BP’s Shift ‘Back To Petroleum’ Prods Consideration Of A Climate Oil Price Cap – OpEd

 

March 14, 2023 

By IPS

By Philippe Benoit*

BP, the oil company that previously brought us “Beyond Petroleum” and more recently robust corporate climate goals, has announced a return in emphasis to its traditional business of producing oil. Drawn by the inescapable appeal of oil’s latest high profits, has BP rebranded itself as “Back to Petroleum?”

This type of shift highlights the importance of stronger market incentives for reducing emissions so that companies interested in decarbonizing see their financial interest align with that course. BP’s recent journey points to the need for instruments that influence profits specifically, and notably reconsideration of the controversial price control tool: a climate-driven price cap on oil.

BP has consistently been a forward-leaning company among its peers on climate.  As early as 2002, then CEO Lord Browne rebranded BP as it sought “to reinvent the energy business: to go beyond petroleum.” However, various financial pressures, including the Deepwater Horizon spill, subsequently moved the company away from its non-petroleum businesses.

But in August 2020, BP was back with a strengthened pivot to climate as the company announced a series of ambitious low-carbon targets.”  This included a 40% production decline and a 10-fold increase in low-carbon investment over the next decade.  BP also announced  a groundbreaking target for Scope 3 emissions (namely, emissions from the consumption of its products by industry and other consumers).

Unfortunately, BP has now scaled back its climate ambition.  Notably, rather than a 40% drop in production by 2030, BP now expects only a 25% decrease.  Significantly, this shift has been made at a time of $28 billion in record corporate profits for BP, records also seen by other oil majors, such as ExxonMobil and Shell.

These record profits — driven in part by high gas prices resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — also point to a major vulnerability for any market-driven climate effort.  With the lure of these type of returns from the traditional petroleum business, it is difficult to see or sustain financial motivation to shift away.

Indeed, as BP made clear in announcing its ambitious 2022 climate targets: “bp is committed to delivering attractive returns to shareholders” — and petroleum, with its upside, is uniquely placed to deliver the potential of a high return. So long as there are big profits to be made from oil, these companies will continue to be drawn to their petroleum activities, notwithstanding any stated desire to shift to renewables.

However, this also points to what needs to be a focus of an effective climate policy for oil: reducing its profitability.  Over the years, think tanks, academics and others have put forward carbon pricing as the most efficient emissions reduction instrument, but this discourse has failed to deliver significant results in practice, especially when it comes to oil companies.

As emissions continue to rise and the carbon budget shrinks, the time has come to explore other solutions. One tool that merits consideration — more precisely, reconsideration — is a cap on oil prices.

This “climate oil price cap” would be designed to increase the relative profitability and so financial appeal of renewables by limiting the upside on oil activities specifically (something a customary windfall profits tax set at the corporate level wouldn’t accomplish). It would thereby support and encourage BP and other oil companies to transform themselves from a traditional petroleum company into an “integrated energy company” (BP’s own term), one that can generate significant profits from renewables and other low-carbon products relative to its petroleum activities.

Oil price controls are, of course, not new and have a checkered history (e.g., President Nixon’s effort in the US 50 years ago). But the climate emergency presents a new threat that merits re-examining this instrument. Importantly, a price cap could also help energy-importing developing countries, as well as vulnerable households there and elsewhere, avoid the harmful impact of the high oil prices experienced in 2022 (another potential advantage over a windfall profits tax ).

And there is now a precedent for this type of concerted purchaser action, namely the price cap on Russian oil agreed by the EU and US. It is also a tool that has drawn renewed attention in other contexts, including rethinking the framework governing gas prices to insulate US consumers from the gasoline price surges driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Any effort needs to consider the lessons from the failed efforts of the past.  For example, the cap should be set at a sufficient level to attract the desired supply – including to energy-importing developing countries — even as it precludes the type of record profits the oil industry saw last year. It should also build on the experience with the current Russian price cap.

