View previous stories
	Fifty Years after Silent Spring, Assault on Science Continues by Yale 360 USA   June 2013   Carbon Emissions Increased 1.4 Percent in 2012, IEA Reports   Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by 1.4 percent in 2012, a pace that could lead to a temperature increase of as much as 5.3 degrees C (9 degrees F) over pre-industrial times, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest World Energy Outlook. Despite improvements in some regions, including the U.S. and Europe, a record 31.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide were emitted worldwide during the year, including a 5.8-percent increase in Japan, where more fossil fuels were burned to compensate for reductions in nuclear power.   While the rate of emissions growth in China was lower than in recent years, it still emitted 3.8 percent more carbon dioxide in 2012 than in 2011.   In its report, the IEA encouraged four strategies to prevent what it says will be a catastrophic temperature increase: improved energy efficiency in buildings, industry, and transportation; a reduction in construction and use of coal-fired plants; reduced methane emissions; and a partial phaseout of fossil fuel consumption subsidies.   May 2013   Large Majority of Americans believe Global Warming Should be a Priority   Roughly 70 percent of Americans say global warming should be a priority for President Obama and Congress and 61 percent support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax that would be used to help reduce the national debt, according to a new survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. In a national survey conducted in April, 87 percent of respondents said that the president and Congress should make developing clean sources of energy a priority, 68 percent favored regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and 71 percent supported providing tax rebates for people who buy solar panels and energy-efficient vehicles. Seventy percent said global warming should be at least a “medium” priority, while 28 percent said it should be a low priority. The poll showed that 7 in 10 Americans support funding more research into green energy sources.   Fifty Years after Silent Spring, Assault on Science Continues, by Frank Graham jr.   When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.   Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. More than a century and a half after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared, nearly half the adults in the United States still don’t believe that evolution happens. And 50 years after the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, naysayers still rage from long-entrenched positions of ignorance at Rachel Carson and her ground-breaking critique of pesticide use.   The parallels with today’s assault on climate science are striking. The personal, vitriolic attacks that were leveled at Carson are echoed today in the organized assault on the scientists who bring us uncontroverted evidence that greenhouse gases are rapidly warming the planet. But Carson savored a victory that today’s climate scientists have yet to taste — her book spurred concrete action to curtail the use of pesticides that were causing widespread harm.   I came to Carson’s book from a special angle. Several years after her death in 1964, her editor at Houghton Mifflin asked me to bring the history of the book’s publication up to date, and my work appeared in 1970 under the sibilant title, Since Silent Spring. Carson, I knew, was an unlikely target of controversy. She had been a marine biologist employed by what is now the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As the author of several beautifully written and highly acclaimed books about the sea, she was probably the best-known science writer in the world.   But by the late 1950s, Carson had grown uneasy about the poisoning of land and sea by the massive and indiscriminate post-war barrage of new pesticides against gypsy moths, cotton boll weevils, and other pest insects. A very private person, she was reluctant to speak out and, in fact, urged several other persuasive writers, including E. B. White, to take on the task of spreading the bad tidings.   Carson was already suffering from the cancer that would kill her. Yet, with her science background, she stepped in and labored for four years documenting how chemicals were destroying birds, fish, and other wildlife and tracking the mounting evidence of their long-term threats to living things. In style and content, she designed her book to reveal to the public the misuse of those poisons. She pointed out the failures to grasp biological principles that encouraged the spread of deadly chemicals through the open environment and described the resulting fiascoes and disasters. She suggested alternatives and called for intensive research into the effects of these chemicals on all forms of life, including humans.   In June 1962, The New Yorker published the first of three excerpts from her book, and Houghton Mifflin brought out Silent Spring itself in September. She had expected an attack on its content by representatives of the chemical industry and their political allies, but not the kind of virulence and personal animosity that materialized. In almost every case, the attacks were barren of scientific substance.   