During Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to India last week, Indian environmental minister Jairam Ramesh expressed India’s views on climate change policy: “There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, face to actually reduce emissions.” Other less-developed countries (LDCs) have similar, though perhaps less aggressive, attitudes. The problem is, developing countries now make up a significant portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (China emits the most carbon dioxide of any country, and India is fourth). While it’s true that LDCs still emit greenhouse gases at much lower per capita rates than developed nations, a successful policy to combat climate change will require their cooperation.

The arguments about whose responsibility it is to curb climate change are well-worn by this point, but they still threaten to thwart meaningful international collaboration. Developed nations point out that the LDCs will soon account for a large majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. LDCs shoot back that industrialized nations created the climate change problem and that it’s only fair that LDCs also get a chance to modernize their economies without environmental restrictions. Both sides have valid points. But the developing world’s unwillingness to address the problem will have devastating consequences that will harm LDCs far worse than the developed world.

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The nation can’t seem to get enough of Sarah Palin.  Many social conservatives adore her just as many liberals seem to be giddy over her repeated missteps.  Whether one loves her or hates her, there’s no question that she draws much attention whenever she speaks.  So, like many others, I was quite interested to read her recent op-ed in the Washington Post criticizing the proposed cap and trade plan to deal with energy and global warming.

Perhaps as one of the defacto figureheads of the Republican party, this would provide an opportunity for her to present some new ideas on these vexing problems.  The reality is that there’s no free lunch when it comes to energy and the environment.  All solutions have costs and will involve some pain.  Unfortunately, rather than addressing these tradeoffs constructively, Palin chose instead to just ignore the problem.  This is not to say that she was all wrong.  She raised some important points.  It’s just that her proposed solutions are the exact opposite of what needs to be done.

Probably the most concerning aspect of Palin’s piece is its glaring omission of any serious thinking about how to deal with the environmental impact of our energy usage.  The cap and trade program addresses two interrelated issues:  energy and environment.  While Palin seems eager to speak about utilizing domestic sources of energy, she says virtually nothing about how to deal with emissions.  I was struck by Palin’s dismissal of the cap and trade program.  She wrote, “It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.”

Yes, there will likely be some short term financial costs to this effort.  However, I’m not sure how ignoring global warming can be considered good long term planning.  It seems to me that dramatically altering our environment such that coastal regions are flooded and the nation’s agricultural output is significantly altered could be considered “permanent damage.” (more…)

The likely probability, as I noted in my last post, of Sen. Obama becoming president is now reality.

And though I normally shy away from using words like “historic” because it is such a cliché I think this may be a time when it can validly be used. If, for no other reason than, as a recent Defense Science Board report noted, “It has been more than two generations since the presidency transitioned with American troops engaged in significant combat operations—a deployment begun in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.”

So now Americans get to indulge in one of their favorite perennial activities; telling him what he should do. Deal with the financial meltdown, close Guantanamo Bay prison, make Africa a greater priority, declare a moratorium on new “free-trade” deals, reaffirm U.S. commitment to international laws, treaties, the United Nations, and multilateral responses to violations of international peace, work for a comprehensive nonproliferation policy, institute a cap and trade policy for carbon emissions, et cetera.

Looking at all the things people want him to work on you would think we elected Superman as president instead of a mere mortal.

Yet let’s not be naive. Even though he has yet to assume office his victory is already starting to create change. For example, as the Washington Post reported , Iraqi officials, who see President-elect Obama’s views on the timing of a U.S. withdrawal as consonant with their own, appear to be leveraging his election to pressure the Bush administration to make last-minute concessions.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that the U.S. notified Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki it has accepted many of the changes proposed last week by the Iraqi cabinet in a draft security agreement between the two countries.

Doubtlessly U.S. military officials will advise President-elect Obama to adjust his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010. Remember that while promising a 16-month timetable for getting all U.S. fighting forces out, Obama repeatedly insisted on what he calls a “responsible” withdrawal.

And, in truth, if the United States wants to take back the majority of its equipment from all the bases, major and minor it has in Iraq, it will take more than 16 months.

Like all administrations, Obama needs to take stock of the world. Eight years of Bush foreign and national security policies, plus ongoing globalization, emergence of new powers makes the world a very different place. (more…)

I would like to thank Mr. Eckel for the very cordial debate as well as the PSA for offering me this opportunity. Mr. Eckel was a challenging opponent, and I salute him for his effort. Rather than providing a lengthy discussion rewriting what has already been said, I will make an attempt to find some common ground between our two arguments while outlining where we differ.

It appears that Mr. Eckel agrees with affording America some military superiority around the world. However, how the military is used, and the economic limits of its superiority is where we differ. While I support working with our allies to preserve security around the world, we differ with how much faith should be placed in foreign governments. While Mr. Eckel and I both support free market capitalism as the best path to prosperity for poor nations, Mr. Eckel still concerns himself with tired leftist dogmas of overpopulation, global warming, and resource depletion. Of course in order to solve these mythical problems, the solution is always more and more government control.

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Although Mr. Eckel makes an attempt to clarify his position, his rebuttal leaves more questions unanswered. He first argues that he is not advocating for, nor defending, klepto-socialism or centralized planning. Conversely, he asserts that he is advocating for “the development of global institutions that take into account not just traditional measures of economic health like per-capita GDP, public debt, balance of trade etc, but also the manner in which that health can be sustained.” But, to demonstrate the importance of taking into account nontraditional measures of economic health, he cites China as an example of economic growth leading to environmental damage. China is a peculiar choice to represent this thesis.

