Making a Market out of Carbon Footprints and the US's not too nice history with water torture

Some weeks, I just wish everyone could afford a subscription to The New Yorker. Two essays this week seem of particular interest to people who post here. Making a Market out Carbon Footprints: Michael Specter's Big Foot begins by describing Sir Terry Leahy, head of Tesco Supermarkets in Britain, and his pledge that Tesco will be a leader in creating a low-carbon economy.

He announced that Tesco would cut its energy use in half by 2010, drastically limit the number of products it transports by air, and place airplane symbols on the packaging of those which it does. More important, in an effort to help consumers understand the environmental impact of the choices they make every day, he told the forum that Tesco would develop a system of carbon labels and put them on each of its seventy thousand products. “Customers want us to develop ways to take complicated carbon calculations and present them simply,” he said.

Also in Britain, Marks&Spencer "has set a goal of recycling all its waste, and intends to become carbon-neutral by 2012—the equivalent, it claims, of taking a hundred thousand cars off the road every year." In the U.S., "Kraft Foods recently began to power part of a New York plant with methane produced by adding bacteria to whey, a by-product of cream cheese. Not to be outdone, Sara Lee will deploy solar panels to run one of its bakeries, in New Mexico." One of the most provocative points of the Specter article, however, lies in the second half, where Specter interviews Richard Sandor, who literally made a market to trade sulfur-dioxide emissions:

In the late nineteen-eighties, Sandor was asked by an Ohio public-interest group if he thought it would be possible to turn air into a commodity. He wrote an essay advocating the creation of an exchange for sulfur-dioxide emissions. The idea attracted a surprising number of environmentalists, because it called for large and specific reductions; conservatives who usually oppose regulation approved of the market-driven solution.

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act, in 1990, the law included a section that mandated annual acid-rain reductions of ten million tons below 1980 levels. Each large smokestack was fitted with a device to measure sulfur-dioxide emissions. As a way to help meet the goals, the act enabled the creation of the market. ..snip... The program has been an undisputed success. Medical and environmental savings associated with reduced levels of lung disease and other conditions have been enormous—more than a hundred billion dollars a year, according to the E.P.A. “When is the last time you heard somebody even talking about acid rain?” Sandor asked. “It was going to ravage the world. Now it is not even mentioned in the popular press. We have reduced emissions from eighteen million tons to nine million, and we are going to halve it again by 2010. That is as good a social policy as you are ever likely to see.”

Punchline: It seems as if Sandor has now created the Chicago Climate Exchange, in an effort to do for carbon what he did for sulfur. Water Boarding, circa 1902:
In Paul Kramer's chilling essay The Water Cure, he documents the U.S. military policy of "torture" during a 1902 "campaign" against two of its own colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. Back then, the government called wars "campaigns," now the language describing our wars is even more bureaucratic -- for example the current mess in Iraq is not a "war" -- it is a contingency operation. According to Kramer:

The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

Indeed, with less pressure on the news media of the time, Americans actually were informed about what was going on in the Philippines to a degree greater than what we know about what is happening in Iraq. Again from Kramer:

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

But the most startling paragraphs in this essay come at the end -- words taken from the New York World newspaper in 1902 could just have easily been written today in 2008 about the American practice of torture:

“But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of such news?” the World asked. “Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by the darker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which the wrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”

This paragraph could have been written today.