Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 633

Elite Women Choosing Family Over Work

Millennials are hard to pin down. They’ve been characterized as politically liberal, but turn out to be quite skeptical of government. They’re thought to have Tweet-length attention spans, but turn out to read more books than older adults. They’re sometimes described as careerist and individualistic, but a certain group of them, at least—high-achieving women—actually prioritizes family over work to a greater extent than their mothers did. The New York Times reports:

A variety of survey data shows that educated, working young women are more likely than those before them to expect their career and family priorities to shift over time.

The surveys highlighted that two generations after women entered the business world in large numbers, it can still be hard for women to work. Even those with the highest career ambitions are more likely than their predecessors to plan to scale back at work at certain times or to seek out flexible jobs.

You might call them the planning generation: Their approach is less all or nothing — climb the career ladder or stay home with children — and more give and take…

Baby boomer women were the first to work in professions in large numbers, and they were less likely to say they planned to interrupt their careers and more likely to say they expected to successfully combine their work and family lives.

Feminists will likely see the shift as evidence that the women’s liberation is still incomplete, while social conservatives are likely to welcome the (modest) move toward more traditional gender norms. But the social picture communicated by the data is probably more complicated than the orthodoxies of either the left or right would allow.

The Times article focuses on three surveys—one of “college educated professionals,” one of business students at Wharton, and one of business students at Harvard. The trend away from full-time working motherhood, in other words, is limited to a narrow and privileged group of American women. Poor and working class women (a disproportionate share of whom are divorced) are less likely to have the luxury of taking time off to spend with their children. While the Times report pitches the data as a story about changing gender norms, they also tell a story about class stratification.

So while the surveys might seem to vindicate the conservative view that many women would opt for part time work or full-time motherhood if given the choice, they also highlight the fact that this choice is not actually available to the majority of the population—in part because of economic inequality and the lack of social support for low-income mothers. And while they might seem to vindicate the feminist view that true parity in the workplace will come about through government intervention and cultural reform, this view is complicated by the fact that even the most high-achieving women, with the most resources at their disposal, in the most socially progressive generation in history, are planning to put their careers on hold to care for their children.

Ultimately, the survey data support the narrative Charles Murray put forward in his 2012 blockbuster book, Coming Apart: that the cultural habits of privileged Americans are looking less and less like those of Americans in the working and middle classes. Whether you are a libertarian or a liberal, a feminist or a conservative, that trend should be a cause for concern.

The Fragile Eggs of Haruki Murakami

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki MurakamiKnopf, 2014, 400 pp., $25.95

I grew interested in the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in the way young people grow interested in many things, but particularly in books: by seeing attractive people reading them.