While, admittedly today there isn’t sufficient support for aggressive climate policies, the prospect for strong action will likely increase over time as heat waves, flooding and other extreme weather events wreak havoc exacerbated by climate change.  This in turn can be expected to increase the willingness of politicians and policymakers to be more ambitious down the road in taking climate action.

In anticipation of this changing landscape, creative options beyond traditional carbon pricing mechanisms should be explored and put before these decision-makers by think tanks, academics and others.

In this regard, the combination of BP’s recent record profits and shift in corporate policy points to the appropriateness of considering a price cap on oil as a possible tool to fight climate change by improving the relative profitability of low-carbon investments.

*Philippe Benoit has over 20 years of experience working on international energy, development and sustainability issues.  He is currently research director at Global Infrastructure Analytics and Sustainability 2050.

Japan eyes more nuclear power for energy security

14 March 2023

Author: Parul Bakshi, JNU

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Japan to reevaluate its energy strategy once again. A sharp rise in the price of LNG, a lack of energy alternatives to reduce reliance on Russian LNG imports and Tokyo’s commitment to phasing out Russian coal and oil imports — all while ensuring Japan’s energy security — are making this reevaluation difficult. Even measures such as wearing turtlenecks to reduce energy consumption have been suggested.

The Japanese government is unsurprisingly using the uncertainty around energy security as a reason to proactively push its nuclear energy policy. The policy can be traced to former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s administration. In 2012, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Abe put nuclear energy back on the table as a potential critical energy source for Japan. Nuclear power has been touted as an important pillar in enhancing Japan’s energy self-sufficiency. Its use is also proposed as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, meet decarbonisation targets and a valuable source of baseload electricity. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has been emphasising the importance of nuclear power, calling for accelerating nuclear energy use on several occasions in the past year.

But the Kishida cabinet’s Green Transformation (GX) strategic plan is being criticised for merely restating Japan’s decade old energy policy goals while pledging to accelerate the previously promised trend of nuclear energy use over the next ten years. GX assumes that nuclear power will account for 20–22 per cent of Japan’s energy mix in 2030 — a target that the Japanese government proposed in its Basic Energy Plan in 2014. In 2022, though, nuclear power only accounted for around 8 per cent of electricity supply.

Kishida’s government hopes to extend the operation of nuclear power plants beyond the current 60-year limit to achieve this target. While the government believes life extensions are considerably cheaper than building new plants, they still represent substantial capital investments. The International Energy Agency estimates that extending the operational life of one gigawatt of nuclear capacity for at least 10 years costs US$500 million to US$1 billion. Even though countries like the United States have extended the lifespan of their reactors, no reactor in the world has been in commercial operation for more than 60 years.

Kishida’s cabinet also proposes replacing aging nuclear facilities with new technologies like light-water reactors, small nuclear reactors and nuclear fusion. While these technologies could be promising, their present commercial viability is questionable.

Even if nuclear power supplies only 10 per cent of Japan’s electricity after 2050, more than 10 new reactors may have to be built. Reactor restarts also incur significant costs ranging from US$700 million to US$1 billion per unit, regardless of reactor size or age. From the 2011 financial year to March 2017, total restart costs were estimated to be 1900 billion yen (US$17 billion) for eight companies, according to a Japan Atomic Industrial Forum survey.

Yet according to polling by Nikkei, 53 per cent of Japanese support restarting reactors so long as safety can be ensured — the first time a majority has favoured this in over a decade. But stringent safety regulations, Nuclear Regulation Authority inspections and citizens’ class action lawsuits against reactors have hindered the desired pace of a post-Fukushima return to nuclear power. These bottlenecks continue to exist, even while public opinion might be shifting. However, over 3000 public comments received were critical of the nuclear policy shift. As a result, Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry, has stated that the government’s plan would be explained clearly to deepen public understanding of it.

