"We believe that there isn't a moral gap between humans and other animals, and that saying things like 'the behavior patterns that wolves or chimpanzees display are merely building blocks for human morality' doesn't really get us anywhere. At some point, differences in degree aren't meaningful differences at all and each species is capable of 'the real thing.' Good biology leads to this conclusion. Morality is an evolved trait and 'they' (other animals) have it just like we have it."

That's a pretty bold statement. If a book declares that in its introduction, it better have to have some strong arguments to back it up. A convincing argument could influence how we view our own morality and its origins, how we understand animal cognition and even how we relate to animals themselves.

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a new book by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, presents a persuasive case for some animals being much more intelligent than generally believed. The authors show how these animals have emotions, exhibit empathy, mourn for their dead and seem to have a sense of justice. They draw interesting parallels to similar human behaviour that many people think stems from our moral codes and/or religious beliefs rather than some evolutionary process. All this is fascinating and their argument for open-mindedness about recognising animals' real capabilities is strong.

The stories they base their thesis on are intriguing. They talk about an elephant with a leg injury whose fellow elephants in her herd slowed down for her and even fed her. They tell how dogs can agree for a session of rough play that's not supposed to hurt and those that overstep the bounds, by for example by biting too hard, get frozen out of the group. Caged rats taught to push a level for food won't do it when that prompts the scientists to give a rat in the next cage an electric shock. Vampire bats share the blood they collect with bats that can't go out to hunt for their daily dose. Some sort of behavioural code is clearly working here, just as a behavioural code is at work when humans do similar things.

But the authors overreach when they say this shows that animals have morality. The problem is with their limited definition:

"We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviours that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviours relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue."

Baby elephants in Nairobi, 10 Nov 2008/Radu Sigheti

That's good as far as it goes. But morality isn't only a "suite" ("a number of things forming a series or set") of behaviours. It's also a wider system of beliefs about what is right and wrong, not just for the person involved but for others and for society as a whole. It's a system for evaluating actions, their causes and consequences even if we are not immediately confronted with the need to make a choice. Calling morality something "arising in the interactions between and among individual animals" is a bit too reductionist, like saying art boils down to something that comes from brush strokes on canvas. Yes, but there's something more to it, too, that raises the requirements for any definition.

In arguing against the traditional view that humans and animals are separated by a wide gap, Wild Justice makes the gap too narrow. Human morality includes complex rational abstraction, ongoing debate and changing opinions mediated through language. Some animals have a certain level of intelligence, but not that much. The authors minimise this by deflating the human side of the gap, saying that "Western philosophical accounts of morality are outdated in important respects, for example in ascribing too much volition and intentionality to moral behaviour." Sure, neuroscience is showing that the "too much" part of that statement is true. But this argument ascribes too little importance to volition and intentionality. Human intelligence allows us to express moral codes in words, debate their merits and change them if we find them insufficient. Without these abilities, we would probably still have "pro-social" reactions described in Wild Justice but not the wider systems known as morality or ethics.

Mother and baby gorillas at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 28 August 2008/Daniel Munoz

If animals have morality "just like we have it," could there be any parallel in the animal world to the changing standards and resulting debate over major moral issues such as we see now regarding legalising same-sex marriage and reducing abortion? That may sound facetious, but it highlights a key area of morality that Wild Justice excludes. Opinions and laws concerning homosexuality and abortion have changed enormously in recent decades, leading to heated and sometimes violent clashes between supporters and opponents of such changes. Supporters have successfully used legal and political arguments to champion an evolution of public moral standards. Religious arguments are often used to counter them. It's hard to imagine any of this would have happened if humans only dealt with moral challenges confronting them directly and couldn't analyse and debate them abstractly.

This change in public moral standards is a product of the particularly human intelligence that Wild Justice plays down. The authors rightly highlight the way some animals exhibit some aspects of what we call moral behaviour. Research into animal cognition will surely uncover more parallels and challenge our views of morality. But it shouldn't narrow the definition of morality to make its results look more persuasive than they are.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy declares “nuclear is dead”; Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is taken to hospital suffering from “confetti inhalation” and “hug-related injuries” after they agree to a historic U.N. deal to curb greenhouse gases in Copenhagen.

At least that’s part of the wishful thinking behind a spoof December 19, 2009 edition of the International Herald Tribune (left) showing a beaming German Chancellor Angela Merkel flanked by Sarkozy (left) and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso above the headline “heads of state agree historic climate-saving deal”.

