuguesa correu a Internet, passou pelos meios de comunicação
britânicos e espalhou-se pelos portugueses. Ana Telma Rocha, de 42 anos, foi a
imigrante que interrompeu uma entrevista em directo da Sky News, um canal de
televisão britânico, para falar “apaixonadamente” sobre o processo do “Brexit”.
Durante um protesto no centro de Londres, sem se identificar, a mulher
portuguesa cortou a palavra a uma jovem inglesa que estava a ser entrevistada
para dizer que dera “a sua juventude” ao Reino Unido e que não achava correcta
a forma como os cidadãos da União Europeia estavam a ser tratados. “Não
aguentei mais, tive de sair à rua e falar porque as pessoas em Portugal não
estão a perceber o que se está aqui a passar. A imagem que se transmite é que
está tudo calmo. Falei por quem está em situações piores [do que a minha]”,
conta Ana Telma, ao telefone com o P3.
A portuguesa
chegou ali, não àquele lugar em concreto, mas ao país que na altura a acolheu,
há coisa de 20 anos. Quis seguir as pisadas do pai, actor toda a vida — é filha
de António Rocha, o “Rocha” de Duarte & Companhia. Chegou a fazer audições
para o Conservatório Nacional de Teatro, ainda em Portugal, mas depois a sua
vida deu “uma volta de 180 graus” e decidiu ir à procura de outra coisa, “fora
de Lisboa”.
Com um destino,
mas ainda sem propósito, chegou ao Reino Unido quase de mãos a abanar. Ali,
voltou ao teatro, fez formações na área, lavou pratos, serviu às mesas, foi
funcionária de escritório e segurança em vários eventos. Casou com um cidadão
britânico e teve dois filhos, apesar de nenhum dos três viver consigo em
Inglaterra. Fundou ainda a sua companhia de teatro independente — que já soprou
12 velas — e que actua principalmente em festivais porque “os bilhetes são
mais baratos” e Ana Telma “quer que o povo vá ao teatro”.
Depois de “32
empregos diferentes”, decidiu que a profissão de técnica de saúde para pessoas
com deficiência motora, conjugada “sempre” com o teatro, lhe enchia as medidas,
e assim se mantém desde há 16 anos para cá. Até que, por volta de 2016, a
sombra do “Brexit” começou a pairar no país e, diz Ana Telma, alcança,
sobretudo, quem não nasceu no Reino Unido.
Um impasse no
processo
“Assim que os
resultados foram conhecidos, o país mudou”, conta Ana. “As pessoas começaram a
ser racistas, violentas, xenófobas. Não percebo o que aconteceu, de um momento
para o outro deixei de poder falar ao telemóvel no autocarro, passei a ter
vergonha de dizer o meu nome numa peça de teatro porque é português, como se eu
fosse uma mancha, [mas] eu não sou uma mancha.”
Até ao “Brexit”,
nunca sentira necessidade de pedir o estatuto de residente permanente. Nos
últimos meses, decidiu regularizar a sua situação, mas entretanto o processo
entrou num impasse: uma das informações necessárias para terminar o pedido não
estava correcta e os serviços britânicos afirmam que a imigrante terá de
começar tudo de novo, o que a preocupa, uma vez que a data marcada para a saída
do Reino Unido da União Europeia está “perto”. A entidade empregadora de Ana
Telma tinha-lhe enviado um link por e-mail para que pudesse iniciar o pedido do
estatuto de residente permanente, mas a cidadã portuguesa afirma que da
primeira vez que tentou não conseguiu completar o processo. Ainda ligou para os
serviços britânicos, mas conta que teve “pouca sorte com o funcionário que a
atendeu”.
“A empresa quer
que as pessoas preencham isto o mais cedo possível para regularizar a nossa
situação cá, mas nós trabalhamos 63 horas semanais e não podemos deixar o
paciente porque ele pode deixar de respirar, pode cair. Além disso, estamos
constantemente ligados a um sistema que nos diz os sinais vitais de cada
cliente, daí que seja muito difícil estar a preencher as coisas correctamente.
Provavelmente eu não o fiz bem”, confessa a imigrante portuguesa. Mesmo
admitindo que o erro foi seu, Ana Telma queixa-se da dificuldade do processo e
do quão errado é o conceito de pedir um estatuto de residente. “As pessoas já
estão aqui a trabalhar há muito e já deviam poder ficar só mostrando a sua
identificação e mais alguns dados”, considera.
Tem acompanhado
as reacções e os comentários ao seu testemunho. “Em Inglaterra, o que se tem
gerado e o que vocês estão a ler é bonito. As pessoas ficaram contentes por eu
ter falado porque até agora ninguém pôde expressar-se, mas as coisas chegaram a
um ponto irreversível e foi por isso que eu falei. Não foi só para os
portugueses, foi para todos os que estão na mesma situação”, conta Ana Telma,
referindo-se principalmente àqueles “que nunca descontaram”, que “sempre
enviaram dinheiro para a família” ou que têm “contratos irregulares de
trabalho” e que agora ficaram desprotegidos e perante um futuro incerto.
Mas nem toda a
gente viu com bons olhos o desabafo ao canal britânico. A portuguesa já recebeu
mensagens insultuosas e que continham ameaças, e foi isso que a fez refugiar-se
durante alguns dias na Escócia. “O que me preocupa é estado das coisas, o
estado da sociedade da qual uma pessoa fez parte durante 20 anos e do nada é
apagada, é invisível, é-lhe dito: “see you later”.
A empresa de Ana
Telma funciona em sistema rotativo, daí que a portuguesa se tenha que deslocar
frequentemente para outras cidades, zonas do país ou mesmo para o estrangeiro,
pernoitando nas casas dos pacientes que cuida. Este método de rotação piorou
muito devido à recente saída de muitos funcionários nascidos maioritariamente
fora do Reino Unido. “Além dos britânicos não quererem fazer estes trabalhos,
não há pessoas suficientes para os fazer”, explica, sublinhando que não tem
planos para voltar a Portugal de vez.