Around my junior year of college, I began to see beautiful young women and interesting young men poring over, or pretending to pore over, both recent and vintage Murakami. Often they seemed to be English majors or “Cultural Studies” types, clad in semi-hippie style: Beads and expressive dresses, yes. Drab corporate-wear and accessories bearing logos, no—though some couture items were exempted. Even in the bohemian Montreal of the early 2000s, thick black glasses were not yet in fashion, so you could see the searching, somewhat naive eyes of literary types of both sexes. But Murakami was also much loved by the party people whose favorite nightly activity (weekend or weeknight) was dancing on bar tables, and by the scientists, the only ones who actually seemed to do any work.This didn’t happen only on campus, but everywhere around town. On the Montreal metro, I remember trying to engage a stunning French-Canadian woman in conversation about the novel she was reading, one of the author’s jazzy pop-mysticism novels of the early 1990s in French translation. This was one of the hippest parts of the Murakami oeuvre, about which only the real cognoscenti knew. She seemed interested in hearing from me, but in mangled French all I could say was how très intéressant I thought everything was. That encounter was the best motivation I had for signing up for French class.Murakami sightings continued over the next few years, in places as diverse as Toronto, Paris, and Jerusalem. The “attractive and interesting people read Murakami” thesis was validated by its applicability in different contexts. By then, of course, I had advanced from staring at readers of Murakami to actually reading him myself. (I leave it to others to judge whether this, too, supported the thesis.) Indeed, I inhaled everything he wrote. Such was my zeal that I had extensive thoughts on the relative strengths of Murakami’s three main English translators, as if I knew something about Japanese. But some of the translations seemed crisper and more attuned to Murakami’s austere style and sometimes broken sentences, which he composed to echo the rhythms of jazz. Murakami had a single formula: the life of some anonymous male, usually in early middle age, is interrupted by some unexpected, usually “mysterious” event such as the sudden disappearance of a loved one. The phlegmatic protagonist would then embark on a mission to figure things out and strengthen his relationship with others or himself. Murakami’s mysteries are never resolved; what the character learns and feels in the face of this interruption of daily life is the point. The fun lies in going along with him.The recent publication in English of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (2013) brought to mind my own voracious Murakami consumption of a decade ago. The formula was just the same: In the case of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, the disruption happened years before the hero’s middle age, when he left his native Nagoya for the university in Tokyo. In high school, Tsukuru had been part of an inseparable group of five friends, three boys and two girls. They were all good at something: One boy is a remarkable athlete while the other is effortlessly brainy; one girl is a piano prodigy and the other shows real literary promise. Only Tsukuru Tazaki, decent at most things but excellent at none, is indistinct. With his sole worldly interest in trains and train stations, he seems to be “colorless.”Upon graduation, Tsukuru’s four friends, hoping to keep up their friendship, attend local universities rather than more prestigious ones further afield. Tsukuru, however, goes to study engineering in Tokyo. At first, each time Tsukuru returns home for vacation, the friendship circle resumes where things left off. Then, suddenly, his friends cut him off without explanation. While the novel revisits these events and Tsukuru’s college years, it is set nearly twenty years later when Tsukuru, prompted by his new girlfriend, finally decides to find out what happened years earlier. The journey takes him back to Nagoya, to his old friends, and even on a trip to Finland. He finds out the “facts” of what happened but not, as usual, what they mean.The book has its strong points. Notable is the perceptive portrait of the high school friendship circle—what each is like intellectually and physically, how they spend their time together, their efforts to guard the platonic nature of the friendships. A long digression follows a young man who “leaves the city” (another recurring theme in Murakami), winding up in a desolate inn haunted by birdsong that is as tantalizing as it is unsettling.Tsukuru’s search for meaning, however, is much less rewarding than those in earlier works like The Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance. His meetings with his now typical middle-aged friends with their typical middle-aged problems are frankly boring. So too is Tsukuru’s psychology. He goes on his quest because his girlfriend Sara tells him, in Philip Gabriel’s English rendering, to deal with his “unresolved emotional issues.” If Murakami intended Sara to be, like Abraham’s wife, the perfect helpmeet, he did not succeed. She rather seems like the stand-in for a self-help book or a bad shrink.The flaws of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki are unlikely to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans around the globe. Passing politely over the probable decline in reading since my college days, one can assume that tablets and smartphones, even if they contain books, are eroding the peculiar charm of seeing and being seen with wacky book covers. But Murakami mania has only continued to grow since my own period of enthusiasm, and he is now a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize for literature.In the meantime, Murakami has conquered America. He struggled to find an American publisher for his break-out 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood (a full translation of which was only published in 2000). When Kafka on the Shore was published in 2005, the initial American print run was only 30,000 copies. 2011’s IQ84, by contrast, had a first run of 95,000. The initial critical reaction in America to Murakami was also mixed. In 1997, the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani described The Wind Up Bird Chronicle as promising but ultimately “fragmentary and chaotic.” For Jonathan Franzen, who had his own cult following among the young before his mass success, this “chaos” was its appeal: “There’s so much more going on in the world, and I don’t have to go outward to find it. I go inward to find it. I go down in a hole to find it.” He went on to call the Wind Up Bird Chronicle one of the “great novels” of the last thirty or forty years. From the current “Great American Novelist” (according to Time), such a benediction is meaningful. What explains it?Murakami’s writing is indisputably cool. I do not mean the cool of your contemporary resident of Williamsburg, for whom the word seems to mean faux-ironic attachment to idiosyncratic, usually frivolous, things—and disdain for everything else. To be sure, Murakami starts from a place of ironic detachment. Like Tsukuru Tazaki, most of his lead characters have no special ability or even strong interest in anything. But like the “magical realists” to whom he is sometimes compared, Murakami uses humdrum existence as a stage upon which to project more interesting images, ideas, and even alternate ways of life. He does not revel in detachment; rather, it is the starting point of a search for that something or series of somethings that might elevate a character’s life. In Murakami, this usually takes the form of looking for “deeper human connection” within life rather than some heightened