Miscellany

Mid-Week Roundup

Fred Thompson: Political Satire at its best

At the head of our Midweek Miscellany is a video commentary by Republican presidential candidate, Fred Thompson on the US (global) economic calamity, seeking to rouse support for the government programme. An excellent performance. Link here.

Reality Beginning to Bite

The Wall Street Journal contains an op ed piece on the rapid shift away from climate change splenetic in Europe. Apparently the ground is shifting faster than you can say "AGW", particularly in Germany that long-term bastion of greenist politics. We reproduce the full article below.

Cooling on Global Warming

Germany and the rest of Europe are getting more rational on climate change.

By BENNY PEISER | From today's Wall Street Journal Europe

Participants at last week's United Nations climate conference in Poznan, Poland, were taken aback by a world seemingly turned upside-down. The traditional villains and heroes of the international climate narrative, the wicked U.S. and the noble European Union, had unexpectedly swapped roles. For once, it was the EU that was criticized for backpedalling on its CO2 targets while Europe's climate nemesis, the U.S., found itself commended for electing an environmental champion as president.

The wrangle over the EU's controversial climate package at a separate summit in Brussels wrong-footed the world's green bureaucracy. The EU climate deal was diluted beyond recognition. Instead of standing by plans to cut CO2 emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, the actual reductions might be as trivial as 4% if all exemptions are factored in.

In recent days the greenist propaganda organs have been trumpeting the significance of the EU climate agreement. They forgot to tell the world about the small print. CO2 emissions targets are now mere symbolic political theatre.

The Brussels summit symbolizes a turning point. The watered-down climate deal epitomizes the onset of a cooling period in Europe's hitherto overheated climate debate. It may lead eventually to the complete abandonment of the unilateral climate agenda that has shaped Europe's green philosophy for nearly 20 years.

The reasons for the changing political atmosphere in Europe are manifold. First, the global economic crisis has demoted green policies nearer to the bottom of the political agenda. Saving the economy and creating jobs take priority now.

This underscores an oft made point. Greenism is unsustainable. It can only prosper as a political movement if it can suck leech-like off a wave of economic growth and prosperity. As soon as economic growth and development is under threat, support for greenism dissolves, and the leeches drop off. This explains why greenist causes are unable to gain any traction in the under-developed economies of the world.

Second, disillusionment with the failed Kyoto Protocol has turned utopian thinking into sobriety. After all, most of the Kyoto signatories failed to reduce their CO2 emissions during the last 10 years. There are also growing doubts about the long-term viability of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme. The price of carbon credits has collapsed as a result of the financial crisis. The drop in demand and the recession are likely to depress carbon prices for years to come. As a result, the effectiveness of the extremely volatile scheme is increasingly questioned.

Third, a number of countries have experienced a political backlash over their renewable energy schemes. Tens of billions of euros of taxpayers' money have been pumped into projects that depend on endless government handouts. Each of the 35,000 solar jobs in Germany, for instance, is subsidized to the tune of €130,000. According to estimates by the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research, green subsidies will cost German electricity consumers nearly €27 billion in the next two years.

Perhaps even more important is the growing realization that the warming trend of the late 20th century has, for the last 10 years or so, essentially come to a temporary halt. The data collected by international meteorological offices confirm this. This most peculiar fact is rarely mentioned in policy debates, but it certainly provides decision makers with a vital respite to reconsider their climate policy options.

Yes. A most peculiar fact indeed. It is hard to get an electorate wound up to the point where they want to pay exorbitant costs to combat global warming while they are freezing to death.

Above all, Europe's politicians have recognized that green taxes have turned into liabilities that may undermine economic stability and their chances of re-election. As German radio Deutsche Welle put it last week: "With the recession tightening its grip on the German economy, [Chancellor Angela] Merkel is betting that job reassurance is more important to the average worker than being a pioneer in tackling climate change."

Nowhere has the fundamental change of the political landscape been more pronounced and less expected than in Germany. For more than 20 years, Europe's economic powerhouse has been the major bastion of green politics.

In the 1990s, Angela Merkel steered and implemented Europe's Kyoto policy as Germany's first environment minister. Now serving as chancellor, she was hailed as Europe's climate savior after playing host to last year's G-8 summit in Heiligendamm. Only 18 months later, however, she no longer wears a halo. As a result of a concerted campaign by Germany's heavy industry, as well as growing opposition from within her Christian Democratic party, Mrs. Merkel has been forced to abandon her green principles and image.