Estado português
já a contactou
Contactada pelo
P3, fonte do gabinete de José Luís Carneiro garante que Ana Telma Rocha já
conversou com o secretário de Estado das Comunidades Portuguesas e que será
ajudada a reiniciar o seu processo: “O que ela nos transmitiu é que teve um
problema na emissão do número de segurança social por parte dos serviços
britânicos, informação que é um dos sinais comprovativos de permanência no
Reino Unido, além de outras como contratos de trabalho e de arrendamento ou
outros dados fiscais, tudo o que possa dizer que esse cidadão vive e trabalha
no Reino Unido há x anos.”
A mesma fonte
acrescenta também que Ana Telma não possui um passaporte português válido,
facto que não a impede de se candidatar ao estatuto, uma vez que o pedido
permite a utilização de um cartão de cidadão português. Garantiu ainda que a
cônsul portuguesa em Londres já entrou em contacto com a portuguesa. “Mesmo que
não haja acordo, os pedidos podem ser feitos até fim de Dezembro de 2020.
Ninguém vai ser expulso no dia 1 de Novembro”, sublinhou.
Já José Luís
Carneiro garantiu esta sexta-feira à Lusa que os portugueses residentes no
Reino Unido “podem estar tranquilos”, apontando que entende “a ansiedade dos
cidadãos” face ao “Brexit”, mas “o Estado português está preparado”. O
secretário de Estado também frisou que os consulados de Londres e Manchester
foram reforçados em meios humanos, infra-estruturas tecnológicas e meios
informáticos, bem como alargados os horários. E contou que a linha “Brexit”, que
começou a funcionar a 1 de Abril, apoiou mais de 30 mil cidadãos portugueses no
Reino Unido que pediram esclarecimentos.
Ana Telma
confirma que foi contactada pelo Estado português e acredita que o seu processo
ficará resolvido em breve. Mesmo acreditando que um pedaço de papel não vai
resolver a situação que se vive no país, não pretende sair para outra que tem
ainda menos para lhe oferecer. “Eu já me sinto inglesa, I love England, adoro
chá inglês e tostas com feijão, faço piadas de acordo com o humor britânico”,
conta de forma animada. “Já tenho muitos projectos na cidade e não vou desistir
até que as coisas tenham a continuação que eu tanto desejei. Acima de tudo, não
vou abandonar o meu trabalho porque aquilo que eu tenho em termos de carreira
em Portugal é zero.”
O que devem saber
os cidadãos portugueses?
Para conseguir a
nacionalidade britânica, os cidadãos europeus precisam desde 2015 de apresentar
a prova de residência permanente no Reino Unido, procedimento que aumentou
significativamente nos últimos dois anos.
O estatuto de
residente permanente (settled status) é atribuído àqueles com cinco anos
consecutivos a viver no Reino Unido, enquanto os que estão há menos de cinco
anos no país terão um título provisório (pre-settled status) até completarem o
tempo necessário. Este não é um direito automático, mas tem de ser solicitado e
concedido pelas autoridades britânicas, sendo o procedimento, gratuito e feito
exclusivamente através da internet.
No caso de saída
sem acordo do Reino Unido da União Europeia, as candidaturas ao “settlement
scheme” podem ser apresentadas até 31 de Dezembro de 2020, enquanto no caso de
saída com acordo a candidatura pode ser efectuada até 30 de Junho de 2021.
Os cidadãos que
pretendam iniciar o processo podem encontrar estas e outras informações na
página do Governo britânico.
Portuguese
Brexit woman: Being hit and nearly run over made me risk arrest to protest
Brexit
Saturday,
August 31st, 2019 2:30pm
Ana Telma
Rocha became an instant social media sensation when she interrupted a Sky News
report
Here, she
explains what compelled her to hijack an interview.
I arrived
in London in 1999, to pursue my dream of becoming an actress.
I made the
journey because I had been inspired by seeing Steven Berkoff on TV.
I quickly
fell in love with the bright lights and the different English accents of London
and the fantastic British comedy.
I got work
looking after children and cleaning dishes all day to pay for night acting
classes.
I totally
sounded like Manuel from Fawlty Towers, but I was of course in my 20s, with
loads of endless spirit and energy.
Then I
found care work and I was changed forever. I learned how to ensure that all
humans should have dignity, no matter what stage of life they were at. I was
taught this by English folk, the kindest and most selfless people I ever met.
They also
tested me for dyslexia after suspecting I had it. I scored really high, but
they gave me tools I needed so I could flourish.
In 2004, I
teamed up with several others to form an all-female theatre company, Get Over
It Productions, and five years later I moved to Yorkshire were I met my English
husband, with whom I have two boys.
By that
point, I had stopped sounding like Manuel and soon developed a Yorkshire
accent.
I'm so
proud of it. I love Yorkshire. I made friends for life there too. My neighbours
were incredible.
At the
beginning, it was very tough. I was very different and my accent put people
off. But I persisted, asking them to teach me about the Yorkshire dialect and
culture and they taught me how to make meat and tatty pie.
I loved
Bridlington, I was crazy about Whitby and became a steam train spotter. But my
enthusiasm for where I was living was all about to come crashing down.
As Nigel
Farage's voice became louder, things started to change.
Before, I
would have comments on the bus, but that was about it.
Then, after
23 June 2016, everything would be different; the comments became threats.
A month
later someone tried to run me over on a crossing with my small son.
They
stopped a few meters ahead just to yell: "Go home, you foreigner
scum."
My husband
was called a traitor at work and Jo Cox had been murdered. I was terrified.
I took my
family to safety, to London, and went back to work in a care company.
I never
discussed politics, and tried to run from the subject as much as possible.
But it just
became worse and worse. I was scared that I would be sent somewhere to work
that was not safe.
One day, a
guy thumped me but I didn't even report it because I was so worried about what
would happen.
I just kept
going - my kids needed money. I would work here, work there, do anything to
drown out the noise of people like Nigel Farage, do all I could to keep going.