understanding of it.Still, when reading Murakami, one can’t help but think of the original meaning of philosophy—the examination of how you ought to live your life. Murakami’s protagonists usually pose something resembling this question, and references to philosophy do appear in Murakami. In Kafka on the Shore, another picaresque novel that centers on a journey, the narrator mentions the Greek comic poet Aristophanes’ famous speech in Plato’s Symposium. In ancient times, there were three species of human beings: “male-male,” “female-male,” and “male-male”—each of which were whole. But Zeus then cut them in half as punishment for a prideful attempt to scale Olympus. The upshot is that, in the present day, humans spend their time looking for their missing halves. For Plato’s Aristophanes, this is high and low comedy. If you believe that “pursuing one’s longing for physical connection” is the purpose of life, says Aristophanes, you need to look at human creatures as they appear, crooked and downright weird. In Murakami’s works, however, this search for the missing half is an entirely serious affair—perhaps the only one. Yet it is a curiously narrow quest, for Murakami ignores much—if not most—of what defines humans in their incompleteness.Murakami is adept at minimalist description, particularly of artistic activities—literature, fashion, representing the human figure, pottery, cooking, (Murakami was at least a decade ahead of the foodie movement that may slightly improve your taste but definitely makes you insufferable company), “interesting” sex, and, especially, music. All of these he presents in cosmopolitan terms. The food and drink is often more Western than Japanese, or at least global. Murakami’s literary firmament is full of writers like Kafka and Flaubert. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, like other Murakami works, has a nice, melancholy account of our contemporary version of the cinq à sept, those hours after work when your brain is fried from staring at a screen, and you have to decide whether to face rush hour immediately or else defer it with an exercise or drinking session. Such experiences, in our day, really are global—the worker bees of New York as well as Tokyo probably experience them in similar ways. Until about a generation ago, significant differences in lifestyle persisted even among developed nations. Anyone who has tried to get someone in Paris on the phone in August knows that they still, to a certain degree, persist. But, despite some stubborn political resistance, the homogenizing effects of modernity proceed apace. And Murakami plays well in that environment.Indeed, there is something de-national about Murakami’s stories. His characters are identifiably Japanese and live in real Japanese cities like Tokyo and Nagoya, but the characters and places seem oddly ethereal. Like the five-year-old son of a friend of mine, Tsukuru Tazaki likes to pass much of his free-time watching trains, in the main Tokyo Railway station. He could just as easily be at Grand Central or Waterloo. We do not see any characterization of city politics, not to mention finance, bureaucracy, labor relations, commuting patterns (biking or driving?), crime, and other activities whose gradations distinguish one city from another. Certainly we never learn anything about national politics. Murakami’s cities recall the no-place modern city of Blade Runner.Is this a secret of Murakami’s success? His impressive cultural arsenal is highly appealing—not to say flattering—to Western readers. Here is someone from a far off-land, indeed an essentially closed society, about which we know almost unbelievably little (do we realize, for instance, just how crazy Abe is?). And yet, Murakami seems to “get it.” A Murakami protagonist can wear a t-shirt of Snoopy with a surfboard, whistle along with Rossini, read Thomas Mann. Tsukuru Tazaki can decide whether to go to a gourmet eel restaurant or a French bistro, or else have a pizza. There’s a wonderful, perhaps too wonderful, worldliness here—the tacit resolve to collect only the pearls from the mountains of trash in all world cultures. Like classical music academies in China, Murakami can seem like a harbinger of the globalization of good taste.Music is probably the most prominent example of Murakami as global tastemaker. Books and essays, and thousands of Internet radio playlists, have been devoted to his music, which includes everything from old jazz ballads to 1970s pop music to Mozart sonatas. When it comes to music, Murakami loves it all, except, it seems, the current chart-toppers, but somehow looks for the best in each genre. It can’t simply be Chopin, but Martha Argerich’s Chopin, and here’s why. Music adorns every Murakami work and often stands at the core of it. In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a haunting Franz Liszt piece is Tsukuru’s last link to the piano prodigy in his group of high school friends. While the author’s remarks on music are often perceptive, they also flatter readers seeking validation for their “correct” musical taste, that vital proof of coolness.Even though his books can function as a kind of postmodern, middlebrow style guide, Murakami’s ambitions are clearly higher. He offers what he considers to be a complete, cultured way of life—one filled with nourishing food and deep thoughts about nature, rich in “human connections,” and free from the vanity of grinding personal ambition and the ugliness of politics. He devotes vast attention to the personal tastes, inclinations, and habits of individual men and women, but zero attention to the institutions that, one would imagine, shaped these same people practically from birth: namely, the country they live in, the bureaucracy they have to deal with, the state or private religion they belong or don’t belong to, the public opinion they agree or disagree with—the list goes on. Even relations between parents and children and brothers and sisters are mostly glossed over.Murakami focuses instead on relations of choice. Organizations such as corporations, professional associations, and places of employment are always bland or shadowy, like crime-syndicates in a bad mystery novel. There is no jumble of people making good or bad decisions: it’s almost as if anything larger than a friend group is engineered by nebulous, omnipotent “forces,” whether malevolent or benevolent. There is no doubt that this strikes a chord in contemporary America. Though the Bush years saw heightened patriotism take hold and President Obama flirted with an emphasis on “national service” during his first term, this interest in public responsibility vanished as quickly as it came. For two decades, at the very least, the private has reigned over the public. And in such a society Murakami resonates.We do not, of course, need our writers to be sociologists or political scientists, to say nothing of being pundits. One might further say that Murakami’s focus on “solitary man” rather than social groups and institutions is something he shares with many modern writers. But when Kafka (to whom Murakami is sometimes compared) embeds his characters in a faceless bureaucracy, he is always alive to the effects of bureaucracy on individuals; the tragedy or comedy of the human situation is that the individual cannot ever break free of such allegedly dehumanizing institutions, for those institutions have, in part, made him. Murakami’s characters, by contrast, are, or could be, perfectly whole, if only they could escape those political institutions, which mainly confine and at most depress and irritate. The world is something “over there”—both distinct and reachable from where they are now.Upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize literary award in 2011, Murakami delivered a highly revealing speech:

Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell… And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is “the System.” The system is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own…

As a preface to this, he stated: “Between a high solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” In going to Jerusalem to accept the prestigious literary award, Murakami had at the least not heeded hysterical calls for a cultural boycott of Israel. Still, no one could mistake his remarks for a pro-Israel speech. Delivered around the time of heavy fighting in Gaza, Murakami’s “fragile eggs” evoke the (allegedly) unarmed Palestinians, and Israel, with its tanks and planes, the “System.” Nonetheless, even the pro-Palestinian sentiment is mostly a default. To make a stand for something, you need to call it by a name. Allergic to proper names, Murakami doesn’t mention either Israelis or Palestinians; instead, this Jerusalem speech perfectly encapsulates his fundamentally apolitical thought. The common-sense approach to the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict—as with any other—is to examine the two peoples and their opposing purposes in all their distinctiveness. In place of this, Murakami constructs the impersonal binary of “fragile egg” and the “System,” obliterating political and social differences entirely. Whether this formulation is notably Eastern, I cannot say. But it certainly resonates in our time, where things that are larger than and, in a way, precede individuals, such as families, government, religion, and businesses, can seem to be mere distractions from the important business of self-fulfillment (or for others, the last and absolute refuge from that tiring task). Murakami’s very formalistic picture of humans abstracted from worldly circumstances can be extraordinary seductive. But the more you dig into it, the less you see.