In response to Kishida’s announcement to consider the construction of new nuclear power plants in Japan, former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi reiterated reasons why the policy could fail. Other than stressing safety and financial concerns, he emphasised the dangers of nuclear waste and the challenges in finding a disposal site.

Previously, observers have highlighted the need for Japan to provide more clarity on its nuclear energy policy, especially regarding the fate of existing nuclear reactors. The steps the government is taking to promote nuclear energy show the direction Japan intends to take. But there continue to be questions about how the government’s goals related to nuclear energy will be achieved — especially around issues such as radioactive waste treatment, risk minimisation and commercial feasibility.

Stable political leadership, consistent stakeholder engagement and appropriate legislation are required to make the government’s vision for nuclear energy to become a critical element in Japan’s energy mix a reality. But the government should be mindful of cost–benefit analyses and ensure the push for nuclear energy does not come at the cost of reversing the expansion of renewables.

Dr Parul Bakshi holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is a Former Special Research Student and Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is a co-editor of India-Japan Relations @70: Building Beyond the Bilateral.

Volkswagen to build new electric vehicle battery factory in Canada

Volkswagen has chosen Canada for the site of its new electric vehicle battery factory, its first in North America. 

March 13 (UPI) -- Volkswagen has chosen Canada for the site of its new electric vehicle battery factory, its first in North America.

Volkswagen Group announced the decision to set up its PowerCo battery cell factory in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, in a press release on Monday. Production is slated to begin at the factory starting in 2027.

The battery cell factory in Canada adds to Volkswagen Group's footprint in North America, following the announcement earlier this month that subsidiary Scout Motors will build a $2 billion electric vehicle manufacturing plant in South Carolina.

"Our [factory] in Canada sends a strong message: PowerCo is on track to become a global battery player," Thomas Schmall, chairman of PowerCo's supervisory board, said in a statement. "With the expansion to North America, we will enter a key market for e-mobility and battery cell production, driving forward our global battery strategy at full speed."

RELATED Tesla announces new $3.6B investment in Nevada Gigafactory

Volkswagen said Canada "offers ideal conditions" with access to local raw materials and clean energy.

The company plans to develop 25 new battery-powered electric vehicles by the end of the decade. It also intends to increase production at its Chattanooga, Tenn., plant and upgrade its facilities in Puebla and Silao, Mexico, to produce electric vehicles and components at those sites.

"Today's announcement by Volkswagen is a true testament to our highly skilled workforce and Canada's strong and growing battery ecosystem," Francois Phillippe Champagne, Canada's minister of innovation, said in a statement.

RELATED Lithium ion batteries going cobalt-free; nickel next on the chopping block

"VW's decision to establish its first overseas [factory] in Canada speaks to our country's competitiveness when it comes to attracting major investments," he said. "It is also a vote of confidence in Canada as the green supplier of choice to the world."

Volkswagen picks Ontario for first battery factory outside Europe

The facility in St. Thomas, Ont. is expected to begin production in 2027

Alicja Siekierska

The Volkswagen Group has picked St. Thomas, Ont. for the site of its first battery cell factory outside of Europe as the carmaker's first ramps up expansion in North America. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

The Volkswagen Group has picked St. Thomas, Ont. for the site of its first battery cell factory outside of Europe, as the carmaker ramps up expansion in North America.

The German carmaker made the announcement Monday, with production expected to start in 2027.

"We now have the unique opportunity to grow profitably in North America and play a key role in driving the transition to electric mobility there," Volkswagen chief financial officer Arno Antlitz said in a statement.

"We will be able to address an even broader range of customers. Volkswagen has the right strategy, products and scale to take a strong position in the North American market."

Volkswagen previously signed a memorandum of understanding with the Canadian government to boost cooperation on the development of battery production, with a key focus on supplying minerals such as lithium, nickel and cobalt.

"Today’s news is a major vote of confidence in Canada and Ontario, and in our shared work to position the country and the province as a global leader on the electric vehicle supply chain," federal innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne and Ontario's minister of economic development Vic Fedeli said in a joint statement.