Until, last
week, I came home from work and the news was on. Boris Johnson was going to
prorogue parliament and the Queen said "yes".
My head
started to spin, I started to breathe deeply. I had to say something. I left
home and headed to Westminster. I needed to tell the 48% "I'm going, get
up and do something. I don't care if I'm arrested".
I left the
bus swearing. I could not stop. At one point I thought I was going to get
arrested but a policeman calmed me down and talked me out of doing something
that would have landed me in trouble. This English policeman was kind, and
firm, and did his job in the middle of all this anger.
"Get a
grip," I said to myself. I went for a walk. I saw a Sky News reporter, and
again, I was overcome with the need to speak out.
Now I am
the Portuguese Brexit woman.
Sky News
© Sky News 2019
Johnson's Brexit Gambit Puts Queen in a Tight Spot
Knavish
Tricks
Johnson's
Brexit Gambit Puts Queen in a Tight Spot
Boris
Johnson is putting all his eggs in one basket in the final run-up to Brexit.
But by sending parliament on forced leave, he is damaging democracy and also
one of the last intact pillars of the United Kingdom: Queen Elizabeth II.
By Jörg
Schindler in London
© By Jörg Schindler in London
August 30,
2019
This summer
has been anything but fun for Queen Elizabeth II, with her sprawling family
affairs refusing to disappear from the headlines. First, the monarch had to
read that the Duke and the Duchess of Sussex, better known as Harry and Meghan,
don't appear to be taking their roles as environmental activists seriously
enough. In the span of only 11 days, the couple flew across Europe on private
jets four times. After that, the news made the rounds of six-figure
contributions to the royal family from a sketchy Hong Kong businessman.
The most
serious, however, were reports that Prince Andrew, Elizabeth's second son, not
only cultivated a precariously close friendship with recently deceased
multimillionaire and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but also allowed himself to
be introduced by Epstein to an underage girl. Buckingham Palace his
vociferously denied the accusation.
An Autumn
of Horror Looms
It's been
quite some time since the 93-year-old monarch, who is currently staying at her
Scottish country estate Balmoral, has had to deal with so much negative
attention focused on her family. Yet even though the summer of displeasure
still hasn't quite finished, an autumn of horror is already looming.
This time,
it will be the queen herself who is at the center of a confrontation unlike any
the United Kingdom has ever seen. Elizabeth has spent 67 years dutifully and
successfully fulfilling her non-partisan role, only to now be dragged into the
middle of a messy bout of political mud-wrestling. And Brexit -- surprise,
surprise -- is to blame.
Political
Vandalism
Boris
Johnson, the prime minister chosen by fewer than 100,000 Conservative Party
members, only slightly more than 0.1 percent of the British population, has
announced that at the end of July, he will lead the UK out of the EU on Oct.
31, come what may and by any means necessary. Since this week, it has been
clear that this will also include, if necessary, denting the throne of
Elizabeth II, an act of political vandalism no prime minister has dared to
commit before him.
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On
Wednesday morning, Johnson, paler than usual, announced he would ask the queen
for permission to suspend the British parliament for five weeks -- a request
that the largely powerless head of state agreed to.
Johnson
says the step of proroguing parliament is necessary in order to work out a
political agenda for the post-Brexit period in peace. By tradition, every new
parliamentary session is opened with the pompously staged "Queen's
Speech," the government program presented by the monarch. But the House of
Commons generally interrupts its work for several days, not for five weeks.
A Wave of
Outrage
With his
democratically questionable act of arbitrariness, Johnson appears to be
pursuing a primary goal: He wants to ensure that elected members of the House
of Commons have very little time to try to prevent his government from carrying
out Brexit, even if it ultimately does so without an agreement with the EU, a
so-called no-deal scenario.
Within
minutes of Johnson's announcement on Wednesday, a wave of outrage swept across
the country. Several public figures, including former Prime Minister John
Major, announced hasty legal challenges, and a petition aimed at stopping
Johnson was signed by more than a million British people within hours.
In London
and several other cities, hectic planning began for large-scale protests and
all manner of civil disobedience. Members of Johnson's own Conservative Party
threatened to create an exile parliament if government actually goes through
with its plans to prorogue the legislative body. The opposition even brought
the notion of a general strike into play.
But the
anger of the masses isn't being directed solely at the man in Downing Street.
One of the last taboos for many Brits has also been broken: blatant criticism
of the queen. "The. Queen. Did. Not. Save. Us," tweeted Labour Party
politician Kate Osamor, and hinted at the abolition of the monarchy. Her party
leader Jeremy Corbyn asked the queen in writing for a personal meeting to
protest against Johnson's coup. Jo Swinson, the head of the EU-friendly Liberal
Democrats, also wrote to the queen asking for an "urgent meeting."
The Last
Round
After three
years of the country beating itself up in the Brexit debate, Johnson is now
leading Britain into the last round of the ordeal -- an unprecedented showdown
between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, which, incidentally,
threatens to damage the last intact pillar of the United Kingdom: its queen.
It's
impossible to predict what will ensue in the coming weeks -- aside from chaos.
But there
is much to suggest Johnson wants precisely that, and at any cost, in order to
deliver the main promise he made to become British prime minister -- to lead
his country out of the EU on Oct. 31, with or without an agreement. After the
G-7 summit in Biarritz, Johnson may have praised the EU's willingness to
compromise, he may have put the chances of no deal at "one in a
million," and the majority of Brits and their elected representatives may
be against leaving the EU without a deal, but no one in the betting crazy UK is
now likely to bet on there being any agreement between London and Brussels in
the end.
The
opposition was caught completely off guard by Johnson's sudden move. On
Tuesday, Labour Party boss Jeremy Corbyn had gathered together the leaders of
smaller parties to discuss plans to stop a no-deal scenario from happening. But
the group chose to reject the strongest instrument available to it -- a no
confidence vote against Johnson. Why? Because if such a vote were to succeed,
the divided opposition likely wouldn't be able to agree on a candidate to
replace him.