Around the time of the publication of the English translation of Kafka on the Shore in 2005, my own interest in Murakami began to wane. I wasn’t exactly tired of the Murakamian device of the “search” for meaning. I was, I thought, on my way to bigger and better books in that regard. But revisiting Murakami ten years later, you see why he appeals to the young. The none-too-hidden aspiration in all his works is the promise of a life without the deadening constraints of politics and business: freedom from bourgeois life, no Marxism necessary. The reward can be self-expression, creative production, better human relations, or even greater knowledge. This is, of course, beguiling. What young person with soul doesn’t, in the first instance, rebel against the homogenizing character of much of contemporary life, at a time when America and the world seem to offer few new frontiers and little if anything to conquer? But Murakami flatters the rebellion instead of educating it, by insisting that we should flee the “System,” that we are each “irreplaceable eggs,” and that you owe nothing to what you leave behind. Murakami ignores the fact that the “System” is no system at all. It is, rather, a jumble of things such as religions, nations, and families that people made or developed, and which are therefore just as much a part of us as our “personal” lives. If, persuaded by Murakami, we think of such institutions as our cold prison cell instead of our living habitat, we might never examine our lives properly at all.Yet in starting with weariness of modern life and the desire for something different, Murakami hits on the right starting point. Murakami 2.0, a Murakami of the future, might use that desire to flee “the world” and create something more truly human as a way to show the paradoxical, stubborn, durable reign of the world over us. For good or ill, we are shaped by our circumstances. A novelist who reveals how this double bind operates today would offer an education in real liberty, not Murakami’s variety, which is quick, easy, and, in the end, rather cheap. We need a fiction that, if not political in itself, recognizes the primacy of the political.

Taking the “State” Out of ISIS

By the blade of its brutal sword, ISIS is working to impose on its territory some semblance of rulership and stability. From the NYT:

[A]s it holds that territory and builds a capacity to govern, the group is transforming into a functioning state that uses extreme violence — terror — as a tool.

That distinction is proving to be more than a matter of perspective for those who live under the Islamic State, which has provided relative stability in a region troubled by war and chaos while filling a vacuum left by failing and corrupt governments that also employed violence — arrest, torture and detention.

While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become the steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governing: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies. That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.

The article cites the now commonplace opinion (and always the opinion of TAI) that the air war against ISIS isn’t going to do the job of eradicating it. Indeed, in an article in our previous issue of the magazine Howard Gambrill Clark argues exactly that: the air war will help ISIS, not starve it of recruits, for it lends credence to the group’s claims of importance and stokes a desire for revenge and glory among potential followers. Furthermore, ISIS is not a traditional military with bases and generals and such—it is amorphous, moveable, and decentralized, and killing off a few leaders, or even Baghdadi himself, is by no means a crippling blow.

ISIS is no more a traditional state than it is a traditional army, and for precisely the same reason: its fluidity. Yet by embedding itself in local populations it gain strength, including the ability to go to ground when it needs to. Much like the Taliban, Clark notes, ISIS is brutal in putting down rebellions; it knows that it can’t withstand an uprising. That’s the challenge before any effective counter-insurgency strategy of the West—we must “go local” and rely on networks already in place to overthrow the jihadis. As the NYT makes clear, many experts express pessimism about the prospect of dislodging ISIS from two war-torn, Shi’a-governed countries where few alternatives for Sunnis exist. The task is not easy, but acknowledging that the ground, not the air, is where the war begins and ends is a start.

U.S. to Cuba: No Expropriation Without Compensation

Washington made a show of restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba this past Monday with a flag-raising at the new embassy, but now the real work begins, starting with billions of dollars worth of unresolved property disputes. According to the NYT:

Resolving [property claims] is a complicated and politically tangled process, made more difficult by the more than 50 years that have passed since Fidel Castro came to power and began confiscating land and businesses in the name of the revolution, including from many Americans.

In the years that followed, many filed claims with the United States government through the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an independent agency at the Department of Justice. The commission received nearly 9,000 such applications — the vast majority from large corporations like Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, and the ITT Corporation — and in 1971 certified almost 6,000 of them as valid, which at the time totaled $1.9 billion. The value today, with interest, is estimated as high as $8 billion.