"This investment is another significant step forward as we build a clean transportation sector to meet global and North American demand for zero-emission vehicles."

The federal and provincial governments did not say how much money is being put forward for the projects. Each level of government has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance to other electric vehicle production projects.

Volkswagen is the latest automaker to select Canada as the site for production related to electric vehicle manufacturing. Stellantis and General Motors previously announced plans to open new manufacturing facilities in Ontario and Quebec, respectively, while Ford said it will retool its Oakville assembly plant to build battery electric vehicles.

Alicja Siekierska is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow her on Twitter @alicjawithaj.

Protests against Israel's judicial reforms hosted in London, Paris, and other cities worldwide

Protests across the world have two words frequenting signs and chants; "shame" and "democracy" appeared repetitively.

 
By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Published: MARCH 14, 2023

An aerial view shows Israelis attending a demonstration against proposed judicial reforms by Israel's new right-wing government in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 28, 2023.
(photo credit: REUTERS/OREN ALON)

Hundreds of protesters turned up for protests against judicial reforms in Israel, as well as the current right-wing government coalition. Demonstrations have largely been organized by Israelis living abroad, and have popped up in cities such as New York, Sydney, Madrid, and Amsterdam amongst others, Israeli media reported.

Ynet reported that at a protest held in Paris, demonstrators tried to interrupt a speech given by Minister of Aliyah and Absorption Ofir Sofer. Sofer was appearing at a conference encouraging Aliyah for French citizens. Some demonstrators shouted "shame," amongst other comments.

Of those protesting overseas, some were Israelis who have been spending their years living outside of Israel. Others were led to opportunities abroad that caused them to leave Israel. "I am in favor of equal rights and in favor of democracy. It is also important to convey a message to the children that one should fight for what is important. We also demonstrated in Jerusalem at the time. The move to London is due to work and completely accidental," one resident told Ynet.

Protests across the world have two words frequenting signs and chants; "shame" and "democracy" appeared repetitively.

The Handmaidens have crossed Israel's borders

Israelis dressed as characters from The Handmaid's Tale television show protest the Israeli government's planned judicial overhaul, in Tel Aviv, February 25, 2023. 

(credit: TOMER NEUBERG/FLASH90)

As part of the reenactment of The Handmaid's Tale, women from all over Israel marched in red robes and white hats in demonstrations against the judicial reforms planned by the government and in protest of the potential violation of women's rights.

Now, now this same demonstration has found its way to London and Paris alike.

The performance is intended to warn against the transformation of Israel from an egalitarian democracy into a theocracy that separates women and dismisses their rights, similar to the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale, a novel by author Margaret Atwood that recently was successfully adapted for television.

The performance was presented for the first time by the "Building an Alternative" organization at a demonstration in Jerusalem, then quickly gained momentum throughout the country and received extensive coverage in the Israeli and international media, including CNN, Fox News and The Washington Post, and was also tweeted by Atwood herself and won a sketch in popular Israeli satire show Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Land).

With Fingerprints, DNA and Photos, Turkey Seeks Families of the Missing

Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur
Sun, March 12, 2023 

Posters of missing people on a window by a food distribution in Atakya, Turkey, in the country's Hatay province, which was hit hard by the earthquake, March 3, 2023. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)

NARLICA, Turkey — When a powerful earthquake struck southern Turkey last month, a lawyer concluded that her relatives had been buried in the rubble of their collapsed apartment.

Three days later, rescue workers recovered the bodies of her mother and brother, she said, but days, then weeks, then a month passed with no sign of her father. His disappearance plunged her into a terrifying mystery faced by families across the quake zone whose loved ones are still missing.

“I can’t find my father anywhere in the world — not under the rubble, not in the hospitals, not anywhere,” said the lawyer, Mervat Nasri, who is from Syria.