Concerted
Action
Instead,
Corbyn and others have announced that they will seek legislation to prevent the
government from moving forward with hard Brexit. It won't be an easy
undertaking, though, because the government sets the agenda for legislative
acts in parliament.
In order to
vote on legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit, the opposition would, for
example, have to wrest control over the agenda from Johnson for a day. They
managed to do that twice under former Prime Minister Theresa May. But even if
they managed to do so this time, there is no guarantee that such a law would
pass in the House of Commons, where the conservative government still has a
single-vote majority.
No one
quite knows what the next several weeks hold for Britain.
Nonetheless,
concerted action on the part of the opposition still presents a great risk to
Johnson, who in Biarritz played down the situation, saying Britain could
"easily cope with a no-deal scenario." His closest advisers believe
the only thing that could still prevent him from completing Brexit on Oct. 31
would be a law signed by the queen. The less time that is available for such
legislation to take shape, the greater Johnson's chances are of success.
Fewer than 24
hours after the opposition meeting, he thus announced his intention to go to
the queen and make his request to suspend parliament, knowing full well that
she has little room for maneuver in such cases. Johnson's plan now calls for
parliament to carry on "business as usual" for a maximum of seven
days starting on Tuesday before adjourning until Oct. 14, when the
"Queen's Speech" is to be given, two weeks before the Brexit
deadline. He said this would give parliamentarians "ample time" to
debate any Brexit plan he has negotiated with Brussels by then.
Speaker of
the House of Commons John Bercow described the development as a
"constitutional outrage," and the hopes of many supporters of the EU
in Britain now rest on his spirit of resistance and inventiveness. An
"emergency debate" is now slated to be held in parliament next week.
There are usually no legally binding votes at the end of such debates, but many
believe Bercow will allow them this time to facilitate emergency legislation
against Johnson. Within the government, though, sources say that if that
legislation is passed, the government may not request the queen's mandatory
signature. It would be an extraordinary affront to the royal house, but
parliament would be largely powerless to do anything about it.
As a last
resort, members of parliament would then only be left with a vote of no
confidence. So far, opposition leader Corbyn has shied away from such a step
because he has doubts that he would be able to attract enough Tory rebels to
his side. But the situation has shifted since Wednesday. Some Conservatives in
parliament, including former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, have responded
coolly to Johnson's move, saying the time may come very soon when they join
forces with the opposition to topple the government.
An
Unabashed Bet
The only
problem is that this may be precisely what Boris Johnson is after. The
55-year-old did his legal homework several weeks ago, with quite astonishing
results. Under current law, after a successful vote of no confidence, any
member of parliament can attempt within 14 days to cobble together a government
majority in order to be officially appointed by the queen as the new prime
minister. Amazingly, however, the law does not forbid a prime minister who has
been voted out from refusing to resign. From all appearances, that is precisely
Johnson's plan.
It appears
that Johnson is unabashedly betting that the opposition won't be able to find
an interim candidate for prime minister in the time available to it. And that
even if it does, the queen will follow his advice and not formally appoint the
opposing candidate, meaning Johnson would remain in office until new elections.
He could then set the date for snap elections himself -- in November. Brexit
will have happened by then and Johnson could campaign on that success as he
seeks to be elected.
There's
almost nothing and nobody who can prevent him from doing so. Except Queen
Elizabeth II, who would be forced to make one of the most far-reaching
political decisions for her country since World War II. And whatever she does:
Some of her subjects will hate her for it.
'An Abuse
of Her Majesty'
Anna
Soubry, a former Tory colleague of Johnson's before she bolted the party,
railed that the prime minister "abuses our queen." And Soubry
announced that she and her colleagues in parliament would use "whatever
mechanism possible" to outmaneuver the gambler inside 10 Downing Street.
Constitutional
expert Vernon Bogdanor recently made it clear in the Times of London that even
if Johnson were to actually go through with this daring plan, the madness still
wouldn't be over. Johnson's actions might be legal, he said. But it would be
just as legal for a parliament newly elected in November to declare the Oct. 31
date of Britain's withdrawal from the EU as null and void, with retroactive
effect -- provided, of course, the EU went along with it.
The tumult
is unlikely to go away quickly. Meanwhile, in a castle located in the kingdom's
far north sits an elderly lady who had a premonition of the current situation
long ago. That, at least, is suggested by a quote from Queen Elizabeth that was
recently leaked to the Times, words she reportedly uttered a short time after
the Brexit referendum. The current political class, she lamented at the time,
is characterized by its "inability to govern."
‘Worst of wildfires still to come’ despite Brazil claiming crisis is under control
‘Worst of
wildfires still to come’ despite Brazil claiming crisis is under control
Forestry
expert warns annual burning season had yet to fully play out and calls for
urgent steps to reduce potential damage
Tom
Phillips Latin America correspondent
Wed 28 Aug
2019 21.26 BST First published on Wed 28 Aug 2019 16.25 BST
The fires
raging in the Brazilian Amazon are likely to intensify over the coming weeks, a
leading environmental expert has warned, despite government claims the
situation had been controlled.
About
80,000 blazes have been detected in Brazil this year – more than half in the
Amazon region – although on Saturday the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro,
claimed the situation was “returning to normal”.
On Monday
Brazil’s defense minister, Fernando Azevedo e Silva, told reporters: “The
situation is not straightforward but it’s under control and already cooling
down nicely.”
But in an
article for Brazil’s O Globo newspaper on Wednesday, one prominent forestry
expert warned that the country’s annual burning season had yet to fully play
out and called for urgent steps to reduce the potential damage.
“The worst of the fire is still to come,”
wrote Tasso Azevedo, a forest engineer and environmentalist who coordinates the
deforestation monitoring group MapBiomas.
Azevedo
said many of the areas currently being consumed by flames were stretches of
Amazon rainforest that had been torn down in the months of April, May and June.
But areas deforested in July and August – when government monitoring systems
detected a major surge in destruction – had yet to be torched.