An official of the Nutrition Foundation contended that “publicists and the author’s adherents among the food faddists, health quacks and special interest groups are promoting her book as if it were scientifically irreproachable and written by a scientist.” Wrote the director of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, “In any large scale pest program, we are immediately confronted with the objection of a vociferous, misinformed group of nature-balancing, organic gardening, bird-loving, unreasonable citizenry that has not been convinced of the important place of agricultural chemicals in our economy.” Other literature accused Carson variously of being “a priestess of nature,” “a bird-lover,” and a member of some mystical cult. An official with the Federal Pest Control Review Board drew laughter from his audience when he remarked, “I thought she was a spinster. What’s she so worried about genetics for?"   Such vitriol is much in evidence today as global warming skeptics and deniers ridicule, harass, and even threaten prominent climate scientists like Penn State’s Michael Mann. The scientifically groundless, magical thinking exhibited by Carson’s critics is repeated by the likes of the North Carolina state Senate, which recently passed a coastal management bill that prohibits even considering the possibility of future sea level rise.   As I began work on my follow-up to Carson’s book, I was puzzled at first by the luke-warm response, and sometimes the outright hostility, shown to Silent Spring by some legitimate scientists. I soon realized the practitioners of entomology at the time were largely predetermined defenders of lavish pesticide use. A big step in that process had taken place in the early 1950s, when the American Entomological Society consolidated with the American Association of Economic Entomologists.   Although the enlarged group included many biologists, they felt outnumbered by chemists, toxicologists, and others whose mission was simply to destroy insects. (“These people loathe insects,” a research biologist told me. “Their life is a crusade against them.”) By the time of Silent Spring’s publication, the American Entomological Society listed Velsicol, Monsanto, Shell Chemical Company, and other chemical corporations among their “sustaining associates.” The society’s criticisms of Carson closely paralleled those of their associates in industry.   University biologists themselves became vulnerable to the pressure. Robert L. Rudd, a zoologist at the University of California, was writing a book about the effects of pesticides on the environment at the same time Carson was writing hers. The two scientists held similar ideas about the dangers posed by unrestrained chemical use. Impeccably scientific in his approach, Rudd nonetheless ran into trouble publishing his book (Pesticides and the Living Landscape). The manuscript went through endless reviews, before finally seeing publication in 1964. But at a price for Rudd: He lost a promotion, and was removed from his position at the California Agricultural Experiment Station.   In researching my book, I wrote to a prominent ecologist I knew at one of the country’s land grant colleges, which are closely associated with the agricultural industry. I asked him to expand on a paper he had published about the harmful effects of long-lasting pesticides on birds. He replied that he was too busy at the time to answer my queries in any detail. When I met him again several years later, he apologized for the brushoff, and sheepishly explained that he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize the position of his co-author (or himself, of course) by directly associating himself with a book about Rachel Carson.   For some scientists, it seems, Silent Spring was a polemic, a diatribe. It did not give both sides of the argument — as a scientist, her critics insisted, she ought to have presented both the pros and cons of extensive pesticide use. But that was just her point. Carson saw no reason to praise pesticide use as it was carried out at the time, for such promotional arguments had appeared for years in a stream of literature from chemical companies and associations, agricultural experiment stations, and the big land grant universities.   So Carson took up her cudgels. Her book is not a mathematical theorem. It is a carefully researched, precisely reasoned, and elegantly written argument for what she passionately believed to be the public good. It is a product of her social conscience, but not the diatribe that her critics complained about. She did not call for a ban on all pesticides, but mostly for the long-lasting chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT whose movement through the environment cannot be contained and whose residues, being fat soluble, are stored in animal tissues and recycled through food chains.   “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides should never be used,” she wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm... I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effects on soil, water, wildlife, or man himself.”   