Negotiating the property question will both test the strength of new diplomatic ties and foreshadow the future of relations between the two nations. Both countries have reasons for wanting the claims resolved. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act lists “satisfactory resolution” of property claims as an essential prerequisite to the normalization of trade relations, so these disputes could act as a stumbling block to lifting the embargo. And if the Cuban government wishes to promote a favorable business climate and attract foreign investors to salvage its economy, demonstrating to the international community that it is not liable to spontaneously seize property (especially without compensation) is a prudent, if not imperative, move.

However, the barriers to resolving these property disputes are also formidable. On one hand, the Castro regime has absolutely no desire to return lands and other assets on the island to their original owners. To do so would be to break from its own socialist experiment and reduce its control over the country. And even if Castro did wish to issue full compensation for the expropriated property, Cuba would simply not be able to afford it. The country has been flailing economically under the weight of sanctions and, at $8 billion, the value of the claims amounts over 10 percent of the nation’s GDP, which is barely a third of Miami’s.While Cuba has reportedly offered to negotiate the settlement of property claims with the U.S., Cuban-Americans clamoring for either a return of their lands or full compensation are likely to face headwinds. The showy establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba has brought plenty of contentious issues to the forefront, leaving diplomats with their work cut out for them.

University of California Hops on Minimum Wage Bandwagon

In yet another sign of the American left’s leftward pivot, a $15 per hour minimum wage has quickly moved from fringe thinking among progressives (in his 2014 State of the Union, President Obama only called for an increase to $10.10 per hour) to conventional wisdom. Blue cities from Seattle to New York are adopting the $15 minimum, and now the University of California has become the first public university system in the country to follow suit. The New York Times reports on UC’s decision:

At the University of California’s 10 campuses, the minimum wage increase will be phased in over the next two years for about 3,200 employees, reaching $15 an hour in October 2017 for those who work at least 20 hours a week. Thousands of people working for contractors will also be paid at least the same rate…

Officials estimated that the wage increases would add about $14 million a year to a total university payroll of more than $12 billion. Dianne Klein, a University of California system spokeswoman, said the cost increase would be paid for by “auxiliary enterprises” like parking garages, book stores and medical centers, and would not come from tuition or state tax dollars.

But that assurance did not satisfy critics, who said that the cost would ultimately be borne by students, who have already seen repeated tuition increases in recent years.

Republican Assembly Leader Kristin Olsen, who opposes the increase, told the LA Times: “It is concerning that UC would implement this proposal just after spending an entire year arguing they do not have the funds necessary to keep tuition flat and enroll more California students.”

She might have added that the increase may well hit the poorest UC campuses hardest. Relatively wealthy campuses like UCSF and UCLA will barely be affected by the system-wide raise itself, because San Francisco and Los Angeles are already in the process of implementing $15 dollar minimums. Berkeley (home to UC’s flagship campus) and San Diego (home to UCSD) have also passed ordinances setting the local minimum wage above the current California minimum of $9 per hour. In other words, the UC minimum wage increase will place only a small burden on the the most prestigious UC campuses, which have the largest endowments and educate the wealthiest students and are already required by law to pay a higher wage.Meanwhile, the counties home to the UC campuses with the smallest endowments and less wealthy student bodies—Merced, Riverside, Santa Cruz and Irvine—either do not have minimum wage ordinances or are in the process of repealing them (in part because these areas have a lower cost of living than the major metropolitan areas). These campuses will therefore probably face the steepest hikes in labor costs compared to existing requirements when the UC wage increases go into effect.To the extent that the $14 million dollar a year cost is borne by individual campuses rather than the UC as a whole, it will likely disproportionately affect the most vulnerable campuses in the cash-starved system. Yet another example of how dramatic minimum wage hikes hurt the parties they are supposed to help.