Among other headlines in the 8-page edition sponsored by environmental group Greenpeace: “Markets soar on news of Copenhagen climate deal”, “Exxon finally comes clean” (by abandoning oil and shifting to renewable energies), “Atmosphere named world heritage site”, “India turns its back on the carbon economy”, “Amazon forest a big winner in Denmark”.

The newspaper imagines that that the deal was successful after the European Union agreed at a summit (starting today in the real world) to contribute $50 billion a year to help developing nations combat climate change, matched by a pledge by U.S. President Barack Obama in December to give $60 billion.

Of course the signs so far are that the real life headlines will be less enthusiastic at the end of the December U.N. conference about a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol: promises for cuts in greenhouse gases by rich nations are well short of the paper’s imaginary curbs to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. And neither the European Union nor the United States are talking about so much cash.

The Kyoto Protocol fell well short of green groups’ expectations — to the right is a copy of the (real) Japan Times the day after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 — below the main headline “Conference adopts Kyoto Protocol” is another article “Kyoto Convention’s success open to debate”.

So what will the real headlines read on December 19?  (Assuming the delegates finish the conference by then?)

Please give us your suggestions…

A slow-moving typhoon that collapsed a tunnel, knocked out a bridge and set off mudslides, killing 12 people in Taiwan last September, is coming back this year.

This time it’s on worldwide TV.

Typhoon Hunter, a 46-minute documentary led by Local Tiger International Co. and funded in part by the Taiwan government, tracks an effort to send weather sensing aircraft into the eye of the typhoon.  Taiwan worked with Japan and the United States, both of whose territories were hit by the same storm, to fly the dangerous mission for recording changes at the centre of the typhoon.

“This reveals for the first time the scientific secrets to the incubation, formation and fierce destructive power of typhoons,” government information Minister Su Jun-pin said in a statement.

The storm in question was Typhoon Sinlaku, which packed wind gusts as high as 162 kph (101 mph) and dumped up to 1,400 mm (55 inches) of rain in some parts of Taiwan. (For a story from the time, click here) Three died in the collapsed tunnel, one drove off the fallen bridge and others were killed in weather-driven traffic accidents. The typhoon also hurt 23 more people and prompted thousands to evacuate. 

The film debuts on June 21 on the National Geographic Channel, which has collaborated with the Taiwan government since 2004 to show short natural phenomenon films.

Typhoons, which are similar to hurricanes in the Atlantic, are swirling low-pressure systems that regularly hit Taiwan, Japan, China and the Philippines in the second half of each year. They gather strength from the warm waters of the Pacific or the South China Sea before weakening over land. 

Taiwan authorities usually call off work and school for major typhoons to minimise injury from blown debris. People are admonished to put hanging signs and potted plants indoors, while flights are cancelled and seaports shut down. The brunt of a storm usually passes within a day.  

“Typhoons are not only of interest to people in Taiwan, but lots of people want to study them,” director Jose Garcia Sanchez said at a mid-June film unveiling ceremony in Taipei. “Some don’t know what a typhoon is.”

Links: Sinlaku YouTube Video, and finally: where’s the next typhoon?

(Photo credits: top left - Paramilitary policemen run with a child as Typhoon Sinlaku hits a levee in Taizhou, Zhejiang province, September 15, 2008. About 460,000 people in east China’s Zhejiang and Fujian Provinces have been evacuated as tropical storm Sinlaku, which was weakened from a typhoon on Monday morning, was approaching, Xinhua News Agency reported. REUTERS/China Daily. Right - Rescue workers look at the collapsed Hofeng Bridge across the Dajia River in Taichung after the passing of Typhoon Sinlaku September 15, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer)

"Sparkling or still?"
 
Remember when that question, asked with a certain downward gaze, would make you feel like a tactless tightwad for requesting tap? Did you try to lessen the shame with a smile and a clever nickname, like "I'll have 'New York's Finest'"?
 
Restaurants and hotels across the country are blurring the lines between these choices, as they stop serving bottled water due to a perception that it is environmentally unfriendly. Critics object to the waste left behind by the plastic and glass bottles, as well as the fuel and other natural resources used to manufacture and ship the bottles all over the world.
 
"In the world of trying to live in a more green, sustainable environment, I think water is the most obvious, simple thing that we can do," said Joseph Bastianich, a business partner of Mario Batali and co-owner of restaurants including Babbo, Lupa, Esca and Del Posto.
 