Despite a few minor errors in Carson’s work (for instance, that American robins faced extinction from pesticide use), leading biologists found Silent Spring persuasive. In the decade following her death, the U.S. banned DDT and some other chemicals for most uses, on the basis not only of her book but also of much subsequent research. Yet curiously the sniping at her continues today, sometimes with fierce intensity.   An ironic aspect of the assault on Carson’s legacy in recent years has been that it is no longer focused on science. Critics have replaced the old chestnuts attacking her professional competence with a new tack — political correctness. The more hysterical of her opponents, including notable climate change deniers such as the late novelist Michael Crichton, have even branded Carson “a mass murderess,” responsible for the deaths of millions of African children from malaria because her work led to a ban on DDT. They portray a white elite, careless of African lives.   So, as with the global warming debate today, politics trumps science. In the byzantine mindset of right-wing think tanks, concerns about environmental health reflect a godless, anti-business, anti-American mind-set. These critics never mention the fact that DDT was banned in the U. S. and some other countries, but globally is still available; nor that, even when Silent Spring first appeared, DDT’s importance against malaria had been greatly diminished because mosquitoes were evolving resistance to the chemical; nor that alternative pesticides, as well as drugs that attack the malaria parasite and bug nets, are more feasible than using DDT. Ironically, many of Carson’s bitterest critics are creationists, who deny the existence of the same evolution that shapes those insects and makes them pesticide resistant.   Such critics would have felt right at home in 1859, arguing that Darwin’s grandpa may have been an ape, but they themselves never evolved. Yet today’s extremists in universities, state legislatures, and Congress have figured out that bad science can’t win against good science. So whether the issue is pesticides or climate change, they have sought a public relations victory by muddying key scientific issues with character attacks and politics.   http://e360.yale.edu/feature/climate_scientist_michael_mann_fights_back_against_skeptics/2516/ http://e360.yale.edu/feature/declining_bee_populations_pose_a_threat_to_global_agriculture/2645/ Visit the related web page
	The U.S., China, and Cybersecurity by Shiran Shen, Robert D. O"Brien Carnegie Council Global Ethics Network   The rise of Asia is one of the most significant developments in the twenty-first century geopolitical landscape. Pundits who dubbed the twentieth century the “American Century” are now predicting that the twenty-first century will be the “Pacific Century.” Asia’s ascendance is driven in large part by the return of China, whose economic and political might has been growing at unprecedented speeds, to a position of international prominence.   China’s re-emergence as a significant global player has heightened the importance of the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China, the two largest economies in the world.   These two countries, which feature markedly different political systems and cultures, have an unprecedented opportunity to cooperate in reshaping global norms in the name of the greater good. To do so, however, they will have to overcome numerous bilateral disputes, many of which are grounded in divergent views on ethics.   Human rights and climate change are two of the most prominent areas where divergent Chinese and American views, determined in large part by differing stances on various ethical questions, are inhibiting cooperation.   In this essay, however, we would like to examine another issue that looms large in both US-China ties and international relations writ large—cybersecurity.   Though commonly conceptualized as a strategic geopolitical issue, we contend that its underpinnings are comprised by series of ethical considerations.   Moreover, we believe that addressing some of these fundamental ethical considerations will provide a better framework for easing bilateral tensions and promoting cooperation than surface-level tit-for-tat negotiations and public naming and shaming.   Cybersecurity is an issue that has rapidly ascended in importance in the US-China relationship. U.S. military and security officials are increasingly wary of the adversarial effects of potential cyber warfare.   In his confirmation hearings for the post as Secretary of Defense in 2011, Leon Panetta warned, “the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyber attack.” China is widely assumed at both the popular and elite levels in the U.S. to be the biggest initiator of cyber attacks on U.S. government, business, and media networks.   On the Chinese side, the view is a bit different. Chinese officials, too, feel that they are victims in the cyber realm and note that a considerable proportion of malicious cyber activities globally have originated from computer hosts located in the U.S.   