It's no secret that Japan seeks an end to the longstanding moratorium on commercial whaling passed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986. Nor is Japan a stranger to allegations that it's bribed other IWC members to vote for its position. But now, the London Times is carrying what it says is proof that at least six states agreed to vote for Japan's position in exchange for aid:

Japan denies buying the votes of IWC members. However, The Sunday Times filmed officials from pro-whaling governments admitting [...] They voted with the whalers because of the large amounts of aid from Japan. One said he was not sure if his country had any whales in its territorial waters. Others are landlocked.

The governments of St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Grenada, Republic of Guinea and Ivory Coast all entered negotiations to sell their votes in return for aid.

The top fisheries official for Guinea said Japan usually gave his minister a “minimum” of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings.

If the Times' report is true, Japan's efforts to overturn the whaling ban may have suffered a major setback. But anti-whaling activists shouldn't rejoice just yet. Debate surrounding the issue has gotten progressively more intense in the last few months as the IWC prepares to consider just what Japan is looking for -- a (temporary) suspension of the moratorium, to be voted on later this month in Morocco. The meeting also follows a recent breakdown in relations between Japan and Australia, whose government sued Tokyo on June 1 for repeatedly violating the IWC whaling ban.

Via Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times, a graph charting the not terribly surprising impact the Gulf oil spill has had on BP's image, once among the best in the industry:

It's from a firm called Covalence that calculates companies' ethical reputations and, on a neat mapping tool, tracks them against the amount of attention the companies are receiving in the media. (Methodology here.) From this report, a look at how different international industries have fared over the past half-decade, as the volume of information about them has generally increased:

Not only is the oil and gas industry in the basement, but it's one of the only industries whose reputation gets actively worse the more we know about it. For the largest oil and gas companies, the relationship is even starker -- spikes in attention track closely with drops in reputation.

On one level, this is probably just a measure of the very different reasons that different industries find themselves in the headlines. (When a tech company is in the news, it's because it's launching the iPad. When an oil company is in the news, it's because it has befouled a major ecosystem for a generation.) And energy companies are often particularly bad actors on the world stage.

But I suspect it's also a testament to the degree to which both the oil industry and the global public that depends on it are more comfortable when the latter knows less about how the former does its work -- the business of energy production is rarely pretty. Which is why all the unflattering attention is important: The best case for drilling domestically in the United States, rather than somewhere like Nigeria, is that the added scrutiny that operations here receive -- from the government, the media, and environmental organizations -- makes companies behave better than they do in the Niger River Delta, where oil operations are estimated to have leaked an amount comparable to the Gulf oil spill since the 1970s, and garnered a fraction of the international outrage.

And for his next trick...

He has put a tiger to sleep, ridden bare-chested on horseback and even saved baby seals from being clubbed to death. Today it was the turn of polar bears to feature in Vladimir Putin’s latest animal adventure.

The action-man Prime Minister was filmed attaching a tracking device to a sedated polar bear and helping scientists to measure and weigh the animal during a visit to the Franz Joseph Land in Russia’s Arctic far north.

Wearing a specially monogrammed red winter jacket, Mr Putin stroked the 230kg (36 stone) bear and shook its paw, saying “Be healthy”, as a commentator for state television told viewers that it could “wake up at any moment”.

Mr Putin, who asserted Russia’s “profound geopolitical interests” in the region during his visit, declared to the camera: “The bear is the master of the Arctic.”

Here at FP, we've frequently highlighted bogus arguments made by climate-change skeptics, but environmentalists are certainly also capable of faulty logic and specious conclusions. In a new column for CNN, Alan Weisman, author of the bestselling The World Without Us, tries to infer a connection between climate change and the recent high-profile volanic eruption and earthquakes:   

The denser that gaseous barrier grows, the hotter things get and the faster glaciers melt. As they flow off the land, we are warned, seas rise. Yet something else is lately worrying geologists: the likelihood that the Earth's crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound.

As it does, a volcano awakens in Iceland (with another, larger and adjacent to still-erupting Eyjafjallajokull, threatening to detonate next). The Earth shudders in Haiti. Then Chile. Then western China. Mexicali-Calexico. The Solomon Islands. Spain. New Guinea. And those are just the big ones, 6+ on the Richter scale, and just in 2010. And it's only April.