The deepening economic crisis seems to transform the mood of the German public. Next year's general election looms large, and voters right now are worried about the economy and jobs, and not green issues. In early December, more than 10,000 angry metal workers and trade unionists -- most of them from Germany -- protested outside the European Parliament in Brussels against the EU's climate policy, which they fear will increase unemployment.

For many international observers, the ease with which Mrs. Merkel overturned her celebrated climate policy has come as a shock. But she was almost the last member of her Christian Democratic party willing to accept that a change in strategy was necessary given the immense costs of the EU's original climate plans. In fact, her party demanded that Mrs. Merkel veto the climate package if German industry did not receive an exemption from the Emissions Trading Scheme's auctioning of carbon credits. The exemption was duly granted.

Perhaps the most critical factor for Mrs. Merkel's almost unchallenged about-face is the vanishing strength of the Social Democratic Party, whose members were once among the most forceful climate alarmists. Mrs. Merkel's junior coalition partner has lost much of its support in recent years. And amid growing fears of a deepening recession, there are also signs of a split within the party on climate and energy issues.

Expect that a growing number of political leaders will be seen doing a Merkel Shift in the next few years. We note yesterday John Key's aligning New Zealand with the cautious, "toe in the water" Australian approach to "combatting" global warming--as propagated by Kevin Rudd. Compare Key's flagging ardour with his statements on the issue six months ago and we begin to see evidence of a distinct cooling, a Merkel Shift, emerging.

At the forefront of the left-wing opposition to the EU's climate policy has been EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen. The German Social Democrat has been arguing throughout the year that the climate targets should only be accepted if "truly cost-effective solutions" could be found. Other prominent dissenters in his party include Hubertus Schmoldt, the head of the mining, chemical and energy industrial union, who has recently called for a two-year postponement of the climate package.

In part as a result of German -- as well as Italian and Polish -- objections, Europe's climate package did not survive in its original form. The inclusion of a revision clause, pushed by Italy, is particularly significant as it makes the EU's climate targets conditional on the outcome of international climate talks. If the U.N.'s Copenhagen conference in 2009 fails to seal a post-Kyoto deal, it is as good as certain that some of the EU's targets will be further cut. By linking its decisions to those of the rest of the world, Europe has begun to act as a more rational player on the stage of international climate diplomacy.

Instead of yielding to the siren calls of climate alarmists, European governments would be well advised to focus their attention on developing pragmatic policies capable of safeguarding their industries, labor forces and environment at the same time.

Mr. Peiser is the editor of the international science policy network CCNet.

Wasted Lives

If you want advance notice of where the New Zealand state education system is going, take a look at the UK. The Economist recently lamented a missed chance to make "hard choices" about what children should be taught.

In New Zealand we have teachers and teacher unionists complaining about curriculum inflation. We have not seen anything yet. We reproduce The Economist article below:

IF YOU are in your 40s and British, it is quite possible that your spelling is an embarrassment. You may never have been taught the distinction between “there”, “their” and “they’re”, or perhaps even your times tables. If you moved house during your primary years you may have entirely missed some vital topic—joined-up writing, say. And you may have struggled to learn to read using the “initial teaching alphabet”, a concoction of 40 letters that was supposed to provide a stepping stone to literacy but tripped up many children when they had to switch to the standard 26.

Those days of swivel-eyed theorising and untrammelled experimentation—or, as the schools inspectorate put it at the time, “markedly individual decisions about what is to be taught”—ended in 1988 with the introduction of a national curriculum. But though that brought rigour and uniformity, it also created an unwieldy—and unworldly—blueprint for the Renaissance Child. Schools have struggled to fit it all in ever since. Now, 20 years later, the primary curriculum is to be cut down.

In January the government commissioned Sir Jim Rose, a former chief inspector of primary schools, to trim ten existing required subjects to give extra space to computing skills and to accommodate two new compulsory subjects: a foreign language and the now-optional “personal, social, health and economic education” (eating fruit and veg, refraining from hitting one’s classmates and much more). On December 8th he published his interim report—and many fear that, as well as losing fat, education will see a lot of meat go too.