The Brazilian
Amazon lost 1,114.8 sq km (430 sq miles) – an area equivalent to Hong Kong – in
the first 26 days of August, according to preliminary data from the
government’s satellite monitoring agency. An area half the size of Philadelphia
was reportedly lost in July, with Brazilian media denouncing an “explosion” of
devastation in the Amazon.
Azevedo
wrote: “What we are experiencing is a genuine crisis which could become a
tragedy foretold with much larger fires than the ones we are now seeing if they
are not immediately halted.”
He called
for urgent measures such as a crackdown on deforestation in indigenous
territories and conservation units and outlawing deliberate burning in the
Amazon until at least the end of October when the dry season ends.
That
warning came after more than 400 members of Brazil’s environmental agency,
Ibama, published a damning open letter about the state of environmental
protection under Bolsonaro, a rightwing nationalist who took power in January
vowing to open up the Amazon to development.
In the
letter to Ibama’s president, Eduardo Bim, employees said they felt it was their
duty to publicly voice their “immense concern” about the direction environment
protection was taking.
“The rates
of Amazon forest destruction will not be reduced unless a firm stand is taken
against environmental crimes,” they wrote.
Campaigners
accuse Bolsonaro’s administration of hamstringing the very agency that should
be fighting illegal deforestation and giving the green-light to environmental
criminals with his pro-development rhetoric.
On
Wednesday Reuters reported that, despite the spike in deforestation, an elite
squad of Ibama operatives – called the Grupo Especializado de Fiscalização or
Specialized Inspection Group – had not been deployed to the Amazon once in
2019.
At a summit
of Amazon governors on Tuesday – supposedly convened to discuss responses to
the fires – Bolsonaro repeatedly attacked environmentalists and indigenous
activists who he claimed were holding back Brazil’s economy.
Many,
though not all, of the Amazon governors backed Bolsonaro’s vision for the
region.
“The Amazon
is still on fire but Jair Bolsonaro has managed to show he is not alone,”
Bernardo Mello Franco wrote in O Globo on Wednesday. “In a meeting at the
presidential palace, most of the region’s governors also made it clear they
couldn’t give a monkey’s about the forest.”
Bolsonaro
confirmed on Wednesday that he would attend a meeting with other South American
leaders in neighbouring Colombia on 6 September, in order to draw up a
coordinated response to the crisis.
The
meeting, announced on Tuesday will seek to draw up a plan to protect the Amazon
rainforest, which straddles Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Bolivia, Guyana and Suriname.
On
Wednesday 18 global fashion brands including Timberland, Vans and The North
Face were reported to have suspended leather purchases from Brazil over the
crisis.
quinta-feira, 29 de agosto de 2019
The Guardian view on proroguing parliament: an affront to democracy
The
Guardian view on proroguing parliament: an affront to democracy
Editorial
The prime
minister’s action might adhere to the letter of the law but in spirit it is an
act of wanton constitutional vandalism
Wed 28 Aug
2019 17.42 BST Last modified on Wed 28 Aug 2019 23.35 BST
A protester
outside Downing Street on 28 August 2019. ‘Mr Johnson is hijacking powers
symbolically vested in the crown and wielding them in aggression against his
parliamentary opponents.’ Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Boris
Johnson has written many dishonest things in his life, but few as consequential
as the letter sent on Wednesday to MPs explaining his decision to seek a
prorogation of parliament. The prime minister says that a new Commons session
is needed to enact a “bold and ambitious legislative agenda”. To that end the
current session must be closed. His plan envisages a Queen’s speech in the
middle of October
No one is
fooled, although government ministers make fools of themselves by parroting
their leader’s line. Prorogation is a device to silence parliament during a
critical period approaching the 31 October Brexit deadline. Mr Johnson cannot
be sure of majority support in the Commons for a withdrawal agreement and he
would certainly not have the numbers for leaving the EU without one. So he
wants to dispense with legislative scrutiny altogether.
The chosen
method for pursuing that goal observes the letter of the law, but in spirit it
is revolutionary and dangerous. John Bercow, the Commons speaker, calls it a
“constitutional outrage” and opposition MPs have decried what they see as a
full-frontal assault on British democracy. At the intemperate end of the
rhetorical spectrum (amplified on social media), Mr Johnson’s move is decried
as a “coup” and a step down the slippery slope towards dictatorship.
Hyperbole
is inevitable at times of political stress and it is true that Mr Johnson is
pushing the UK into a constitutional crisis. But to properly assess the gravity
of the situation it helps also to keep it in perspective. This is a cynical,
premeditated blow against the principle of parliamentary democracy but it is
not a total subversion of the constitutional order on a par with a military
putsch. The prime minister is exhibiting the irresponsible arrogance of which
he has long been known capable. But he is also operating within the technical
parameters of what the British political system allows in all its archaic
peculiarity.
That is
what makes prorogation so devious. Like any confidence trickster, Mr Johnson
knows how to leaven a deception with flecks of truth. He is correct in
asserting that the current Commons session has been unusually long, that the
flow of legislation dried up months ago and that a new government is entitled
to set out its stall. Under normal circumstances, prorogation this autumn would
be in order – overdue, in fact. But nothing about the present circumstances is
normal. In a matter of weeks, the UK faces a total overhaul in economic,
diplomatic and strategic relations with the rest of the world. The prime
minister and his cabinet have signalled explicitly that they do not care how
much damage is done in the process. They would choose ruin over delay. This is
a time when the checks and balances of a parliamentary democracy must operate
vigorously.
When Mr
Johnson asserts that there will be “ample time” to debate Brexit before the
deadline, he insults every MP who cares about a functional relationship between
Britain and the rest of Europe. The offence is intentional. It is a provocation
to sharpen dividing lines between Brexit ultras and the rest. If the prime
minister’s efforts to sideline parliament fail, he could find himself in an
election. Ramping up confrontation with “remainer” opponents – caricatured in
campaign terms as an establishment hell-bent on subverting the “will of the
people” – is one way of anticipating that scenario.