It's looking like this may be a long decade. And if we don't pull carbon out of the way we energize our lives soon, a small clump of our not-too-distant surviving descendants may find themselves, as Gaia scientist James Lovelock has direly predicted, like the first Icelanders: gathered on some near-barren hunk of rock near one of the still-habitable poles, trying yet anew to eke out a plan for human civilization.

I don't know if scientsts really are worried about this -- a link there might have been nice -- but as the geologists I spoke to for this week's FP Explainer patiently explained to me, there's really nothing unusual about the recent level of geological activity:

2010 is actually shaping up to be a perfectly average year for quakes. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, since 1900 the Earth has experienced an average of 16 major quakes -- magnitude 7.0 or higher -- per year. In the first four months of 2010, there have been six. So though this will likely be a worse year than 1986, when there were only six major quakes total, it's unlikely to be as bad as 1943, when there were 32.

The recent high fatalities are not the result of more frequent or stronger quakes, but because we're building larger urban areas in fault zones -- and in the case of Haiti, not particularly well-constructed ones.

As for Iceland, as Weisman himself notes, it sits right on top of the mid-Atlantic ridge and volcanic eruptions are hardly unusual there. If prevailing winds hadn't pushed the ash cloud toward Europe, disrupting jet flights, the recent eruption would probably have barely been covered in the U.S. media.

While I'm ulimately more sympathetic to Weisman's worldview than Pat Robertson's or Rush Limbaugh's, blaming standard geological activity on Earth "striking back" makes about as much sense as blaming it on a voodoo curse or God's opposition to health-care reform. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Plastic Vortex, a Texas-sized gyre of plastic formed by ocean currents, has been known and well-documented for over a decade. But what about all the plastic in the Atlantic?

Researchers are warning of a new blight on the ocean: a swirl of confetti-like plastic debris stretching over thousands of square miles (kilometers) in a remote expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

The floating garbage - hard to spot from the surface and spun together by a vortex of currents - was documented by two groups of scientists who trawled the sea between scenic Bermuda and Portugal's mid-Atlantic Azores islands.

Similar patches are thought to exist in the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans. 

As mentioned in the brief, Tanzania and Zambia were rebuffed today in their attempts to relax the international ban on ivory sales at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Doha. The decision is being hailed as a victory for conservationists after some setbacks earlier in the week: 

The rulings were a rare victory for environmentalists at the two-week meeting where they have endured defeats of proposals ranging from an export ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna to a shark conservation plan to a measure to regulate trade of red and pink corals.

Not that I approve of killing elephants for their ivory, but the economic double-standard at work here seems troubling. The tuna ban, for instance, was strongly opposed by Japan, which imports 80 percent of the world's bluefin and led a concerted lobbying effort to have the current rules overturned.

Japan has, for years, employed a similar strategy in its campaign to loosen restrictions on whaling, exchanging foreign aid to disinterested countries like Togo and St. Kitts who join the International Whaling Comission and vote with the pro-whaling bloc. Economist Christian Dippel has studied this phenomenon and wrote about it in a recent piece for FP.  

Aid-receiving countries like Tanzania and Zambia presumably don't have the resources to mount such a campaign, which is a large part of the reason they want the ban lifted in the first place. As Zambia's Minister of Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources Catherine Namugala put it, "We can't justify failure to take a child to school because we are using resources to conserve elephants. I appeal to allow Zambia to utilize the natural resources given to us by God."

Again, I tend to side with the conservationists on this, but I certainly understand the frustration of poor-country governments who are expected to make economic sacrifices for the sake of endangered species while the world's second-largest economy continues to hunt species on the brink of extinction. 

Update: New protections for hammerhead and white-tip sharks have also been shot down. Guess who led the opposition to them.

A setback for animal-rights activists in Switzerland: 

Voters in Switzerland have rejected a proposal to introduce a nationwide system of state-funded lawyers to represent animals in court. Animal rights groups had proposed the move, saying that without lawyers to argue the animals' case, many instances of cruelty were going unpunished.

