It’s unlikely that Browner’s business cards will actually read “Climate Czar”, since Obama reportedly dislikes the title’s autocratic resonances. Still, the media won’t let her abandon the title so easily, and conservatives are already trying to use the appointment to paint Obama as another high-handed, big-government Democrat. “I’m not sure what the climate czar is supposed to do—wave a magic wand and stop the waves coming in?” scoffs James Bovard, a libertarian author and rabble-rouser once dubbed the “anti-czar czar” by the New York Times. Bovard is skeptical that the new climate czar will be any more successful than the various drug czars who’ve been trying and failing to stem America’s drug habit for the past quarter-century. “This is typical of the Washington habit of using the ‘czar’ title to pretend the problem has been solved,” he said.

Either way, experts say there’s a risk that a climate czar would merely complicate things, further slowing the federal government’s already glacial efforts to tackle global warming. “It does create a new layer of bureaucracy,” says Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University. “It’s hard, unless you have the president’s backing, to impose one’s will on all the different departments and agencies.” Still, Obama really doesn’t have much choice: the sheer scope of the climate crisis makes the appointment of a single central manager a necessity rather than a luxury. “The government of the US today has gotten so big, and has its tentacles involved in so many different problems, that the need for coordination is stronger than ever,” Wayne adds.

Read the rest here.

Venezuelan voters gave President Hugo Chávez a boost yesterday in key regional elections, handing his allies victory in 18 of the 23 gubernatorial races that were up for grabs. Chávez, who had cast the vote as a referendum on his revolutionary project, was swift to claim a fresh mandate for his drive towards 21st-century socialism: "We don't see an opposition victory on a map painted red," sneered one Chávez spokesman as the results came in.

Still, it wasn't all good news for El Jefe. The opposition may have fallen short of a sweeping victory, but it now holds the governorships of five of Venezuela's most densely populated states, including oil-rich Zulia and the major industrial base of Carabobo, along with the mayoralties of Caracas and Maracaibo, the country's two largest cities. Crucially, the opposition pickups were driven by major gains among the poor, urban voters who once propelled Chávez to power. In the Caracas municipal elections, even the iconic Petare slums elected an opposition official.

That hardly adds up to a stinging rebuke of Chávez's administration, but it does dramatically redraw the Venezuelan political map. The revolution, it seems, has gone rural. Chávez retains the support of many, and perhaps most, Venezuelans, but his urban base has been significantly eroded in recent months. These days, the president's democratic mandate depends on his utter dominance of the Venezuelan countryside, where voters – grateful for Chávez's efforts to bring them into the political mainstream, and less affected than their urban counterparts by crime rates and rocketing inflation – yesterday backed the president's allies by 40-point margins.

More here.

With the last cheers echoing around Chicago’s Grant Park, and Democrats across the nation still nursing hard-earned hangovers, it seems churlish to be anything other than optimistic about what the next four years hold in store. George W. Bush has arguably been the worst president for environmentalism since the origin of the term: the lowest rate of endangered species listings of any president since the Act was signed in 1973, zero meaningful action on global warming, broken campaign promises to clean up coal emissions, weakened standards on mercury emissions, public lands opened to development and energy extraction on an unprecedented scale…the list goes on and on. President-elect Obama won the White House while putting energy and environmental issues front and center of his campaign; on Jan 20th, he’ll take the oath of office with a clear mandate--and the votes in Congress--to turn the page on much of the Bush administration’s disastrous environmental record.

Still, good intentions will only go so far; in the last months of his administration, President Bush is going to extraordinary lengths to create bureaucratic momentum that will serve to cement his ideological legacy, ordering his agency chiefs to begin a flurry of last-minute rule-making designed to lock in business-friendly environmental policies. He’s also leaving his successor with a federal infrastructure suffering from systemic dryrot: Key agencies are now understaffed, underfunded, demoralized, and politicized in ways that could take years to put right. “Unfortunately, the Bush administration has done an incredible amount of damage,” says Tiernan Sittenfield, legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters. “The Obama administration is going to be a welcome change - but they’re going to have their work cut out for them.”

More here.