This latent sense of US-China distrust in the realm of cyberspace is dangerous as it can exacerbate the broader strategic distrust about each other’s current and future intentions, brewing hostility that is threatening to the health of the most important bilateral relationship in the world.   Cybersecurity is an important geopolitical issue, but framing it in pure strategic terms neglects its core—a series of basic ethical considerations.   Economically, these include questions about the ethics of espionage targeting private sector entities as well as, more generally, the ethics of intellectual property.   In the politico-military realm, cybersecurity raises general ethical questions about intelligence gathering and reasonable diplomatic and military responses to intrusions and attacks that occur in the cyber realm.   Cybersecurity is a new issue, a global issue, and an important issue. Breaking it apart into its ethical underpinnings provides a framework for effectively addressing it at the bilateral level.   Bilateral cooperation can, in turn, drive a broader global conversation on creating a system of norms that provides for a more secure cyber realm.   The role of cybersecurity in US-China relations   Cybersecurity has quickly catapulted to the top of the US-China bilateral agenda. The two sides, however, have expressed very different understandings of the situation, making resolution of the dispute difficult. While some nascent forms of dialogue have begun, a grander vision for addressing the problem is needed. We believe that vision can be found in isolating the ethical dilemmas at the core of the issue.   Stories on suspected attacks from Chinese hackers—whether government-affiliated or not—have been prevalent in the U.S. media in recent years. In 2010, The New York Times reported that investigators had tracked cyber attacks on Google to Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and a vocational school in eastern China.   The most notorious case came in 2011, when a McAfee white paper documented Operation Shady RAT, an ongoing series of cyber attacks since mid-2006 that have hit at least 72 organizations, including defense contractors, businesses, the United Nations, and the International Olympic Committee.   According to McAfee, the Internet security company that executed the investigation, the operation was “a five-year targeted operation by one specific actor” and the targeting of athletic oversight organizations around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games “potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions.” This state actor is widely presumed to be China.   More recently, the security firm Mandiant released a report stating that cyber spying collaboration had been discovered between SJTU and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). According to Mandiant, several papers on computer network security and intrusion detection were co-authored by faculty at SJTU and researchers at PLA Unit 61398, an allegedly operational unit actively engaged in cyber espionage.   The media’s activism coupled with American private sector angst has spurred a U.S. government response. Recognizing the severity of the problem, the Department of State has elevated the issue to a place of prominence in its annual strategic dialogue with China. The White House has also taken notice. In early March, President Obama and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon both publicly criticized China for its role in supporting cyber attacks and cyber espionage targeting U.S. networks.   President Obama also conveyed his concerns personally to Xi Jinping during a phone call to congratulate Xi on his recent installment as China’s president. More recently, Donilon stated that cybersecurity should be included in all major US-China bilateral economic discussions. The U.S. perspective is clear—China is at fault and needs to rectify its wrongdoings.   With the U.S. publicly denouncing China’s alleged role in cyber attacks on American organizations, Chinese officials and public intellectuals have responded in several ways.   Some highlight the uncertain nature of attributing cyber attacks to a particular entity since a hacker can take control of another computer in nearly any country to launch malicious cyber activity without the owner even being aware of it.   Others react with rage, condemning the U.S. side for making “groundless” accusations and “carrying a Cold War mentality.” To them, this is simply another American plot to demonize China. Still others point out that China is a major victim of cyber attacks. In December 2011, several of China’s most popular online shopping, microblogging, social networking, and gaming websites were hacked, leaking the account information for more than 100 million usernames, passwords, and emails. According to He Rulong, spokesman of the Chinese Embassy in London, 6,747 overseas servers were found to have controlled more than 1.9 million mainframes in China with Trojans or botnets in February and March of this year. Who do these Chinese officials and pundits identify as the initiators of these attacks? The U.S. According to a 2009 Xinhua News report, about 40 percent of cyber attacks on Chinese computer systems in 2005 originated in the U.S.   