Bastianich told Reuters he is in the process of phasing out water across all his restaurants, following in the footsteps of other environmentally-conscious restaurants like Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.
 
In its place, Bastianich is installing filters made by Natura Water, which purify a restaurant's tap water and allow users to get still, sparkling or room temperature tap water. The restaurants can adjust the amount of carbonation, allowing them to tout the water as made in-house.
 
The Natura system, which comes with reusable water bottles for serving, can be rented for about $400 a month. 
 
Company founder Marco De Plano, whose customers also include L.A.'s  Ciudad, San Francisco's Foreign Cinema and certain Four Seasons hotels, said that with prices of high-end bottled water bubbling as high as $10, high-traffic locations can recoup their losses quickly.
 
"When we started this a year ago, everybody was talking about the green aspect," De Plano said. 
 
Bastianich says a liter of Natura water costs him about 50 cents and sells for about $4. That profit margin is slimmer than before, when he would pay about 80 cents for a liter of premium bottled mineral water and sell it for up to $9. 
 
"We think the loss of margin is an investment that's very worthwhile making," Bastianich said. 

The sacrifice to margins would lessen as sales of house-made water increase.

As the backlash against bottled water heats up across the country a host of local governments have cut bottled water out of their budgets.  Virginia, Illinois and New York are among the states that have banned buying bottled water with state funds.

(Photos: Reuters\Eric Thayer)

    By Rob Taylor
  

  “43 percent nasty” read posters dotting the press wing of Australia’s parliament this week under a photo of a beaming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, pointing readers to a more benign 5 percent-strength beer on sale at a nearby news studio.
    The quip drew on a poll finding near one-in-two voters believe the boyish-looking Rudd has a nasty side, echoing other recent surveys showing the centre-left leader’s meteoric popularity is sliding back from a year of levels “with the gods” .
    The beer plug perhaps helps explain a bizarre and sudden switch in Rudd’s technocratic speaking style to a bush slang which has left even Australians bewildered as, with his usual obsessiveness, Rudd works hard to reconnect.

Photo: Rudd at the Asia Security Conference in Singapore, May 29, 2009/Reuters 

 "Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate . . . It's chalk and cheese . . . Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate . . . Well, again, fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate," the Mandarin-speaking former diplomat said with “ticking clock” monotony in a television interview this week which raised eyebrows nationally.
    Compare that to equally incomprehensible, but slang-free, comments by Rudd in Britain last year while meeting foreign leaders over climate change.
    "The parallel ideological synergies, vis-a-vis the development opportunity momentum in our own constituencies … that's where the low-hanging fruit lies," he said as attending journalists shook their heads.
    In the United States, Rudd spoke at the prestigious Brookings Institution of “a complimentarity that could be developed further in the direction of some short of conceptual synthesis”.
    Australians can be forgiven for wondering who their prime minister really is, with the question having added resonance amid a swirl of talk that Rudd could call early elections to overcome an upper house Senate currently giving Labor nightmares.
    “Will the real Kevin Rudd please stand up,” former conservative opposition leader John Hewson demanded on national television on Friday.
    Rudd was a virtual unknown outside the corridors of parliament when he led his Labor Party out of near 12 years in opposition and chronic leadership instability to a sweeping election triumph in November 2007.
    Rudd came to lead then-opposition Labor in late 2006 as almost last leadership man standing and since election his popularity has been at record highs. His standing belies the “Dr Death” nickname Rudd earned while cutting a swathe through staff numbers as a top bureaucrat in Queensland state in the early 1990s.
    But that began to downshift in April when stories emerged of Rudd’s temper and control obsession -- which political insiders have known of for years – boiling over at a air force stewardess he reduced to tears over food choice while on a VIP flight.
    Since then Rudd’s popularity, while still strong, has fallen from high 70s to around 58 percent in the closely-watched Newspoll series.
    “Rudd's whole life is an artifice. With his blond hair, round face, round glasses
and wholesome values, he would have us believe he's the Milky Bar Kid,” senior writer Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Australian newspaper this month, comparing Labor’s star to a popular children’s chocolate bar character.
    “As the public is starting to realise, the real Rudd has more in common with Dr
Death than the carefully-crafted public persona of the Milky Bar Kid,” Fitzgerald said.
    “Strewth! There is now a Kevin Rudd for every occasion, and the only version of the Prime Minister that's missing is one that's real,” wrote conservative Herald Sun newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt after Rudd’s stream of sauce bottle slang.
    Speech experts have blamed Rudd's chameleon switch on his advisors trying to better reach ordinary voters, particularly swing-vote workers in crucial regional seats and suburban fringes, often ill at ease with Rudd’s natural intellectualism.
    But commentators, and the public, see the transition as far from smooth, raising questions on if it could actually harm Rudd in future opinion polling, and ultimately an election.
    Others say its shows a country and its leader unsure of their identity, torn between sophisticated city dwellers and a more insular retreat to nationalist symbols and protectionism among voters in regional areas.
    “While some of us have drifted off to lattes, designer wear and a taste for cosmopolitan things, others have retreated to the comfort of flags on our utes (SUVs) and Southern Cross tattoos,” the Courier Mail newspaper said.
    “In all fairness, it must be hard for any moderately intelligent Australian political leader to hit exactly the right note with his or her public persona in this shifting landscape that is our national character,” the paper said.
    So far Rudd is not retreating from the barrage of criticism and has even poked fun at himself and protagonists at a business power lunch in Sydney on Thursday, drawing laughter from those assembled.
    Channeling his inner aussie once more, Rudd called on media commentators to give him a "fair crack of the whip" and not "come the raw prawn".
     Does that leave you confused? Then spare a thought for wondering Australians as they await opinion testing of Rudd new style during a bruising parliamentary session over the next fortnight that could yet lead to surprise early elections!