Five weeks after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and a powerful aftershock struck southern Turkey, killing 47,000 people, many others remain unaccounted for, adding ambiguity to the complete toll and leaving families in an agonizing limbo. More than 6,000 people were also killed across the border in northern Syria.

Turkish authorities have provided scant information about how many people are missing, making the scope unclear. One indication is the number of unidentified bodies buried in cemeteries. Ahmet Hilal, a professor of forensic medicine at Cukurova University in Adana, said his research in the afflicted area found that there were currently about 1,470.

Recent interviews with experts, survivors and officials involved in the recovery efforts indicated chaos in the disaster’s first days, with injured people dispatched to faraway hospitals where they may have died without their relatives’ knowledge, and unidentified bodies hastily buried because rescue workers had no place to store them.

In the weeks since, Turkish authorities have begun using fingerprints, DNA tests and photographs to try to link unidentified bodies with their next of kin.

One branch of that effort is in a rocky lot in Narlica, a town in Hatay province, one of the areas most heavily damaged by the quake. On a recent day, police officers and prosecutors worked in metal shipping containers, which have been used as quake-proof shelters. A stream of families came by, hoping to find traces of missing loved ones.

Police recorded the names of missing relatives and checked a database to see if they had been found elsewhere. Families that found matches received death certificates, photographs taken before their relatives were buried, and the cemetery names and grave numbers where they had been laid to rest.

Those whose relatives’ names were not in the system watched a large screen as the police scrolled through hundreds of photographs of unidentified bodies, many of them disfigured, hoping to see a face they recognized.

Some families came away with nothing. They gave blood for DNA tests that would be cross-checked with samples taken from unidentified bodies before burial.

“I checked more than 150 photos. I couldn’t take it anymore,” said Suheyl Avci after leaving the container to smoke a cigarette. “My brother is continuing now.”

More than two dozen of their relatives had been killed in the quake, he said, but he was still searching for an aunt. He had heard a rumor that a woman with her name had been pulled from the rubble alive, but he had not managed to find her.

Other families received painful confirmations of loss.

“He was like a mountain, my son,” cried Makbule Karadeniz, 62, after recognizing her dead son Sait, 35, in the photographs.

The quake Feb. 6 destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings across southern Turkey, ruining some hospitals, overwhelming others and creating chaos that made it easy for relatives to lose one another.

After the quake, Sakine Nur Gul, 27, navigated a blizzard and roads clogged with emergency vehicles to reach her family’s building in the city of Antakya, finally arriving 19 hours after it had collapsed, she said.

Assuming her relatives were entombed inside, she waited by the rubble as rescue workers dug for bodies and survivors, she said. But when they reached the basement on the sixth day, they had not found her relatives.

So she began a painful, weekslong odyssey to find her mother, father and brother, who were among 28 people missing from the same building.

Thinking they could have been pulled out alive soon after the quake, she visited hospitals and graveyards throughout the area and gave blood in the hope that her DNA would lead to a match.

Early on, she said, she found sprawling expanses of new, numbered graves but no one to explain who was buried where, she said. Some hospitals refused to show her photographs of unidentified patients in their intensive care units, citing privacy concerns.

As the search dragged on, the birthdays of her missing brother and father passed, she said. Nine days after the quake, her father’s bank sent his last automatic mortgage payment for the family’s now nonexistent apartment.

She has struggled to maintain hope that they are still alive, while feeling unable to grieve until she is sure they are dead.

“How long are we going to have to wait?” she said.

Previous earthquakes in Turkey left many people unaccounted for. More than 18,000 people were killed in a quake near Istanbul in 1999. To this day, 5,840 are officially still missing, most believed to have been interred without being identified. They are not included in the death toll.

After last month’s quake, around 5,000 unidentified people were buried across the quake zone, said Hilal, the professor of forensic medicine. But in the weeks since, he said, that number has gone down to around 1,470 because many of the buried bodies have been identified through DNA matches and other methods.