With two wars and an economic meltdown to manage, charting a new direction in Latin America won't be top of the 44th president's to-do list. It's worth noting, too, that while Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, is a foreign-policy specialist, he's shown little interest in Latin America during his stint in the Senate, preferring to focus on Europe and the Middle East. That's led many Beltway observers to believe that if Obama's Latin American policy breaks with that of his predecessor, it will be through stylistic rather than substantive changes; President Obama will strike a warmer, more respectful tone towards Latin American leaders, but the bulk of his actual policies probably won't differ materially from those of Bush or Clinton.

That means that big-label programmes like Plan Colombia and the Merida initiative – a multi-billion dollar aid programme designed to curtail violence and drug trafficking in Mexico's border states – are likely to continue more or less as planned. It also makes it likely that Obama will stick more or less closely to the path set by Bush on free-trade initiatives, albeit with a new focus on environmental and labour safeguards. Even Bush's favorite boondoggle, the 700-mile security fence along the Mexican border, seems likely to be waved through by soon-to-be-President Obama; both he and his running mate, Joe Biden, voted in favour of building the fence.

Check out the rest here.

In January 2006, Brad Miller, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina, joined Sen. John McCain on a legislative fact-finding delegation to the South Pole. Miller recalls the lawmakers, still bundled in their emergency cold-weather gear, huddling into a tiny conference room a stone’s throw from the pole itself, where nervous climate scientists showed them ice-core data that a few months later would serve as the dramatic centerpiece of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “We were all fairly taken aback,” says Miller. But McCain was less interested in the science, which he seemed to accept at face value, than in finding ammunition to use against his opponents back in Washington; during the presentation, he bombarded the scientists with questions about whether the Bush administration or his rivals in the Senate had tried to suppress the researchers’ findings. “McCain absolutely grilled them,” Miller says. “He was really pushing these guys about whether they were allowed to say what they really thought.” Later that night, with the midnight sun still overhead, McCain buttonholed Miller in the dingy prefab hut that served as the research station’s bar and, over a beer, held forth about the importance of tackling climate change. McCain had recently read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and lectured Miller on the story of Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their ecosystem and ultimately their entire society. “He seemed to be trying to impress upon me that he was a kindred spirit on the subject of the environment,” Miller says. “He said it needed to be our urgent business.”

Miller returned from the South Pole with a strong impression that McCain was sincere in his desire to tackle climate change, and serious about the necessity of putting science before politics. Lately, though, he’s started to have second thoughts. “I really worry,” says Miller, who now chairs the Investigations and Oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology committee. “I thought he’d be different, but now I’m not at all sure.” At the time of the South Pole trip, McCain was still being feted for penning the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, the first legislative effort to reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Since then, though, McCain has refused to lend his support to other lawmakers’ climate legislation on the grounds that it did not include subsidies for the nuclear industry. He has repeatedly failed to support renewable-energy legislation, including a key bill that ultimately failed by just one vote. He has newly embraced off-shore drilling and adopted fossil-fuel friendly energy policies. And - the last straw - he’s appointed an oil-state governor who has denied humans' role in global warming as his running mate. “It’s hard to square the pick of Sarah Palin with a deep abiding conviction that the climate of the earth is changing,” says Miller.

William Buckley, a founder of the modern right-wing movement, famously described the two George Bushes as being conservative without being conservatives:; they may have taken conservative positions, he said, but they lacked any serious philosophical commitment to the tenets of conservatism. By the same token, over the years it’s become apparent that while John McCain sometimes sides with greens, he lacks the ideological consistency that marks a true environmentalist. In the quarter of a century that he’s spent in Washington, McCain’s positions have been marked by a strange – some might say erratic – blend of idealism and opportunism: he’s fought for climate legislation, and almost single-handedly kept global warming on the political agenda after the failure of the Kyoto Protocol; but he’s also repeatedly sided with corporate interests and the energy sector on a wide range of environmental and conservation issues. Despite McCain’s efforts to halt global warming, his lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters is just 24 percent, on a par with some of the most right-wing lawmakers around. “You don’t just go out and get a 24,” says Tim Greefe, the LCV’s deputy legislative director. “You really have to earn that.”

Read the rest here.