But the measure was rejected by around 70% of voters in a referendum.

U.S. "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein wrote in favor of establishing something like this as a law professor, which led to hunting rights activists Saxby Chambliss and John Cornyn holding up his senate confirmation for a time. It's a safe bet that Sunstein won't touch anything like the Swiss proposal with a ten-foot poll now that he's actually in government, but it would still be interesting to know his thoughts on it.

On a slightly related note, I have a short piece in the last print magazine about circumstances under which animals observe human national borders.   

Since we've apparently been mandated by the Department of Homeland Security with providing more Olympics coverage, I thought I'd take note of the fact that, for the first time ever, the medals hanging around Olympians necks in Vancouver will be partially made with recycled materials:  

The more than 1,000 medals to be awarded at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, which kick off today, amount to 2.05 kilograms of gold, 1,950 kilograms of silver (Olympic gold medals are about 92.5 per cent silver, plated with six grams of gold) and 903 kilograms of copper. A little more than 1.5 percent of each gold medal was made with metals harvested from cathode ray tube glass, computer parts, circuit boards and other trashed tech. Each copper medal contains just over one percent e-waste, while the silver medals contain only small traces of recycled electronics. ...

Teck Resources, the Vancouver-based company that extracted the metals used to make the medals, noted in a press release that it used a number of different recovery processes. The company shredded computers, monitors, printers and glass and then separated out steel, aluminum, copper, glass and other usable substances. The leftover shredded components were fed into a furnace operating at a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius in order to remove the metals that could not be recovered simply by shredding the electronic devices.

I'm definitely not an expert in this, but it seems to me that it would take an awful lot of energy to extract (and detoxify?) the material and run a 1,200 degree (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit) furnace -- especially for about 30 kilograms of actual recycled material. 

For the past few months, a cynical observer might think, Washington has carried out a long piece of performance art detailing the many ways in which passing legislation is hard, even with the White House and Congress in one party's hands. There are holds, filibusters, floor motions, cloture, and sundry other rules. The Senate is a small-c conservative institution, delimited from making radical change in a thousand ways.

The biggest obstacle of all is the ticking clock. Every motion takes up floor time. There is only so much floor time. And, when it snows in Washington, there is less. Indeed, the Senate was briefly open for business today. But it won't be tomorrow or, probably, the next day, many thanks to Snowpocalypse 3. Senators need to be present to vote. They won't be, so the whole government apparatus will be shut down.

This got me to thinking: Do really inclement countries let their legislatures vote remotely?

The answer in the United States is no -- though it has been proposed before.  The first country I thought of was Estonia, which has the most tech-savvy government on the planet and, I imagine, rather nasty winters. There, you can cast your national electoral ballot from the comfort of your living room sofa, over the Internet. (There are actually a number of countries and localities that allow this.) But, it seems, members of parliament need to be present to give the up or down on legislation.

I only found one government that allows remote legislative voting -- in, of all places, sunny Catalunya, Spain. In that region, which includes Barcelona, local representatives can request permission to send in their vote from home if they need to tend to a sick family member, for instance. No details on whether they also do it if hit with 22 inches of white stuff.

There's not a whole lot to feel good about in the headlines today, but the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is feeling a bit more optimistic about the world, and has moved its famous Doomsday Clock one minute back to "six minutes to midnight." The clock is a measure of how close the BAS board thinks the world is to catastrophic destruction. Turns out they agree with the Norwegian Nobel Committee that Barack Obama has made the world a slightly (very slightly) less dangerous place:

Created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted only 18 times prior to today, most recently in January 2007 and February 2002 after the events of 9/11.  By moving the hand of the Clock away from midnight — the figurative end of civilization — the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to encouraging signs of progress.  At the same time, the small increment of the change reflects both the threats that remain around the globe and the danger that governments may fail to deliver on pledged actions on reducing nuclear weapons and mitigating climate change.

The BAS statement explains: “This hopeful state of world affairs leads the boards of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — which include 19 Nobel laureates — to move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back from five to six minutes to midnight.  By shifting the hand back from midnight by only one additional minute, we emphasize how much needs to be accomplished, while at the same time recognizing signs of collaboration among the United States, Russia, the European Union, India, China, Brazil, and others on nuclear security and on climate stabilization.”