People could have disappeared in different ways, Hilal said. Overwhelmed rescue workers buried bodies before they were identified, although in most cases, they collected photographs, fingerprints or blood. Others could have been charred by fires in the rubble, making identification difficult, he said.

Other remains could have been hauled away accidentally when rubble was removed, Hilal said, but this was unlikely because many people waited near buildings until their relatives had been found.

In the end, Hilal said he expected the number of missing people to be lower than in 1999, when the state could not match DNA and did not have fingerprints for as many Turkish citizens and residents.

But for many families, the uncertainty continues.

In the days after the quake, Reema Baliqji and her two sons were rescued from the rubble of their building, she said, and the bodies of her husband and younger daughter were recovered. But her older daughter, Fariyal Idris, 17, was missing, as was a 15-year-old girl from another family who had been rescued and sent away in an ambulance.

At the shipping containers in Narlica, police found records for her husband and younger daughter, prepared death certificates and gave her the locations and numbers of their plots in a sprawling new cemetery nearby. She also received a surprise: the burial location of a niece with the same last name who the family had not even known was missing.

But there was still no trace of her older daughter.

“We will wait and see what happens,” Baliqji said.

© 2023 The New York Times Company

UN says only 13% of $1B appeal funded to help Türkiye quake survivors

UN launched appeal for Türkiye on Feb. 16 to assist more than 5 million people

Betül Yürük |14.03.2023 

A view of tent city established by United Nations (UN) at Muradiye neighborhood of Iskenderun district, after 6.4 and 5.8 magnitude earthquakes hit Hatay, on February 28, 2023.

UNITED NATIONS

The UN's $1 billion humanitarian appeal to support the people of Türkiye who are suffering from last month’s devastating earthquakes was funded at only 13%, a spokesperson said Monday.

The UN launched the billion-dollar appeal for Türkiye on Feb. 16 to assist more than five million people affected by the earthquakes.

UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric provided the percentage figure when asked by Anadolu.

The funding covers a three-month-period which will allow aid organizations to rapidly scale up vital support in areas that include food security, protection, education, water and shelter.

The death toll from powerful earthquakes that struck southern Türkiye on Feb. 6 has risen to 48,448, the country’s interior minister said Monday.

"6,660 of the dead were foreign nationals, and most of them are our Syrian brothers," Suleyman Soylu said at a news conference in quake-hit Malatya province along with Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.

The magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes, centered in Kahramanmaras province, affected more than 13 million people across 11 provinces, including Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye, Elazig and Sanliurfa.

Several countries in the region, including Syria and Lebanon, also felt the strong tremors that struck Türkiye in fewer than 10 hours.

PDF Thailand 2020 youth movement_FINAL.pdf (boell.org)

 Abstract 

 Kanokrat Lertchoosakul’s “The rise and dynamics of the 2020 youth movement in Thailand” focuses on the recent youth-driven political movements in Thailand. Young advocates for democracy are campaigning against the surveillance state and the internet “gateway” to control inappropriate websites and the flow of information from the rest of the world to Thailand. The election win of the Future Forward Party (FFP) shows how Thailand’s active young generation is moving from the Internet to the ballot box. After succeeding in blocking the military government’s attempts to restrict their freedom, they have moved to establish a formal political institution. In February 2020, Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the FFP over internal party allegations and improper financial sources. Nationwide student and school protests erupted, the largest mass youth movement since the 1970s

Appeals Court upholds restriction on Twitter’s First Amendment right to publish national security transparency report

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
13 March 2023

A view of Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco, California, 8 February 2023.

 Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The court's decision in Twitter v. Garland is seen as a disappointing, dangerous opinion that may well empower even broader uses of government power to censor speech by unwilling participants in government investigations.

This statement was originally published on eff.org on 10 March 2023.

A ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week marks a new low in judicial deference to classification and national security, even against the nearly inviolable First Amendment right to be free of prior restraints against speech. In Twitter v. Garland, the court ruled that it was not a violation of the First Amendment for the Justice Department to censor a draft transparency report on the aggregate number of national security demands Twitter received in the second half of 2013. It’s a disappointing, dangerous opinion that may well empower even broader uses of government power to censor speech by unwilling participants in government investigations.
Background

In 2014, Twitter submitted its draft transparency report to the FBI to review. The FBI redacted the report, prohibiting Twitter from sharing the total number of foreign intelligence surveillance orders the government had served within a six-month period in aggregate bands such as 1-99. In response, Twitter filed suit in order to assert its First Amendment right to share that information. To be clear, Twitter did not plan to share any detail about the requests such as the targets or other identifying information.

In April 2020, a federal district court dismissed Twitter’s First Amendment claim. Among the several concerning aspects of the opinion, the judge devoted only a single paragraph to analyzing Twitter’s First Amendment right to inform the public about law enforcement orders for its users’ information. Twitter appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal.
A Dangerous Precedent

Not only did the Ninth Circuit uphold the lower court’s ruling, it went out of its way to find that a large, well established body of prior restraint law did not apply. As we wrote in our amicus brief, when the government seeks to stop the publication of speech, it must satisfy “extraordinarily exacting” scrutiny. This includes a substantive demonstration both that the prior restraint is truly the only means of preserving the government’s interest, and a series of procedural requirements designed to ensure that a censor’s decisions are quickly and adequately reviewed by an independent court. But the Ninth Circuit applied a much more deferential test for the government’s need for a gag. Worse still, it held that exacting procedural protections against prior restraints do not apply to “the disclosure of information transmitted confidentially as part of a legitimate government process, because such restrictions do not pose the same dangers to speech rights as do traditional censorship regimes.”

We’ve fallen a long way from the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case. There, the Supreme Court upheld the New York Times’ right to publish classified reports about the failure in Vietnam despite strenuous government claims that it would seriously damage national security. This Ninth Circuit decision deepens a trend of “prior restraint lite” cases, in which the government can silence speakers who wish to talk about their involvement in government investigations in ways that would be completely unthinkable in other contexts of censorship. This is, in fact, the crux of the Ninth Circuit’s rationale: because transparency reports originate out of a company’s involvement with the government’s own classified doings, rather than a creative or journalistic endeavor like a movie or news article, the government supposedly has more control over the information.

According to the opinion, gags on recipients of national security demands do not “present the grave dangers of a censorship system” like film licensing boards. But it does little to explain why the government’s interest in limiting discussion of its secret investigations – legitimate as that might be – presents no risk of overreaching censorship. The history of the national security state – from the Pentagon Papers to the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program – suggests the opposite.

The creation of national security exceptions to the Constitution are worrying enough, but they must not be allowed to migrate into other areas of law. We’ll be watching for any attempts to rely on this latest decision to justify restrictions on transparency reporting and other speech by participants in government investigations outside of the national security context.

 

Permacrisis Can’t Be The Future Of US–China Relations – OpEd

 March 14, 2023

By East Asia Forum

By EAF Editorial Board*

Confusion, miscommunication, lies, crude posturing, finger-pointing— last month’s ‘balloongate’ was the contemporary US–China relationship in microcosm.

As Paul Heer writes in the first of this week’s two lead articles, ‘[w]e now know that this rapid sequence of events reflected a rush to judgement and action before the facts were clear’. The balloon’s drift over North America wasn’t the deliberate provocation it was initially cast as — more likely the result of a spy balloon blown off-course — though in doing so it ‘exposed a Chinese intelligence program that would violate international law by operating within other countries’ territorial airspace’.

The peril to US national security from the balloon’s overflight didn’t match the overheated rhetoric. But it was alarming in how it revealed ‘mutual distrust, latent hostility, a failure to communicate and the adverse impact of internal politics on how the two sides deal with each other’, writes Heer, and ‘reinforced their exaggerated assessments of each other’s strategic intentions’.