While the issue of cybersecurity has become one of great importance in US-China relations, steps to address it remain rudimentary in nature. On April 13, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the two sides had agreed to establish a cybersecurity working group. A little over a week later, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, convened a joint conference with Chinese general Fang Fenghui, who pledged to work with the U.S. because the consequences of a major cyber attack “may be as serious as a nuclear bomb.” Gen. Fang, the chief of the PLA General Staff and a member of the Central Military Commission, indicated that he would be willing to establish a cybersecurity “mechanism,” with the caveat that progress might not be swift.   These steps toward dialogue are positive in nature, but they are only small bricks in the construction of bridge that needs to extend across a great divide. One challenge to improving the bilateral dialogue can be found in the framing of the issue itself: cybersecurity is typically couched within a strategic geopolitical context. We contend that viewing cybersecurity as simply a strategic and technological matter, however, proves restrictive, neglecting the fundamental ethical questions at its core. Identifying these ethical questions not only adds further nuance to our respective understandings of the issue, but also provides a framework for addressing it.   Cybersecurity and ethics: the economic aspect   One example of the ethical foundations of cybersecurity can be found in the economic aspects of the issue. The American mainstream media and U.S. government statements have painted this as a fairly straightforward problem—China is stealing precious intellectual property from American companies. Yet a closer look at the issue yields a measure of its complexity. More specifically, norms regarding the ethics of economically motivated cyber espionage remain underdeveloped and viewing the procurement of commercial data as pure theft fails to take into account cultural considerations regarding the ethics of intellectual property protection.   In recent months, numerous reports have been released identifying China as a thief—the illegal procurer of sensitive American proprietary information. It is important to note however, that even assuming these reports are accurate and China does procure economic data from American firms through cyber espionage, the People’s Republic is not alone in doing so.   Indeed, a recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate notes that France, Russia, and Israel have engaged in hacking for economic intelligence. The diversity of these countries—a democracy, an authoritarian regime, and a democracy founded on religious grounds—is indicative of the fact that relevant norms on cyber espionage are neither universal nor well-established. Such a fact creates an area of ethical fuzziness that makes assertions of right and wrong as regards economic cyber espionage problematic.   More importantly, the issue of economically motivated cyber espionage is underwritten by difficult questions regarding intellectual property. This is a longstanding area of contention between the U.S. and China, but one worth rehashing. In short, different cultures employ different practices of idea attribution, a reality which is all-too-often overlooked.   American academic papers frequently feature hundreds of footnotes; many serious papers by Chinese scholars employ only a few footnotes. Who is right? Do Americans excessively individualize the production of knowledge, losing sight of its true social value, or do Chinese academics understate the role that individuals play in creating ideas? And what role does culture and tradition play? In the U.S., students are encouraged at a very young age to “think outside the box” as well as to “find your own way of learning.”   Americans are taught to use the ideas presented to them to chart their own, unique course forward. In China, by contrast, students learn primarily through rote memorization—the consumption of knowledge and later reproduction of it on standardized tests. Such a system has its roots in the ancient practice of imperial examination, in which prospective officials proved they were worthy of governing by demonstrating their mastery of the content and style of Confucian wisdom. Examinees sometimes spent a lifetime in preparation, memorizing the work of sages such as Confucius and Mencius so as to reproduce it in essays that were notoriously rigid in form.   In other words, in China, imitation can be not only the sincerest form of flattery, but also the sincerest form of respect. This cultural norm, in turn, influences conceptions of the ethics of intellectual property itself, posing questions like: Is intellectual property itself always ethical, particularly when one takes into account the disparities in wealth, healthcare, and access to technology it can create? And shouldn’t the true value of knowledge be founded on its social impact and not a financial measure?   