Another week, another round of diplomatic ping-pong: Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales have given US diplomats the bum's rush out of Caracas and La Paz, and Venezuelan and Bolivian envoys are now winging their way home from Washington. Adding a little spice to the mix, the brouhaha blew up at the very moment that two vast Russian bombers, painted antiflash-white to deflect nuclear blasts, were touching down on Venezuelan runways in preparation for joint training exercises. In a series of feisty and occasionally foul-mouthed speeches, Chávez pledged to personally pilot one of the "White Swans" over Cuban skies as a tribute to Fidel Castro. Whether or not Chávez actually breaks out his flying goggles, Russia's military presence underscores a fresh low-point in US-Latin American relations, and has even prompted talk of a new cold war.

... Chávez hopes to fan the flames of the latest diplomatic row, both to rally his own increasingly skeptical supporters and to distract international observers from his efforts to foist an undemocratic brand of socialism upon a reluctant people. American observers shouldn't buy into his sleight of hand: this week's diplomatic back-and-forth isn't the beginning of a new Cold War, but merely business as usual in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

Read more here.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is on something of a roll. He's managed to engineer the all-but-final collapse of his country's Farc rebels. He's humiliated his rambunctious neighbour, Hugo Chávez, by capturing and publishing documents detailing the depth of the Venezuelan leader's ties to the guerrilla group. He even managed to secure the release of 15 prize hostages, including star secuestrada Ingrid Betancourt, without agreeing to any of the rebel army's demands. Unsurprisingly, his approval ratings are sky high: with upwards of 90% of the population behind him, Uribe's only real concern is whether to relinquish power when his term ends in 2010 or try to leverage his achievements to extend his constitutional term limits and keep Colombia's top job.

But while Uribe's achievements are real and impressive, they've come at considerable moral cost. His victories have been underpinned, after all, by a fervent militarism, and in Colombia such militarism comes at a price. In 2007 alone, according to a recent report by a coalition of Colombian human rights organisations, the country's military and police carried out 329 extrajudicial killings, a 48% increase from 2006. And last year was no anomaly. According to another report published last year, the five-year period ending June 2006 saw 50% more extrajudicial killings than the preceding half-decade.

Read the rest here.

The problems started when Fernández decreed an increase in export levies on agricultural produce. That prompted mass protests from outraged farmers and gave Argentina's formerly directionless opposition a cause to rally around. It also angered both the urban middle classes and the Kirchners' supporters in Congress, who took umbrage at the president's failure to even go through the motions of consulting lawmakers on the new taxes. Most troubling of all, Fernández found herself under fire from her own vice-president, Julio Cobos, who slipped easily into the role of Lex Luthor to the Kirchners' Superman. Appointed by Fernández to negotiate with the farm lobby, Cobos instead began to publicly question his boss's judgment, culminating in an open letter asking her to submit her proposals to Congress for ratification.

Ultimately, Fernández found herself unable to resist her underling's arm-twisting, and she asked lawmakers to support her tax plan. That ought to have been a formality, given the Peronists' dominance in Congress. Even there, though, Fernández's superpowers failed her. Despite her best efforts, the tax bill became utterly deadlocked in the Senate, despite the Peronists' two-thirds majority. Finally, after 17 hours of debate failed to break the stalemate, vice-president Cobos cast a dramatic tie-breaking vote against his own boss, shooting down the tax reform once and for all.

Read more here.

Since May, the former speaker has been larding his environmental rhetoric with calls for America to begin new drilling programs to achieve energy independence and bring down the price at the pump. Never mind that domestic oil production will never put a significant dent in gas prices or offset the demand for imported oil: Newt’s sloganeering - “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” - hit a nerve, and more than 1.3 million people signed a petition backing his campaign.

That was bad enough. Now, though, researchers at the Alaska Wilderness League have revealed that Gingrich’s cheerleading for Big Oil was bankrolled by a veritable Who’s Who of the extractive industries. The group behind Newt’s drilling drive has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from executives and investors with close ties to companies like Exxon, Shell, and Suncor.

Read more here.