China, although it has uplifted millions of people out of poverty as a result of free market and capitalist reforms, has created environmental damage not because of the positive changes it has made, but because of the communist authoritarianism it has not yet abandoned. While China is beginning to create a system of De Jure private property rights, its government nevertheless plans much of the infrastructure displacing millions of people from their homes without adequate compensation. Almost all of the environmental devastation, like the former USSR, results from this centralized planning.

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It was just over twenty years ago, on June 23 1988, that Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a U.S. Senate committee that the year’s record temperatures were not the result of natural variation. As a result global warming irrevocably became part of official political discourse.

Last year Hansen said that a global tipping point will be reached by 2016 if the human population is unable to reduce greenhouse gases. He said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for future sea level rise do not take into account ice sheet disintegration, which could cause several meters of sea level rise during the next century.

It is important to remember that even before his 1988 testimony Hansen was sounding the alarm. In 1981 he and a team of scientists at Goddard had reached the conclusion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming sooner than previously predicted. While other climatologists had already predicted that a trend would be apparent by 2020, Hansen predicted, in a paper published in Science, that the change was already occurring and that there would be record high temperatures as early as 1990. He also predicted that it would be difficult to convince politicians and the public to react.

The history of Hansen is instructive for what it says about the American government’s ability to deal with a real global threat. After decades of even acknowledging there could be a problem it then switched to minimizing the dangers. When even that became impossible it switched to suppressing information about it.

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According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an article in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, China’s reluctant and belated concession to allow a skeleton UN-AU peacekeeping force in Sudan represents a newly “cooperative approach on a range of problems.” But the reality is that some newfound sense of Chinese responsibility on the world stage had nothing to do with Beijing’s decision to “cooperate.” The concession on Darfur (if you want to call it that) was entirely about the Beijing Olympics. Given that it took a threatened boycott by Western leaders for China to stop arms sales to Sudan and drop its veto of the peacekeeping resolution, I am dubious that we’ll see any further “responsible” behavior after the Olympic Games have come and gone. At this point, the Games are going ahead—with or without protesting Western leaders—and the leverage a coordinated boycott might have provided will be a mere memory.

But I’m not writing this to bemoan a missed opportunity or cast aspersions on Rice’s diplomatic optimism. I’m writing this to call some attention to the next opportunity down the road: Sochi 2014.

China and Russia are both rising powers, economically, militarily and diplomatically. Secretary Rice referred to both as carrying “special responsibility and weight as fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council.” Translation: they both have lots of nuclear weapons, so our military power doesn’t really scare them. China is also not the only rising power we’d love to see adopt a more cooperative stance as it claims (or reclaims) “full membership in the international community.”

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One of the classic rules of propaganda is that if you say something enough times, regardless of whether or not it is true some people will come to believe it.  With that in mind let us look at the newest conventional wisdom that has been increasingly circulating the past few years; especially in the aftermath of the recent climate change conference in Bali; namely, that the need to curb carbon emissions in order to prevent global warming means the world must rely more on nuclear power.

Yes, nice, clean, safe, nuclear power, as an advertisement from the Nuclear Energy Institute or the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, or even the International Atomic Energy Agency might put it. And no, I’m not picking on them. Like a character out of a Cecil B. Demille movie they are is just three of uncounted thousands –hmmm, in an internet age we better make that millions– parroting this new orthodoxy.

But before we think that advances in technology have made nuclear power so safe that even Homer Simpson can run a nuclear power plant perhaps we should pause to consider the world of reality, and not the one where Montgomery Burn’s Springfield nuclear power plant supplies our energy needs.

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It strikes me that the fate of the world might at least merit a second post on the same topic so let’s think a bit more about why we should be panicking, or at least far more concerned than we are at present, regarding the environmental state of the world in general, and climate change in particular.

Two weeks ago, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented its latest synthesis report, which contained its sternest warning yet about the need to immediately tackle climate change. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” said IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri.

Consider some excerpts from the report

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level

Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the global surface temperature (since 1850).

Rising sea level is consistent with warming (Figure SPM.1). Global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an  average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3]mm/yr and since 1993 at 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8]mm/yr, with contributions from thermal  expansion, melting glaciers and ice caps, and the polar ice sheets

There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.

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After reading the new report on global climate change just released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security one might be inclined to ask, am I afraid? But afraid is such an insufficient word. A better question is, am I panicked? And if your answer is no, then you need to ask why not?

While warnings, projections, and predictions about the planet’s environmental future are hardly novel, most writings limit themselves to the actual physical consequences resulting from global warming. And by now we should have heard them often enough to be able to cite them in our sleep, i.e., mass migrations, flooding of costal cities, fighting over resources, adverse impact on agriculture, desertification, collapse of ocean fisheries, et cetera.

Still, as someone who regularly reads the latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  I have to say that this new report, The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change does a great job of making you shudder.

Now normally, I’m not one for fearmongering. In fact, much of what is wrong with our foreign policy today is based on exaggerating threats, i.e., Iran may develop nuclear weapons so we must bomb them now or Al-Qaeda wants to attack America so we must fight a global war on terrorism.

But the issue of climate change is different. Bush and Cheney might still disagree, albeit privately, but we’re now at the point where we no longer have an excuse. Climate change is happening now. We can’t say it might be a problem for a future generation, such as our children or our grandchildren. The fact is that it is already a problem for us. It will be a bigger problem for our children; and an even bigger problem for our grandchildren.  And this is under the best case scenario. We are already living in the “age of consequences.” And so far our reaction to it is laughably inadequate. (more…)