But it is
not just remainers who are appalled by Mr Johnson’s behaviour. Prorogation is
an exercise of royal prerogative that is tolerable in a modern democracy only
insofar as it is ceremonial. Its deployment by a prime minister without an
electoral mandate of his own, in pursuit of a partisan agenda for which there
is no Commons majority, represents a grotesque abuse of the country’s highest
political office. Mr Johnson is hijacking powers symbolically vested in the crown
and wielding them in aggression against his parliamentary opponents. That he
does it in pursuit of a hard Brexit is distressing for pro-Europeans. That he
is prepared to do it at all should alarm everyone who values the traditions of
British democracy.
The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
The long
read
The air
conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
The global dominance of air conditioning was
not inevitable. Illustration: Guardian Design
The warmer
it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning,
the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap?
by Stephen
Buranyi
Thu 29 Aug
2019 06.00 BST
On a
sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York
City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest
weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak
electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of
people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the
midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10
million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy
turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.
Inside the
conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by
representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the
status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials
displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in
Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the
company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix
things, the system is running at max capacity.”
Power grids
are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one
time. Con Edison’s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles
of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can
deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a
regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a
heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap is,
is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of
high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat
and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people
in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.
This year,
by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand
at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in
Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were
close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people
without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and
Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.
As the
world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an
air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate
change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a
small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running
four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power
than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity
was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the
International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
There are
just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about
one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by
2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the
mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air
conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the
rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13%
of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year – about the
same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.
All of
these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures
lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer
temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature,
the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach
for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
The global
dominance of air conditioning was not inevitable. As recently as 1990, there
were only about 400m air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US.
Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually came to be
seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning
went global. Today, as with other drivers of the climate crisis, we race to find
solutions – and puzzle over how we ended up so closely tied to a technology
that turns out to be drowning us.
Like the
aqueduct or the automobile, air conditioning is a technology that transformed
the world. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of independent Singapore,
called it “one of the signal inventions of history” that allowed the rapid
modernisation of his tropical country. In 1998, the American academic Richard
Nathan told the New York Times that, along with the “civil rights revolution”,
air conditioning had been the biggest factor in changing American demography
and politics over the previous three decades, enabling extensive residential
development in the very hot, and very conservative, American south.
A century
ago, few would have predicted this. For the first 50 years of its existence,
air conditioning was mainly restricted to factories and a handful of public
spaces. The initial invention is credited to Willis Carrier, an American
engineer at a heating and ventilation company, who was tasked in 1902 with
reducing humidity in a Brooklyn printing factory. Today we assume that the
purpose of air conditioning is to reduce heat, but engineers at the time
weren’t solely concerned with temperature. They wanted to create the most
stable possible conditions for industrial production – and in a print factory,
humidity curled sheets of paper and smudged ink.
Carrier
realised that removing heat from the factory air would reduce humidity, and so
he borrowed technology from the nascent refrigeration industry to create what
was, and still is, essentially a jacked-up fridge. Then as now, air
conditioning units work by breathing in warm air, passing it across a cold
surface, and exhaling cool, dry air. The invention was an immediate success
with industry – textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical factories were among
the first adopters – and then began to catch on elsewhere. The House of
Representatives installed air conditioning in 1928, followed by the White House
and the Senate in 1929. But during this period, most Americans encountered air
conditioning only in places such as theatres or department stores, where it was
seen as a delightful novelty.
It wasn’t
until the late 1940s, when it began to enter people’s homes, that the air
conditioner really conquered the US. Before then, according to the historian
Gail Cooper, the industry had struggled to convince the public that air
conditioning was a necessity, rather than a luxury. In her definitive account
of the early days of the industry, Air-Conditioning America, Cooper notes that
magazines described air conditioning as a flop with consumers. Fortune called
it “a prime public disappointment of the 1930s”. By 1938 only one out of every
400 American homes had an air conditioner; today it is closer to nine out of
10.
What
fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer
demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing
boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for
the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects
and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in
climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico
as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems
caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city
planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in
1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes,
“Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and
consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.”
Equally
essential to the rise of the air conditioner were electric utilities – the
companies that operate power plants and sell electricity to consumers. Electric
utilities benefit from every new house hooked up to their grid, but throughout
the early 20th century they were also looking for ways to get these new
customers to use even more electricity in their homes. This process was known
as “load building”, after the industry term (load) for the amount of
electricity used at any one time. “The cost of electricity was low, which was
fine by the utilities. They simply increased demand, and encouraged customers
to use more electricity so they could keep expanding and building new power
plants,” says Richard Hirsh, a historian of technology at Virginia Tech.
The
utilities quickly recognised that air conditioning was a serious load builder.
As early as 1935, Commonwealth Edison, the precursor to the modern Con Edison,
noted in its end-of-year report that the power demand from air conditioners was
growing at 50% a year, and “offered substantial potential for the future”. That
same year, Electric Light & Power, an industry trade magazine, reported
that utilities in big cities “are now pushing air conditioning. For their own
good, all power companies should be very active in this field.”
By the
1950s, that future had arrived. Electric utilities ran print, radio and film
adverts promoting air conditioning, as well as offering financing and discount
rates to construction companies that installed it. In 1957, Commonwealth Edison
reported that for the first time, peak electricity usage had occurred not in
the winter, when households were turning up their heating, but during summer,
when people were turning on their air-conditioning units. By 1970, 35% of
American houses had air conditioning, more than 200 times the number just three
decades earlier.
At the same
time, air-conditioning-hungry commercial buildings were springing up across the
US. The all-glass skyscraper, a building style that, because of its poor
reflective properties and lack of ventilation, often requires more than half
its electricity output be reserved for air conditioning, became an American
mainstay. Between 1950 and 1970 the average electricity used per square foot in
commercial buildings more than doubled. New York’s World Trade Center,
completed in 1974, had what was then the world’s largest AC unit, with nine
enormous engines and more than 270km of piping for cooling and heating.