The spread of the dead zone is partly due to widespread flooding, possibly caused by global warming, which this year brought especially large quantities of chemical waste into the Mississippi. The single biggest culprit, though, is the American infatuation with corn ethanol: Farmers are planting more corn per acre than ever before in a bid to cash in on federal biofuel mandates. That’s rapidly depleting the soil along the banks of the Mississippi, leading to a massive new demand for the chemical fertilizers responsible for deoxygenation.

Researchers say that we’re rapidly approaching the point of no return. If the dead zone continues to spread, shrimp and other seabed dwellers could be left with nowhere to run and find themselves literally pushed off the continental shelf. If that happens, the Gulf’s valuable crustaceans could be permanently replaced by an expanse of worthless - and possibly carcinogenic - bacterial sludge.

Read the rest here.

Many election watchers believe McCain still has a chance to claw back Latino support. After all, the argument goes, Hispanics are a historically volatile voting bloc and might well swing back toward McCain in the months ahead. It's true that about 40% of Latinos backed Bush in 2004; it's true, too, that Hispanic support helped steer Democrats to victory in the 2006 midterms. But while those shifts help perpetuate the myth that Latinos are swing voters, the truth is that they change their allegiance no more frequently than other demographic groups. Most Latinos - with the exception of Florida's strategically important Cuban-American population - remain true-blue Democrats and simply aren't in the market for another GOP president.

It won't help that McCain's strategy for winning over Hispanics rests on puffing his track record on immigration reform, while raising concerns about Obama's trustworthiness on the issue. That's a risky gambit. McCain's trite reminders that even immigrants with Hispanic names "are God's children" might help placate his conservative base, but they won't do much for his support among Latino voters, barely a quarter of whom were born outside the US. Besides, polls consistently show that Hispanic voters - who are, by definition, already US citizens - care far less about immigration than about bread-and-butter issues like the economy and healthcare.

More here.

Dems haven’t quite gone so far as to back Bush’s barmy plan to open up protected areas of America’s coastline to the oil companies, of course; instead, they’ve rolled out a counter-proposal that would boost oil production in those areas of Alaska already open to drilling. That’s essentially an attempt to shield Democratic lawmakers against charges of obstructionism, while stopping short of endorsing new drilling in protected areas.

Unfortunately, though, it’s a strategy that plays into Republicans’ hands. The Democrats’ Alaskan gambit only makes sense if the root problem is that American oil production is too low. That reinforces the Republican argument that boosting oil production would help alleviate the current energy crisis, and makes it easier for Bush and McCain to argue that greens, in opposing new offshore drilling, are simply putting coastal ecosystems ahead of the wider US economy.

Get the rest here.

Chávez still has a few punches left to throw. He's fortunate that Colombia's President Uribe appears minded to be magnanimous in victory, perhaps due to his country's extensive trade ties with Venezuela. The two leaders meet today to discuss border security, giving Chávez a chance to belatedly bury the hatchet and perhaps score an invitation to resume negotiations for the release of the Farc's remaining hostages, or even the rebel army's disarmament. The latter is a long shot, of course, but if Chávez can play even a bit part in ending the Colombian conflict, he could repair much of the damage he's done to his international standing.

Back home, Chávez seems to be pinning his party's electoral hopes on a dirty-tricks campaign. Last month, the national comptroller blacklisted nearly 400 public officials - mostly opposition politicians - and barred them from standing in the coming elections, ostensibly because of past administrative or legal offences. Opposition leaders have protested the decision, calling it unconstitutional and undemocratic, and noting that many of the alleged offences are disputed and were never tested in court. They may well be right, but with electoral officials and the supreme court largely in Chávez's pocket, they're unlikely to be able to reverse the ruling before the August deadline for candidate registration.

The blacklist is straight out of Chávez's usual playbook, a carefully judged low blow, not quite blatant or sweeping enough to make a travesty of the election itself, but guaranteed to boost Chávez's allies' electoral prospects while reducing his opponents to unappealingly frothy fits of red-faced rage. That may or may not be enough to allow him to avert disaster in the coming elections. Either way, it's a sign that the Venezuelan leader still has plenty of life left in him. Chávez may be on the ropes, but if his opponents want to capitalise on his recent tribulations, they're going to have a fight on their hands.

Read more here.