The statement continues:  “A key to the new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government’s orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama.  With a more pragmatic, problem-solving approach, not only has Obama  initiated new arms reduction talks with Russia, he has started negotiations with Iran to close its nuclear enrichment program, and directed the U.S. government to lead a global effort to secure loose fissile material in four years.  He also presided over the U.N. Security Council last September where he supported a fissile material cutoff treaty and encouraged all countries to live up to their disarmament and nonproliferation obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty…”

See also: John Mueller's "Think Again" from the new issue in which he argues that fears of nuclear weapons are overblown,  and my list of ways the world could end.

With all due respect to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I don't think you really needed an advanced computer model to predict that the Copenhagen conference wasn't going to end with binding emissions goals. But even so, the final deal is a crushing disappointment. Developing countries didn't get the deep emissions cuts or level of aid that they were hoping for. Nor did they commit to the binding agreements or outside verification that developed countries were hoping for. (That includes China, which is absurdly placed in the same category as Kiribati and Tuvalu in the final agreement.) And, perhaps most disappointing, we can't even hope for a real deal in 2010 anymore. 

In following international politics -- or any politics for that matter -- one thing that we hear again and again is that meaningful deals and agreements are not reached at summit meetings or international conferences under the glare of TV cameras, but in private, but low-ranking bureaucrats we've never heard of, who have most of the details worked out by the time heads of state arrive.

Yet today, we were treated to the spectacle of President Barack Obama flying in to Copenhagen to play Deus ex Machina and holding last-minute meetings with Wen Jiabao. The conference was leaking like a sieve from the start, with new draft agreements appearing in newspapers and developing countires staging a walkout. 

Given that the essential conflicts involved weren't exactly unknown, one has to ask, where was the backroom advance work? As he so often does, Brazilian President Lula Inacio da Silva summed up the proceedings well:

"We did we face all these difficulties?" Lula said. "Because we did not take the care in advance to work with the responsibility needed."

Couldn't the U.S. and China (the two countries that really mattered in this discussion) have reached some compromise position -- however watered-down -- before Copenhagen and left it to the conference to hammer out the details? A very public two-week conference under siege from both environmentalist protesters and climate denialists was hardly the best place to start from scratch. 

In the end, no one really looks good. Obama has been thwarted for the second time this week by the intransigence of an erstwhile friend. China will once again be painted as the villain (though it's hardly alone in sharing the blame). The White House is already spinning this as "an important first step," but in terms of the prospects for a cap-and-trade bill, it may a step back since U.S. business interests will now be able to say (with some justification) that they're being asked to make sacrifices while the world's largest emitter makes no binding commitments. The poor planning and seeming lack of advance work for the event don't exactly help the U.N.'s credibility as a forum for working out these deals. And the Earth, of course, keeps getting hotter. 

Here's hoping this is the last time Obama has to fly home empty-handed from Copenhagen. 

JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

Jamal Saghir, the director of the energy, transport, and water programs at the World Bank responds to a Foreign Policy article by Phil Radford, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

Mr. Radford's recent column "Banking on Coal" provides a highly misleading and inaccurate picture of the World Bank Group's efforts to help countries fight poverty and develop energy sustainably.

He asserts that the World Bank Group is funding coal projects to the detriment of renewable energy (RE). Wrong. Our RE and energy efficiency (EE) financing levels are at historic highs -- over 40 percent of total fiscal year 2009 energy financing.

He says the Bank has been increasingly subsidizing coal projects. Wrong. Our fossil fuel share of financing has been declining for years, and two thirds of our fossil fuel financing is for natural gas, the cleanest fuel for base-load supply. Mr. Radford cites 2008 as a big year for coal financing, but neglects to mention that in fiscal year 2009 our coal financing then dropped 62 percent. Mr. Radford says that Bank fossil fuel financing is twice what we finance in RE/EE projects. Wrong again. In fiscal year 2009 we financed more RE/EE projects (over 40 percent) than fossil fuels (about 32 percent).