How GMOs Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Cows get a lot of flack for the methane they produce, and many greens point to their emissions of that particularly potent greenhouse gas as another reason to stop eating meat. What those activists will invariably fail to mention, however, is that crops can emit methane, too. Rice, a diet staple for millions around the world, is one such crop, but the LA Times reports that genetic modifications may help farmers grow the plant greener:

When rice paddies are flooded, methane-producing bacteria thrive on the carbohydrates secreted by rice roots in the oxygen-free soils. The rice plant itself acts as a conduit, transmitting methane from the soil into the atmosphere. […]

By transferring a barley gene into a rice plant, scientists have created a new variety of rice that produces less methane while still making highly starchy, productive seeds. The development of the new rice strain is described this week in the journal Nature.Finding a way to boost rice production while reducing methane emissions has been a goal for many years, said Chuanxin Sun, a plant biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the lead author of the study. By engineering barley genes into the rice plant, “we demonstrated it’s possible to get these two traits with this technology,” he said.

Boosting crop yields while depressing harmful greenhouse gas emissions to less than 10 percent of conventional rice, all in one fell swoop? Yes, please. This is exactly the kind of technology we’ll need if we want to feed a growing global population on less land, without warming our planet even further. In other words, this is a step towards a workable solution to the kind of bleak future Malthusian greens promise is right around the corner.

And yet, and yet…the environmental movement remains by and large opposed to genetic modification technology. The science says GMOs are safe, and a select few greens have come to their senses and embraced the enormous potential these new crops offer, but the vast majority of the purportedly eco-conscious continue to inflame public distrust of “frankenfoods”, leading companies like Chipotle to proudly declare their offerings “GMO-free.” Greens don the mantle of settled science when pushing their climate change agenda, yet brazenly shed it when it comes to GMOs. That’s a shameful hypocrisy, but if there’s any silver lining here, it’s this: The environmental movement as currently configured is so strategically inept that its opposition to these new crop technologies is anything but insurmountable. For that, future generations can be thankful.

Oil Disputes in Asia’s Costal Waters Pour Fuel on Regional Fire

One of the reasons that countries claiming territory in Asia’s coastal waters are fighting so bitterly over what are, after all, remote, mostly-uninhabited rocks is that by some estimates there’s a ton of oil and gas under the seabed. That’s why, earlier this week, Tokyo warned Beijing not to install offshore drilling platforms near disputed waters in the East China Sea. Though China retained plausible deniability by situating these platforms in undisputed territory, Japan voiced concerns that the oil and gas reserves being tapped could extend into its own territory.

To protest the Chinese rigs’ presence, Tokyo released pictures of those rigs under construction earlier this week. Chinese authorities were none too pleased, as Reuters reports:

Japan’s release of pictures of Chinese construction activity in the East China Sea will only provoke confrontation between the two countries and do nothing for efforts to promote dialogue, China’s Foreign Ministry said. […]

In a statement late on Wednesday, China’s Foreign Ministry said it had every right to develop oil and gas resources in waters not in dispute that fall under its jurisdiction.“What Japan did provokes confrontation between the two countries, and is not constructive at all to the management of the East China Sea situation and the improvement of bilateral relations,” it said.

This issue isn’t likely to go away. The EIA estimates that the East China Sea contains 200 million barrels of oil, and between 1 and 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Those numbers are dwarfed by the EIA’s estimates of the reserves of oil and gas in the South China Sea—11 billion barrels and 190 trillion cubic feet, respectively. As countries in the region explore and start to extract those deposits, they’ll be pouring further fuel on the regional fire.

European Centrists Strike Back

When the deal with Greece was announced a little over a week ago, we noted that Euroskeptic parties across the continent were girding for a fight, eager to capitalize on Greece’s apparent humiliation at the hands of an overweening Brussels intent on forcing austerity on a periphery. So how is the fight going?

Portugal yesterday announced that general elections will be held on October 4th. The country’s center-right ruling coalition, which has implemented strict austerity measures as part of its 2011 €78 billion bailout, and which has presided over a grueling recession and high unemployment, has managed to close the gap on the country’s Socialists, who have been campaigning against austerity. The messaging from Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has been clear: Syriza led Greece to catastrophe, and our policies, while painful, are working. The two parties now stand neck-and-neck in the polls.Portugal, however, does not have a truly radical Euroskeptic party contending in the elections: the Socialists disagree on the degree to which austerity should be applied, but are not setting themselves up as a cousin party to Syriza. In neighboring Spain, however, where an election is slated for November, Syriza-allied Podemos had lately been on a tear, most recently making big strides in local elections. However, in the wake of the Greek crisis, it seems to have suffered a setback in the polls: As of this weekend, the center-right People’s Party had 29.1 percent, the mainstream opposition socialists had 25.1 percent, and Podemos was polling at only 15 percent.Part of the reason is surely Syriza’s debacle in Greece. But part of it, too, is that the economic situation appears to be improving in Spain. Bloomberg:

Spanish unemployment fell to the lowest level in almost four years in the second quarter, adding to expectations that stronger growth is translating into faster job creation.

