Paris, France
16 September 2009
Lots of history books report on how Great Britain became a world power in the 17 and 18 hundreds based in its use of coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution. The use of coal and the trading of coal enabled Great Britain to conquer large parts of the globe and to foster commerce by dominance on the oceans.
In the process of industrialization based on the increased use of fossil fuels large amounts of carbon dioxide, a major heat -trapping gas, were released into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels became the energy source of choice to countries seeking to develop their industries. Today the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere has accumulated to more that fifty percent higher than its level at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. This has caused a heating up of the Planet’s atmosphere, thus far, by 0.74 deg C.
Given the decades-long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, it is now expected that the global average temperature would rise to a level between 2 and 3 deg C by the end of this century. This warming is expected to have major worldwide devastating impacts on human activities and on the ecosystems and environmental processes on which societies depend for their well being.
A picture of likely winners and loser under the conditions of a warmer Planet is beginning to emerge, though the picture is still quite fuzzy. We are told by climate modelers and researchers in other disciplines that there will (not might) be more intense and more frequent droughts and floods, forest fires, vector-borne disease outbreaks and epidemics, coastal inundation, and more frequent and more intense tropical storms. Right now China and the United States are the two major emitters of carbon dioxide but there are many other lesser culprits as well. These countries have also designed scenarios that have variously identified regions and economic sectors that are likely either to benefit or to suffer from climate change.
International as well as domestic negotiations are underway on how to reduce emissions, when to reduce them, who is to reduce them, and when? Lines are being drawn in the sand based on levels of development and on degrees of vulnerability. For example, African countries negotiating as a bloc with industrialized countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to cope with the impact of a changing climate caused historically in large measure during the development processes of the industrialized countries.
Governments are scurrying around looking for ways to reduce the costs of emitting CO2 which are sure to become limited as well as taxed in one form or another. In addition to reduce the use of fossil fuels, thereby reducing emissions, others are seeking alternative forms of energy. Still others are looking into ways to get credit for ‘sucking’ CO2 from the atmosphere, through carbon sequestration methods such as planting trees that take carbon from the air and store it for decades or centuries. Another popular concept for sequestration is to devise ways to get the oceans to take up carbon and become sequestered in the deep ocean for several hundreds of years. Yet another way is to sequester industrial CO2 emissions in abandoned mines and in geological formation deep underground. Now back to Great Britain, where this story started.
Most recently, the Financial Times (UK) reported that British researchers had or a century or so. Here’s how it was described (September 9, 2009, p.4).
Britain could earn billions of pounds a year and sustain tens of thousands of jobs by selling space deep under the North Sea for storing carbon dioxide captured from power station emissions … Carbon capture and storage could be an industry the size of North Sea oil.
They propose to bury CO2 of its own as well as that from many other European countries in saline aquifers geologic formations deep under the North Sea portion that falls within its coastal zone jurisdiction. There is an irony to this proposal: A country that made its fortune and became industrialized at the expense of sullying the Planet’s atmospheric chemistry now proposes to enhance its fortune by offering to clean up the atmosphere it “polluted”. Great Britain has identified a way to capitalize on cleaning up an environmental crisis it helped to cause.
Let’s say that what these researchers propose — making tens of billions of dollars from sequestration of carbon — is a good thing for both Britain and the Planet. The question arises (from a developing country point of view) should Great Britain “have its cake and be able to eat it too?” My answer is “yes, but …”
Let them make money — of dollars, pounds, euros, whatever — but let them also give a substantial share of its profits to the victims of global warming, a share of the “downstream profits”. In that way everyone benefits, not just the perpetrators of the harm but the victims as well. This notion should be applied to all the major GHG-emitting countries that choose to make money off of the global warming problem that they contributed to.
Category: All Fragilecologies
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Ashes to ashes: how to benefit from a problem (CO2 emissions) that you (Great Britain) helped to cause (global warming)!
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Norman Borlaug Inspired ME!