Commentators at the time noted that it used the same amount of electricity each
day as the nearby city of Schenectady, population 80,000.
The
air-conditioning industry, construction companies and electric utilities were
all riding the great wave of postwar American capitalism. In their pursuit of
profit, they ensured that the air conditioner became an essential element of
American life. “Our children are raised in an air-conditioned culture,” an AC
company executive told Time magazine in 1968. “You can’t really expect them to
live in a home that isn’t air conditioned.” Over time, the public found they
liked air conditioning, and its use continued to climb, reaching 87% of US
households by 2009.
The postwar
building spree was underpinned by the idea that all of these new buildings
would consume incredible amounts of power, and that this would not present any
serious problems in the future. In 1992, the journal Energy and Buildings
published an article by the British conservative academic Gwyn Prins, arguing
that the American addiction to air conditioning was a symbol of its profound
decadence. Prins summarised America’s guiding credo as: “We shall be cool, our
plates shall overflow and gas shall be $1 a gallon, Amen.”
During the
time that air conditioning was reshaping America’s cities, it had little effect
elsewhere. (With some exceptions – Japan, Australia and Singapore were early
adopters.) Now, however, air conditioning is finally sweeping across the rest
of the world. If the march of air conditioning across the US tracked its
postwar building and consumption boom, its more recent expansion has followed
the course of globalisation. As the rest of the world adopts more Americanised
ways of building and living, air conditioning follows.
In the
1990s, many countries across Asia opened up to foreign investment and embarked
on an unprecedented urban building spree. Over the past three decades, about
200 million people in India have moved to cities; in China, the number is more
than 500 million. From New Delhi to Shanghai, heavily air-conditioned office
buildings, hotels and malls began to spring up. These buildings were not only
indistinguishable from those in New York or London, but were often constructed
by the same builders and architects. “When you had this money coming in from
the rest of the world for high-end buildings, it often came with an American or
European designer or consultancy attached,” says Ashok Lall, an Indian
architect who focuses on housing and low-energy design. “And so it comes as a
package with AC. They thought that meant progress.”
As the rate
and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for
mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor
of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in
Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design – which had dealt with
heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were slowly
displaced by American or European styles. “I would say that this international
style has a lot to answer for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century,
but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built
in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. “Developers were
building without thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and
city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The speed of construction that
was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to
fix it later.”
Lall says
that even with affordable housing it is possible to reduce the need for air
conditioning by designing carefully. “You balance the sizes of opening, the
area of the wall, the thermal properties, and shading, the orientation,” he
says. But he argues that, in general, developers are not interested. “Even
little things like adequate shading and insulation in the rooftop are resisted.
The builders don’t appear to see any value in this. They want 10- to 20-storey
blocks close to one another. That’s just how business works now, that’s what
the cities are forcing us to do. It’s all driven by speculation and land value.”
This
reliance on air conditioning is a symptom of what the Chinese art critic Hou
Hanru has called the epoch of post-planning. Today, planning as we
traditionally think of it – centralised, methodical, preceding development – is
vanishingly rare. Markets dictate and allocate development at incredible speed,
and for the actual inhabitants, the conditions they require to live are sourced
later, in a piecemeal fashion. “You see these immense towers go up, and they’re
already locking the need for air conditioning into the building,” says Marlyne
Sahakian, a sociologist who studies the use of air conditioning in the
Philippines.
t
Over coffee
recently in London, the influential Malaysian architect Ken Yeang lamented what
he viewed as the loss of an entire generation of architects and builders to a
dependency on fossil fuels to control the environment. “So much damage has been
done by those buildings,” he says, “I have entirely lost hope in my generation;
perhaps the next one can design a rescue mission.”
To its
proponents, air conditioning is often presented as a simple choice that
consumers make to improve their lives as they climb the economic ladder. “It’s
no longer a luxury product but a necessity,” an executive at the Indian branch
of the Japanese air-conditioner manufacturing giant Daikin told the Associated
Press last year. “Everyone deserves AC.”
This
refrain is as familiar in Rajasthan now as it was in the US 70 years ago. Once
air conditioning is embedded in people’s lives, they tend to want to keep it.
But that fact obscures the ways that consumers’ choices are shaped by forces
beyond their control. In her 1967 book Vietnam, Mary McCarthy reflected on this
subtle proscription of choice in American life. “In American hotel rooms,” she
wrote, “you can decide whether or not to turn on the air conditioning (that is
your business), but you cannot open the window.”
One step
towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning – and one that
doesn’t require a complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to build a
better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention
of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public
radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902.
“Everything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a
refrigerator. It’s effectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin
Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and
Information Association. “What has happened is we’ve expanded the affordability
of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they’ve improved but they
haven’t leaped.”
One scheme
to encourage engineers to build a more efficient air conditioner was launched
last year by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a US-based energy policy
thinktank, and endorsed by the UN environment programme and government of
India. They are offering $3m to the winner of the inaugural Global Cooling
prize. The aim is to design an air conditioner that is five times more
efficient than the current standard model, but which costs no more than twice
as much money to produce. They have received more than a hundred entries, from
lone inventors to prominent universities, and even research teams from multibillion-dollar
appliance giants.
But, as
with other technological responses to climate change, it is far from certain
that the arrival of a more efficient air conditioner will significantly reduce
global emissions. According to the RMI, in order to keep total global emissions
from new air conditioners from rising, their prize-winning efficient air
conditioner would need to go on sale no later than 2022, and capture 80% of the
market by 2030. In other words, the new product would have to almost totally
replace its rivals in less than a decade. Benjamin Sovacool, professor of
energy policy at Sussex University and a lead author on the next
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, describes this
ambition as not impossible, but pretty unlikely.
“This idea of technology saving us is a
narrative that we want to believe. Its simplicity is comforting,” he says. It
has proven so comforting, in fact, that it is often discussed as if it is our
first and best response to climate change – even as the timeframe for inventing
and implementing such technologies becomes so narrow as to strain credulity.