The jobless rate dropped to 22.4 percent from 23.8 percent in the previous quarter, the National Statistics Institute said in Madrid on Thursday. That is in line with a Bloomberg News survey of 11 economists that called for a decline to 22.5 percent […][Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy’s government has raised its growth forecast for this year to 3.3 percent from 2.9 percent in April, putting the euro area’s fourth-largest economy on track to outpace its peers. The government foresees 3 percent expansion in 2016.

Rajoy has been celebrating on Twitter, saying that “Four years ago they told us that it was impossible to stop the destruction of employment during a recession. And we did it.”

Of course, much can change between now and November. For one thing, the Greek crisis may not be over yet. Polling in Germany shows that public opinion is still quite hostile to proceeding with a third Greek bailout: 56 percent are opposed, and only 33 percent are in favor. Though the Greek parliament passed its second round of reforms early this morning, negotiations over the terms of the bailout with its European creditors may prove more difficult than expected, and if it looks like the Greeks are getting the short end of the stick, Euroskeptic parties across the continent could get another boost.But for now, at least, they don’t appear to have the winds at their backs.

Another Major Bites the Dust in China’s Shale

China may hold the world’s largest shale gas reserves, but that doesn’t mean that tapping that resource will be easy. American oil major ConocoPhillips just announced that it was throwing in the towel on Chinese shale after concluding a two-year investigation into a Sichuan basin play.

China’s shale development has been dogged by unfavorable geology, water scarcity, and an under-built oil services industry. ConocoPhillips’ decision isn’t so much a surprise as it is confirmation that Beijing’s efforts to catch up to the U.S. shale boom are far behind schedule. In fact, last summer China cut its fracking targets by more than 50 percent as planners acquiesced to the fact that the pace of America’s extraordinary success couldn’t be replicated.Plunging oil prices have also thrown a wrench into the works, forcing the world’s oil majors to trim capital expenditures by culling higher-risk, underperforming plays (like Chinese shale projects). Li Li, the head of the research team at ICIS China, an energy consultancy, told Bloomberg that “[g]iven the complicated shale formations in China, only the state-owned Chinese energy firms are more likely to pursue their investment in the sector as they see it more as a national strategy.” But of course, China’s domestic firms lack the technical know-how to unlock shale’s hydrocarbons very successfully.Shale isn’t looking so hale in China.

Remembering the American Prisoners in Iran

The Washington Post reminds us that, as of today, its reporter Jason Rezaian has been imprisoned in Iran on manufactured charges for a full year—a detention that is the “longest, by far, for a Western journalist in Iran since the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.”

Rezaian’s incarceration, which has reportedly included torture and solitary confinement, has been covered extensively in the American press. There are also two other American hostages behind bars in Iran who have received less coverage: Amir Hekmati, a U.S. Marine, and Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor. Hekmati, most likely targeted because of his U.S. military service (he served in Iraq before being honorably discharged in 2005), was thrown in jail in the summer of 2011 on trumped-up espionage charges. Abedini, apparently targeted for his religious convictions, has been incarcerated since 2012 for the crime of “undermining Iran’s national security” by participating in a Christian evangelical movement.Last month, Mark Donig and Gabriel Kohan told the stories of these two men, noting their families’ concerns that, after the nuclear deal with Iran was signed, a large source of the leverage that might have been used to secure their release would evaporate. On the other hand, as Gary Samore, President Obama’s former counter-proliferation czar in charge of the Iran portfolio, explains in another piece by Donig and Kohan, the Administration has reasons for not linking the negotiations to the fate of the Americans imprisoned in Iran, as it apparently did in the case of the Cuba opening.Read the whole thing here.