These ethical considerations make the U.S. accusation that China is a thief problematic, not only from the perspective of “right” versus “wrong,” but also in terms of finding common ground from which to address the cybersecurity issue. Both sides, then, could benefit from taking a step back to look at core ethical questions about economically motivated cyberespionage: a) what are the international norms in this area and what should they be? And b) how should intellectual property be conceptualized and how should its protection be encouraged?   Cybersecurity and ethics: the politico-military aspect   Ethics also stand at the core of considerations regarding cybersecurity’s politico-military dimensions. Important ethical questions in this realm include: What type of interstate cyber espionage is acceptable? And what are ethical forms of response to incidences of cyber espionage and cyber attack?   At a fundamental level, espionage of any type stands on questionable ethical footing. That being said, in practice states both acknowledge and allow espionage to occur. Such espionage, however, is not without its own set of ethical guidelines. One prominent example of this was the so-called “Moscow Rules”—the tacitly agreed to set of regulations for interstate espionage between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Defense Group International Vice President James Mulvenon, among others, has noted that these rules simply do not exist in the cyber realm.   Without these mutually constituted social guidelines on ethics in the practice of espionage, how are state cyber intelligence agents supposed to determine what is permissible as opposed to what “crosses the line?”   On the military front, ethical questions regarding appropriate responses to incidents of cyber espionage and cyber attack also stand prominent. Here, the consequences of an unclear ethical framework for response entail huge risks. Cyber warfare is an extremely new tactic. Thus, the issue of appropriate and proportional response remains an important and uncharted territory.   If U.S. intelligence operatives hack into a Chinese military network and destroy plans that are integral to China’s construction of its new aircraft carrier, what is an ethical response? Can Chinese intelligence agents respond by launching a cyber attack on an American bank that wreaks widespread havoc, thereby hurting the U.S. government’s economic position? More alarmingly, what happens if a cyber attack by one side on the other is deemed so damaging that a conventional military response is taken into consideration?   Here, again, the dialogue between the U.S. and China would benefit from a clear focus on a series of ethical questions. Without ethical guidelines on interstate espionage and emergency response mechanisms, bilateral mutual distrust stands to grow and the potential for a major military conflict, in the cyber or conventional realm, remains perilously high.   China, the U.S., and cybersecurity: the opportunity   By focusing on the ethical underpinnings of the cybersecurity issue, the U.S. and China can chart a path forward in addressing the bilateral dispute. As the two most significant players in international cyberspace, the two sides can expect dividends from cooperating in establishing norms in the cyber realm.   Since strategic mistrust regarding cybersecurity has a spillover effect on overall bilateral relations, cooperation in setting norms on permissible cyberspace behavior can help ease tensions between the two countries. Moreover, US-China bilateral collaboration in addressing the issue can serve as a critical step towards promoting multilateral efforts aimed at ensuring a more secure cyber realm. The task of bridging the divide between Chinese and American understandings of cybersecurity is not an easy one. Tensions are high and the stakes—the health of the bilateral relationship and the safety of the cyber realm—are even higher.   Nevertheless, there is a path forward for the two countries and it can be found in a consideration of the fundamental ethical questions that constitute the issue of cybersecurity itself.   By clarifying their respective views on a series of simple ethical questions, the U.S. and China will increase mutual understanding, creating a more conducive environment for dialogue. This dialogue, in turn, will make possible agreements on certain new norms in the cyber realm.   Ultimately, the U.S. and China are only two countries in a complex international system. They alone cannot solve problems involving multiple stakeholders. By working to create new norms, however, they can mature the multilateral dialogue on issues like cybersecurity, helping to make possible global solutions to important global problems.   Authors: Shiran Shen, Stanford University. China Robert D. O"Brien, University of Oxford. USA   http://www.globalethicsnetwork.org/profiles/blogs/the-u-s-china-and-cybersecurity-the-ethical-underpinnings-of-a http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/thought-leaders/leaders/index http://www.globalethicsnetwork.org/video/video/listTagged?tag=globalcivics Visit the related web page
	View more stories