Dr. Norman Borlaug just passed away at the age of 95. he is called “the father of the Green Reolution”. He is claimed to have savede the lives of a billion people from the fate of starvation as a result of his ideas about enhancing ffood production globally. He was a humble guy as I recall and should serve as an inspiration to many around the globe. He stayed committed and active till the end trying to save lives through better agricultural seeds and techniques.
I had the chance to meet Dr. Borlaug in the mid-1970s when i was working on a Swedish project for IFIAS under the wing of the founder of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts.
Working on a project on the “value of long-range forecasts”, I had chose to study the spring wheat region of Saskatchewan Province in Canada. Knowing little to nothing about wheat, I brazenly wrote a letter (there was no email then!) to Dr. Borlaug, director of CYMMYT (centro Internacional por mejoramente de maize y trigo). I say brazen, because I wrote a letter to a director even though i was just a postdoc. CYMMYT was the center for developing new high yield varieties of wheat and corn and at the time was setting up demonstration farms to show skeptical Mexican farmers that they could improve production and personal well-being by resorting to new varieties and methods of farming.
Within a short period of time I received a reply and was invited by Borlaug to visit CYMMYT in Mexico… and did so.
He was a gracious person and host, showing me various experimental plots and took the time to educate a neophyte on agriculture. Since that time much of my research has been on or around food security issues, at first in Africa and then worldwide. At first on land and then in the sea.
I, like many others, owed a lot to Borlaug, not just for his knowledge and wisdom, but for his caring. He deserved the Nobel Prize twice over!
When most people eat their evening meals around the world, they will likely have no idea how Norman Borlaug helped to put food on their tables at affordable prices. Such is the price of real fame I guess.
MICKEY GLANTZ
(written in a hotel on rue de Vaugirard in Paris, France). -
President Bush: How about stepping up to the plate for America?
It seems that President Obama is under attack from the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and by the right wing media jockeys and a few wing nuts like Glen Beck. Debate and controversy have been an integral part of the political process since the beginning of days of the colonies on North America. What has happened in my lifetime is that the parties are so different now that the losers of the last election have become rabid foes of everything that Obama stands for. I have a feeling that a lot of the animosity toward Obama is that he is Black, has lived abroad, and has a Muslim middle name. Full stop. What the Republicans fail to realize is that if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination from the Democrats and won against McCain, much of the animosity toward Obama would have been directed at her. The white male Christian dominance of the presidency has ended. Where are the ex-Presidents in all of this? Why has George W. Bush been so silent? It would be presidential for ex-President Bush to call on the American public to return to civility in their debates over policy and politics. This could go a long way toward rehabilitating his image if he were to take the high road and call on extremists to ratchet down the hostile, nasty rhetoric. By doing so, he would not be providing support to one side or another, but he’d be calling for open and fair debate where both sides listen to each other, learn from each other and at the end of the day come together to support the ideals of our forefathers. The extremists are inflaming the public with half-truths and even downright lies. Remember the slogan “united we stand. Divided we fail”. It seems extremists are willing to destroy the country in order to save it!
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Climate Change confronts Human Nature: Adapting to an “adaptation mentality”
Mickey Glantz
August 5, 2009While governments negotiate and bicker over how much greenhouse gases each one can emit, the climate warms. This warming of the global climate is now expected to surpass the relatively safe level of a 2ºC increase. This change has been projected to have major negative impacts on weather-related phenomena and on societies throughout the 21st century, and those impacts are supposed to increase in number and intensities and frequencies as the decades pass.
Discussions about adaptation measures related to climate change seem to be the rage of the day among policy makers, climate researchers, and social scientists, especially since 2007 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to IPCC researchers working on the issue of climate change (aka global warming). Now, we hear about adaptation to cope with the causes and the impacts, guesstimates about potential ecological and societal impacts, methods to assess them, and options available.
Adaptation has several definitions, some of which conflict with one another. For example, adaptation has been used to refer both to proactive preparations and to reactive responses to climate related hazards. To most others, however, adaptation is only the recognition of the need of societies to consider climate change in future planning.