Yikes. Seems it ain’t easy, or at least ain’t cheap, being green.

It will cost California some $115 billion for (pretty much) hitting 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. That’s more than twice the price tag of sticking with a goal of 20 percent. The difference, according to a long-delayed report issued today by the state’s Public Utilities Commission is due to the speed of building fast. There are all sorts of other problems outlined in exquisite detail. It’s all quite handy for those trying to get a sense of just what needs to be done to go green. A lot, it seems.

When Kennedy announced the moon shot, was there this type of gnashing of teeth? Maybe no one ran the numbers ahead of time!

Pic of Mr. It’s Not Easy Being Green by Mike Segar/Reuters

Can semantics help save the planet?

A showdown between leaders of Chevron Corp and the Sierra Club on Wednesday night revealed a number of shared beliefs between the two California institutions, particularly about the need for a transparent way of pricing carbon.

The debate at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on Wednesday night pitted Chevron CEO David O’Reilly against Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and both agreed that limiting carbon emissions should involve some sort of levy imposed by the government - if only there was a word for such a thing.

“It would be much cleaner if there was a transparent cost on carbon that one could see,” O’Reilly said.

The moderator suggested that was a ‘tax’. “Nobody wants to talk about it,” O’Reilly replied. 

“Call it a fee,” Pope then suggested.

They also agreed that legislation which is workable in California or other states was not so easy to sell at a national level, even though the White House now seemed supportive, according to Pope.

“You could have conversations with the Republican caucus in the Idaho legislature that you couldn’t have with anybody in Washington D.C.,” Pope said of the eight year Bush administration.

They strongly disagreed on the timeline for cutting carbon emissions, but both saw cars as among the last carbon emitters that would go, simply because people would have to pay to replace them.

“The last clunker on the road will probably be one of the last relics of the energy economy of the 20th century,” Pope said.

Pope also suggested that all oil companies worldwide should commit to putting 10 percent of their profits over the next decade into a fund to help communities hurt by production of oil and gas.

O’Reilly, having said earlier in the debate that he made $14 million last year, noted this cost would also be passed along to consumers ultimately, but didn’t think many were in the mood for that.

“If you can get the government to increase taxes other than on a few of us, I agree,” O’Reilly said to boos and hisses.

“I hope the next three months will be better for you than the last three," Czech ambassador Jaromir Novotny told a gathering of Japanese car importers last month.

The way things are going, he'll be hoping against hope.

In April, Japan introduced an “eco-car” tax incentive that has left all foreign car brands such as Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, neatly outside the fence of eligibility.

It’s the last thing they need in a market that’s already full of quirks that make life difficult for non-Japanese car brands: the existence of a huge and unique 660cc microcar segment, convoluted recycling laws and stringent regulations against what type of materials can be used in fuel tanks, to name just a few.

No one is complaining about incentivising low-emission cars. But what rankles outsiders is that the perks are based on an outdated fuel economy testing method that critics say is a poor reflection of real-life driving.

“It’s so far from reality that we never bothered to tune our cars to get good readings under this method,” an executive at a European carmaker told me. “And now they’ve hit us with this eco-car tax and even if we wanted to make the adjustments, it would take us until next year to be ready.”