Over the last six years, coal represented 7.5 percent of all World Bank Group financing for energy. In some years it was as low as one or two percent. And fully a third of the spending on coal is to clean up inefficient, polluting old plants, something that surely Greenpeace would not want us to stop.

Mr. Radford criticizes the Bank's recently released draft energy strategy. We haven't issued a draft strategy. What we are doing is consulting in an open way with key stakeholders, including civil society organizations, whose input will help us to write a draft strategy next year.

Mr. Radford's criticisms lack context. He says that the Bank-financed projects are a significant source of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Wrong. Our projects are a minuscule fraction of the global footprint. The new proposed South African project he criticized will use the cleanest super-critical technology and has $750 million in financing for renewable energy and low carbon energy efficiency components that otherwise would not be part of the project.

We're proud to be a leader in advancing environmental financing innovation, such as the Climate Investment Funds ($6.3 billion pledged with $3.2 billion in investment plans already endorsed to support more than $30.5 billion in clean technology projects), the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, climate risk management products, and "Green Bonds."

The bottom line is that for our 186 member countries, our primary focus is fighting poverty. There are 1.6 billion people living today without access to electricity. Under very limited, case-by-case situations with strict criteria, and when alternative lower-carbon technologies are not immediately available, we will support least cost, carbon-based energy solutions. And we will do this as an interim measure while we continue to help a country prepare for a cleaner energy development path in the medium term.

The Indian plant he references will have lower emissions than the average for OECD countries (2005). Turning away from South African or Indian aspirations for affordable energy means turning away from energy for schools and hospitals and homes in those countries. It's particularly ironic for Mr. Radford in the United States to criticize our very modest portfolio when half of U.S. electricity comes from coal. While the World Bank Group is working to support low carbon paths, Mr. Radford advocates a double standard that will help ensure poor countries will not cooperate in addressing global climate change.

The World Bank Group is committed to fighting poverty and supporting economic growth and opportunity in a sustainable manner. Our increased lending for renewable energy and energy efficiency and our innovative financing demonstrates that we are serious about it.

See the World Bank's climate site here. 

John Moore/Getty Images

Saudi Arabia is very concerned about "Climategate":

As 15,000 delegates from 192 nations began what was billed as the "last, best chance" to avert a catastrophic rise in sea and air temperatures, Saudi Arabia's chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, spoke from the floor to say that e-mails hacked from a UK research centre had shaken trust in the work of scientists....

"In light of recent information ... the scientific scandal has assumed huge proportion," he said. "We think it is definitely going to affect the nature of what can be trusted in the negotiations."

While he didn't exactly have a lot of good options, I wonder if International Panel on Climate Change Chair Rajendra Pachauri didn't make a tactical error by addressing the Climategate critics and defending the work of the IPCC in his opening statement. If the U.N. allows the conference to turn into a debate on whether climate change is even happening, rather than what to do about it, they've probably already lost half the war. 

A new study from the University of Haifa finds that animals on either side of the Israel-Jordanian border exhibit different characteristics and behaviors:

The first study inspected the reptile population and revealed that the number of reptiles is similar on both sides, but the variety of species in the sandy areas of Jordan is significantly higher than the variety found in the sands of Israel. A second study revealed that Israeli gerbils are more cautious than their Jordanian friends, while a third study showed that the funnel-digging ant lion population in Israel is unmistakably larger than in Jordan.

According to the researchers, the differences between Israel and Jordan are primarily in the higher level of agriculture and the higher number of agricultural farms in Israel as opposed to Jordan's agriculture that is primarily based on nomadic shepherding and traditional farming. The agricultural fields on the Israeli side of the border not only create a gulf between habitats and thereby cause an increase in the number of species in the region, but they also hail one of the most problematic of intruders in the world: the red fox. On the Jordanian side, the red fox is far less common, so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.

This follows an amazing Wall Street Journal story from two weeks ago describing how red deer still refuse to cross the German-Czech border, 20 years after an electric fence was taken down. The U.S.-Mexico border fence is also proving disruptive to migration patterns several species. 

Arbitrary political constructions though they may be, national borders are becoming natural ones as well.