Regardless of definition, time is running out for the global community; and very few signs indicate that either the political or the social will exists to respond in a timely and effective way to change the trends that point toward increased warming of the earth’s atmosphere.
source: www.workroom.thinkprogress.org/tag/global-boiling It seems the only option available is to clean up after the impacts occur, discussions about geo-engineering the climate system notwithstanding. Therefore, adaptation to climate change can also be interpreted as recognition, even acceptance, of the belief that societies everywhere are pretty helpless in the face of a yet-to-be controlled changing climate. Societies—after millennia of struggling for the upper hand on climate—are apparently surrendering to the vagaries of the climate system.
But Americans do not see themselves as quitters. They often side with the underdog in a conflict, and they are known for their (blind) faith in technology, believing that the country’s engineering capabilities and ever-evolving modern marvels can overcome most, if not all, problems. I must admit that I shared this view of our engineering know-how; in fact, my first university degree was a BS in Metallurgical Engineering. History shows that engineers have time and time again risen to an occasion to overcome a wide range of constraints imposed on societies both by the vagaries of nature as well as by poor decision-making.
But now I believe we may have met our match, having not only created more environmental problems – air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, etc. – but also what could prove in the end to be “The mother of all environmental problems”, that is, an environmental change that can spawn innumerable environmental and social changes across the planet: Global Warming.
Global warming is already spawning a wide range of environmental changes and hazards. In the past, we tried to outwit nature and for the most part were pretty successful (at least for a while). But the overwhelming power and constancy of change in nature always seems to eventually prevail over our attempts to control it. Today, ironically, the nature that is causing many of the problems we face is human nature. In the spirit of the 1970s Pogo cartoon, “We have met the enemy. It is us.”
Why then do I seem to be giving up on any effective attempt in the short to midterm to arrest, let alone roll back, greenhouse gas emissions? Robert Cushman Murphy once said, man “seems to be the sole insatiable predator, because, unlike lower animals, he takes his prey from motives other than personal survival.” The same may be true for our dependence on the burning of fossil fuels. Even though there are signs across the globe as to the serious impacts that will accompany a climate change of 2-4ºC, societies continue to deal with those impacts at a rate much slower than the actual changes, such as with the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which is accelerating at rates surprising even to the scientists who have been monitoring it for decades.
At this point, researchers can only speculate about what we are doing to future climate. Is, for example, a runaway greenhouse effect a possibility, and if so, what happens to civilization and human habitability on the planet? The planet does not care which country does what reductions; it will go on fine without us and with a significantly warmer climate. The flora and fauna that evolve with the changing climate will take over. The planet cares not either way.
I can picture the greeting card personification of Mother Nature laughing at human attempts to geo-manage the planet through such hubris as “man dominating Nature” or “rugged individualism” [I can do what I want to the environment]. In the end, we are only harming ourselves, since we are only making the planet less hospitable for our success as a species. In other words, we must accept the reality that “we need Nature but Nature does not need us.” We need to foster a “mentality of adaptation” to a changing climate or we might just be the ones who are changed. As I see it, humanity could very likely at a fork in the road: one direction can take you to a sustainable future based on humans living in harmony with a variable and changing society and the other direction taking us to a very different future . . . to extinction. Let’s hope our policymakers around the globe can make the right choice!
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who will feed China? Africa? the United States?
Revisiting the question “Who will feed China?”
(followed by “Who will feed Africa?” and by “Who will feed the US”)Michael H. Glantz
Boulder, ColoradoJune 11, 2009
Fifteen years ago Lester Brown wrote an interesting book with an intriguing title: “Who will feed China?” Brown’s concern — highly criticized as might be expected by Chinese government officials at the time — was that China’s population size coupled with increasing industrialization and affluence along with its population growth rates, when compared to the amount of land available for food production, would eventually (in the not-so-distant future) make China a major food deficit country. Making a bad situation worse were the various and numerous pollution hotspots throughout the country: air, water and land pollution. River waters have been over-exploited and heavily polluted. In many locations the air pollution from manufacturing enterprises was so thick that it blocked out the sunlight. Some lakes, ponds and streams were covered with trash. And so on. The soils have been worked for centuries, agricultural land was being converted to other uses and production levels were likely to peak. Fast forward — to 2010.