Japan’s mileage test is based on cars with engines already warmed up, a very slow acceleration and a top speed of just 70 kph (43 mph) --  slow even for Japan, where the speed limit on highways is 100 kph.

The differences mean Toyota’s third-generation Prius gets listed fuel economy of 38 km/litre, or 89 mpg, in Japan, but only 50 mpg in the United States.

Granted, that still beats anything in its class hands down, but there’s another catch: fuel economy and emissions standards in Japan are divided into nine different weight classes, and designed in such a way that a relatively big car with a smallish engine scores well in each category.

Unfortunately for European cars, that’s pretty much the reverse of their general strategy for Japan: “a big, sexy engine in a small car relative to its weight”, as one industry expert described it to me.

To be fair, it wouldn’t be the first time that a country formulated its regulations to suit domestic companies.

But there must be questions when a Volkswagen Golf, known the world over as a fuel-efficient car, doesn’t qualify for the green tax rates when a big, honking van like Toyota’s Alphard does.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Christian Charisius; REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Google Green Energy Czar (real title) Bill Weihl sat down with Reuters to talk about Renewable Energy Less Than Coal - the company’s plan to make affordable clean energy. Google started off trying to green up its own computer operations and then launched this save-the-world effort, which includes some investment in renewable energy startups and the work by a Google team.

Weihl describes that work in the video below, saying that the chances of successfully creating clean energy at less than coal prices - or about 3 cents per kilowatt — had risen from long shot to roughly even odds in about three years’ time.

This is an overview of Google efforts (that’s me asking questions):

And here is Weihl giving a bit more detail of solar thermal work for you wonks (like me):

Video by Peter Henderson/Reuters

Clashes in the Amazon between indigenous protestors and Peru’s army that killed some 60 people last week throw some old issues into sharp new relief: development versus the environment and local versus foreign control of natural resources.

Indigenous tribes, worried they will lose control over natural resources, have protested since April seeking to force Peru’s Congress to repeal new laws that encourage foreign mining and energy companies to invest billions of dollars in huge tracts of pristine rain forest.

In the developing world, extractive industries have a bad record of bringing benefits to local people. Prime examples include the oil-rich Niger Delta in Nigeria and mineral-rich South Africa under apartheid.

Equally bad is their record on the environment. The despoiled Niger Delta also springs immediately to mind (and it is probably no coincidence that it has also been wracked by conflict and insurgency).

The tensions in Peru also highlight the on-going debate about the environment versus development — especially when that development involves the planet’s dwindling rain forests.

A seven-year economic boom has failed to significantly reduce poverty in Peru, which is where about 36 percent of the population remains mired.

Developing countries such as Peru have long argued that the rich world reached its affluence in part by exploiting its own environment (and its colonies’) and natural resources and that they should be able to do the same.

But the world’s rain forests are the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, and left intact could still generate untold economic riches. They contain countless species which have not even been discovered or described by scientists. Some may hold the keys to medical or other scientific breakthroughs. They also have huge potential as ecotourist destinations (a sector that creates local jobs and encourages local investment).

Letting the rain forest stand can also play a big role in the struggle against climate change. Chopping down fewer trees and caring for the soil may be cheaper and more effective in fighting climate change than curbing emissions from coal plants, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Friday. Trees store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) as they grow. You can see our story on the report here.

Tropical rain forests are shrinking almost everywhere they are found, from Borneo in Asia to west Africa to South America’s Amazon. Estimates for deforestation rates vary widely and some of the predictions from the 1980s for example have long since proven to be alarmist (one otherwise fine book from the mid-1980s, which has been many a student’s introduction to rainforest ecology, predicted at the time that ”there will be little left of this fascinating habitat by the end of the century.”) But there is no question that the world’s rain forests are in trouble — not least some would argue because they are found in tropical countries which tend to be poor.

Alternative paths to development also include a plan to pay tropical countries not to chop down trees — but an exclusive Reuters report last week revealed that the plan risks being discredited by opportunists even before it starts.

What do you think? Should Peru exploit its rain forest regions in a bid to attract badly needed foreign capital? Or should other paths to development be taken which can hopefully spare the rain forest from the axe?

(Photo: Native people hold sticks as they barricade the entrance to Yurimagua city, in a remote Amazon region of northern Peru, June 6, 2009. They are protesting the government’s drive to lure foreign energy and mining companies into the rain forest. REUTERS/Enrique Castro-Mendivil/PERU)