Given the current climate, what happens if something similar occurs not over the skies of the American west, but in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea?

Heer is on the money in arguing that ‘[i]t is imperative that [Washington and Beijing] reinvigorate the process of substantive engagement that Biden and Xi agreed to at their last meeting in 2022, and supplement that with serious efforts to establish bilateral mechanisms for crisis management’.

A real danger is that US policy can shape Beijing’s political options and incentives, in ways that are ultimately damaging to US interests. As Harrison Prétat writes in the second of this week’s lead articles, ‘China’s actions will be dictated by Beijing’s perceptions. If Beijing concludes current US initiatives are the beginning of a containment effort, Beijing may see now as its only chance to secure control over disputed territory or maritime areas’. For this reason, ‘Washington needs to complement its deterrent measures with assurance mechanisms that … demonstrate to Beijing that risky military action is not necessary to preserve its core interests’, in Taiwan or elsewhere.

The United States could benefit from reassuring itself, too — specifically about the reality that the stakes involved in competition with China aren’t existential. Too many in the US system are ‘underestimating our strengths and our rival’s weaknesses’, says David Rothkopf. That’s a disservice to American democracy, statecraft and economic dynamism. As Edward Luce wrote in a widely-shared Financial Times column last week, ‘[t]he US still holds more of the cards. It has plenty of allies, a global system that it designed, better technology and younger demographics’.

The United States, in other words, is well-equipped to thrive even in a multipolar world in which its relative economic and military dominance is less pronounced. As Jude Blanchette of CSIS observed, ‘if you were an alien’ listening in on some recent rhetoric from US politicians on China, ‘you would think the United States is a pathetic, weak, scared nation, which is being beset by an omnicompetent, omnipresent enemy’. The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, which falls this week, is the perfect moment to reflect upon the dangers of US policymakers succumbing to an exaggerated sense of threat.

The entrenchment of a Chinese sphere of influence in East Asia would be unwelcome for all sorts of reasons, but it is unnecessary to risk World War III in order to prevent that outcome: globalisation and multilateralism can do a lot of the work that diplomatic braggadocio and military deterrence are now vainly attempting.

The growth within ‘Altasia’ and greater integration of the regional and global economy all blunt the ability of China to use lopsided bilateral trade ties as an instrument of coercion. US involvement in Asia Pacific integration initiatives would be a boon in this regard. But the United States’ Indo Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) doesn’t cut it in terms of seriously lowering the barriers to trade and investment between the United States and Asia, and US complicity in the erosion of the multilateral trading system and its own turn to protectionism just opens strategic space for China to pose as a friend of globalisation through its positive role within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and by seeking membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement.

The reinforcement of multilateralism and the ASEAN-centred security cooperation architecture offers the opportunity to build a space for dialogue and confidence (if not trust) between the United States and China and, most crucially of all, institutionalise a role for non-great power stakeholders in collectively negotiating the rules and norms that shape all parties’ conduct towards one another, including that of the great powers.

The consolidation of a Cold-War mindset in Washington — a place where ideas can and should be openly contested — would be a huge stumbling block. That the United States is already entering its political cycle makes the problem worse. The conversation in the United States all too often reflects the defective thinking that Jessica Chen Weiss identified in an important essay in 2022, in which she argues that the United States was spooking itself into an all-encompassing struggle with China without any clear idea of what victory would mean.

This danger should galvanise Asia’s middle and smaller powers to take a leadership role in building out an institutional order that can preserve their prosperity and sovereignty in the multipolar regional order that China’s economic rise has already created.

*About the author: The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum

East Asia Forum is a platform for analysis and research on politics, economics, business, law, security, international relations and society relevant to public policy, centred on the Asia Pacific region. It consists of an online publication and a quarterly magazine, East Asia Forum Quarterly, which aim to provide clear and original analysis from the leading minds in the region and beyond.