Sir Jim proposes merging the subjects into six “learning areas”. History and geography will become “human, social and environmental understanding”; reading, writing and foreign languages, “understanding English, communication and languages”. Physical education, some bits of science and various odds and ends will merge into “understanding physical health and well-being”, and so on. His plan would “reduce prescription”, he says, and, far from downgrading important ideas, “embed and intensify [them] to better effect in cross-curricular studies”.

We can expect similar outcomes in New Zealand. Attempts to focus and narrow down the curriculum will result in fewer, but broader subject categories, leaving the same mess intact.

Learned societies are livid. “An erosion of specialist knowledge,” harrumphs the Royal Historical Society; its geographical counterpart is worried about “losing rigour and the teaching of basics”. Even those with no brief for a particular subject are concerned. Pouring 12 subjects into six “learning areas” is not the same as slimming down; if the curriculum is to become more digestible something must be lost, and just what is being glossed over. “Wouldn’t it be better to address the question of subjects directly—which ones, for how long and what to specify?” asks Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University.

One answer is that making hard choices openly would provoke complaints that the curriculum was being dumbed down. Attempts to cut it outright would run counter to powerful forces, as politicians look to schools to solve myriad social ills—from obesity to teenage pregnancy to low turnout in elections—and to pick up the slack left by poor parenting. But Sir Jim’s prescription indicates more than the difficulty of his job. He has been asked to solve tricky educational conundrums before and, every time, he has managed to catch the prevailing political wind.

Ah yes. As long as the Athenian fallacy of reductio ad educatum remains regnant there will be no genuine reform in the state education system. The school system has become increasingly an extension of the Ministry of Social Development. One cannot see how that will ever change whilst Athens clings to its empty idols. Expect that in time in New Zealand the Department of Education will be subsumed under the Ministry of Social Development--or something similar. Britain has already done this.

In 2006 he reviewed reading tuition, and plumped for the back-to-basics “synthetic phonics”—to the delight of a government already mustard-keen on the method. In 1999 he answered “no” to the charge that rising exam results were a sign of less exacting exams rather than of better teaching. In 1991 the Tory government of the day was equally thrilled to be told that primary education had become too progressive.

This time, too, Sir Jim has captured the Zeitgeist. Synthesis and cross-cutting are once more fashionable in educational circles: since July 2007 England’s schools have been overseen not by an education ministry but by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which is responsible for pretty much everything to do with young people, from health to criminal justice to learning. (The three other bits of the United Kingdom—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—go their own way on education.) Primary schools were turning away from discrete subjects even before he pronounced: a 2007 survey found a third taught mostly “themed” lessons; another 40% were planning to do so soon. Another recent review, this time of what 11-14-year-olds should learn, also plumped for more cross-curricular learning.

Themed lessons are now the coming "vanity du jour" in New Zealand state educational circles as well. Hard subject content is being filtered by abstract themes (love, joy, peace, goodness--whatever) so that literature and mathematics become merely illustrative of a theme. The subjects themselves are not taught honestly or rigorously. "Two plus two" becomes an illustration of the themes of order or regularity or social conventions--but as a construct fundamental to the subject of mathematics it is not.

Many countries’ curriculums consist of high-flown descriptions of the paragonic citizens that education is meant to help produce, couched in impenetrable educationalese. But alongside are usually some hard facts: which textbooks to use and how many hours to devote to each topic, for example. England’s lacks such a crib sheet. Schools can choose their own texts, even write their own, and apportion the school day as they please. Exams come in competing varieties from independent exam boards that must, like teachers, read between the lines to figure out what is meant to have been taught. That leaves England particularly exposed to the consequences of curricular woolliness.

NCEA in New Zealand has produced many unintended consequences--curricular woolliness is one of the most prominent. This charge will arouse indignant ire amongst professional state educators, since the system was designed to reduce all curricular subjects to precise "learning" bits which could be measured. As always happens, the law of unintended consequences wins out when the State seeks to operate in areas beyond its sphere of competence. Education is no exception. NCEA has facilitated the burgeoning range and number of subjects that can be taught--that is, curricula inflation--and has replaced a hard focus upon subject content with the facilitation of achievement testing.

Despite seeming vague, though, national curriculums do often encapsulate some aspect of national ideals. France’s is explicit about the primacy of la belle langue; Sweden’s elevates equality above all other virtues; Japan’s, love of country. That these match stereotypes so well suggests that they capture a national spirit, or create it, or a bit of both—and raises a worrying question for anyone looking at England’s proposed mishmash of a new curriculum.