New
air-conditioner technology would be welcome, but it is perhaps “the fourth, or
maybe fifth thing on the list we should do” to reduce the emissions from air
conditioning, says Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, a professor of climate change and energy
policy at Central European University, and a lead author on the forthcoming
IPCC report. Among the higher priorities that she mentions are planting trees,
retrofitting old buildings with proper ventilation, and no longer building
“concrete and glass cages that can’t withstand a heatwave”. She adds: “All of
these things would be cheaper too, in the long run.”
But while
these things are technically cheaper, they require changes in behaviour and
major policy shifts – and the open secret of the climate crisis is that nobody
really knows how to make these kind of changes on the systematic, global scale
that the severity of the crisis demands.
If we are
not about to be rescued by technology, and worldwide policy changes look like a
distant hope, there remains a very simple way of reducing the environmental
damage done by air conditioning: use less of it. But, as the ecological
economist and IPCC author Julia Steinberger has written, any serious proposals
to change our lifestyles – cutting down on driving, flying or imported avocados
– are considered “beyond the pale, heretic, almost insane”. This is especially
true of air conditioning, where calls to use it less are frequently treated as
suggestions that people should die in heatwaves, or evidence of a malicious
desire to deny other people the same comforts that citizens in wealthy
countries already enjoy.
This
summer, the publication of a New York Times article asking “Do Americans need
air conditioning?” touched off a thousand furious social media posts, uniting
figures from the feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay (“You wouldn’t last a
summer week in Florida without it. Get a grip”) to the conservative professor
and pundit Tom Nichols (“Air conditioning is why we left the caves … You will
get my AC from me when you pry it from my frozen, frosty hands”).
Despite
this backlash, there is a reasonable case to be made that we are over-reliant
on air conditioning and could cut back. The supposedly ideal indoor temperature
has long been determined by air-conditioning engineers, using criteria that
suggest pretty much all humans want the same temperature range at all times.
The underlying idea is that comfort is objective, and that a building in
Jakarta should be the same temperature as one in Boston. In practice, says
Leena Thomas, this means that the temperature in most air-conditioned buildings
is usually “low-20s plus/minus one”.
But not
everyone has accepted the notion that there is such as thing as the objectively
“right” temperature. Studies have suggested that men have different ideal
temperatures from women. In offices around the world, “Men toil in their dream
temperatures, while women are left to shiver,” argued a 2015 article in the
Telegraph, one of many suggesting that the scientific research had simply
confirmed something millions of women already knew.
Researchers
have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short
time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether
it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive,
not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live
with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I
attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If I can work and
function at 30C, you could too – believe you me.”
Adding to
the weight of evidence against the idea of the “ideal” temperature, Frederick
Rohles, a psychologist and member of the American Society of Heating,
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, has conducted studies showing
that subjects who were shown a false thermometer displaying a high temperature
felt warm, even if the room was cool. “These are the sorts of things that drive
my engineering colleagues crazy,” he wrote in 2007. “Comfort is a state of
mind!”
Ashok Lall
points out that once people are open to the idea that the temperature in a
building can change, you can build houses that use air conditioning as a last
resort, not a first step. “But there is no broad culture or regulation
underpinning this,” he says. At the moment, it is the deterministic camp that
has control of the levers of power – and their view continues to be reflected
in building codes and standards around the world.
How, then,
can we get ourselves out of the air-conditioning trap? On the continuum of
habits and technologies that we need to reduce or abandon if we are to avoid
the worst effects of the climate crisis, the air conditioner probably falls
somewhere in the middle: harder to reduce than our habit of eating meat five
times a week; easier than eliminating the fossil-fuel automobile.
According
to Nick Mabey, a former senior civil servant who runs the UK-based climate
politics consultancy E3G, air conditioning has – like many consumer products
that are deeply embedded in society and, in aggregate, drive global warming –
escaped the notice of most governments. There is little precedent for top-down
regulation. “There is no department that handles this, there’s no guy you can
just go talk to who controls air conditioning,” he says.
The key,
Mabey says, is to find the places it can be controlled, and begin the push
there. He is supporting a UN programme that aims to improve the efficiency –
and thus reduce the emissions – of all air conditioners sold worldwide. It
falls under the unglamorous label of consumer standards. Currently, the average
air conditioner on the market is about half as efficient as the best available
unit. Closing that gap even a little bit would take a big chunk out of future
emissions.
At the
local level, some progress is being made. The New York City council recently
passed far-reaching legislation requiring all large buildings in the city to
reduce their overall emissions by 40% by 2030, with a goal of 80% by 2050,
backed with hefty fines for offenders. Costa Constantinides, the city council
member spearheading the legislation, says it is “the largest carbon-emissions
reduction ever mandated by any city, anywhere”. The Los Angeles mayor’s office
is working on similar plans, to make all buildings net-zero carbon by 2050.
Other
cities are taking even more direct action. In the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has
a warmer climate than much of the US, the local government banned the
installation of air conditioning except by special permission. This approach is
relatively common across Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning
accounts for less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don’t appear to
miss air conditioning too much – its absence is rarely discussed, and they have
largely learned to do without.
In countries
where air conditioning is still relatively new, an immense opportunity exists
to find alternatives before it becomes a way of life. The aim, in the words of
Thomas, should be to avoid “the worst of the west”. Recently, the Indian
government adopted recommendations by Thomas, Rawal and others into its
countrywide national residential building code (“an immensely powerful
document” says Rawal). It allows higher indoor temperatures based on Indian
field studies – Indian levels of comfort – and notes the “growing prevalence”
of buildings that use air conditioning as a technology of last resort.
Cutting
down on air conditioning doesn’t mean leaving modernity behind, but it does
require facing up to some of its consequences. “It’s not a matter of going back
to the past. But before, people knew how to work with the climate,” says Ken
Yeang. “Air conditioning became a way to control it, and it was no longer a
concern. No one saw the consequences. People see them now.”
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