If one were to ask the same question today, “who will feed China?”, the answer would be quite different. China’s economy has been booming for the past 15 years or so. The government has amassed more than a trillion dollars of US currency as a result of a chronic trade imbalance in its favor and against America. That puts it in a position to purchase food, whenever it needs to. It can buy energy resources, new technologies (such as for in-country water transfer schemes), fertilizers and whatever else it is that might be needed to increase crop yields and overall food production. But, even that might not be enough to feed China. There is a phenomenon that has been quietly taking place under the proverbial radar screen, that is, out of the purview of policy makers in most countries.The phenomenon is referred to as the “land grab”: that is, 99-year leases on hundreds of thousands of hectares (2.2 acres equal one hectare) of land in various countries including several in sub-Saharan Africa. China is acquiring the right to grow food (or biofuels, if it so chooses) in some African countries by leasing land on the “hungry continent”. The contents of the leases are not clear to the public even though the African countries do receive benefits from China in the way of new schools or hospitals and new roads, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure. Nevertheless, land used by the Chinese means that land would not be available to Africa’s local farmers or herders.
As far as the land grab is concerned, China is not alone. South Korea has been a major lessor of land in Africa and elsewhere. Its most recent “land-lease” was a controversial one in Madagascar. It had leased 1.3 million hectares for 99 years. As a result of protests within the country, however, the president of Madagascar was deposed and the lease agreement was cancelled. Other countries involved in “land grabs” includes Saudi Arabia, Germany, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, among others.
Who will feed China? Well, at this point, it looks like sub-Saharan Africa will help to do so! That however, raises another concern; who then will feed sub-Saharan Africa?
A year after Brown’s book was published, political scientist Robert Paarlberg wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 1996 (likely in response to the book by Brown) entitled “Who will feed Africa?” He felt that Africa was the problem of the future with regard to food security. Today, several articles raise the same concern about African food security.
ENERGY: Africa Will Have to Feed EU’s Artificial Biofuels Demand
Will Africa feed rich nations?
Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls: Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis
Could GM crops help feed Africa?
How Will We Feed Africa?
Organic Farming “Could Feed Africa” Says New UN Study
WFP to Feed Up to 50 Million People in Africa [2006]
[Prince] Charles’s fantasy farming [organic] won’t feed Africa’s poor
Headlines like these continue to appear in the print and electronic media. There is no apparent “silver bullet”, that is, one solution that can resolve all causes contributing to Africa’s chronic food shortages and food insecurity. What we see going on in Africa today is a trend that has continued for decades; a lowering on the continent of its gross agricultural production. Odds are this trend is likely to continue for some time in the future with food deficits being countered by humanitarian food shipments.
There is an expression in English that “turnabout is fair play” If you do something to me, it is fair for me to do the same to you”. It’s a mild version of “an eye for an eye”. Very recently, the China Daily (April 1, 2009) printed an article entitled “Who will ‘feed’ the US?” It seems to me to be an example of “turnabout”. The article began in the following way:
The United States, the world’s most developed country, is scrambling to answer the question “Who will ‘feed’ the US?” years after it had asked the most populous developing country a similar question: “Who will feed China?”
Is it sensational to ask the richest country the same question that China faced more than 10 years ago? The reply is “No.” This time, it is not about “grain supply”, but “capital supply” and “supply of order.”… Who will be able to provide the financial support for the enormous fiscal deficit of the US government?We live in globalized world. For thousands of years, however big the “world” seemed to be to local communities, its life’s blood was based on trade or aid. Countries are now interconnected functionally in a wide variety of ways. Most countries rely on most other countries for something they need or want: capital, oil, food, labor, and so forth. China needs America among others to buy its products. The US imports goods and services its citizens require or desire. The US relies on laborers from Mexico and Central America. Similar needs are found in Europe and Japan.
In retrospect, it was likely that China would need food supplies from outside of its borders, as it industrialized and as affluence increased. Lester Brown pointed that out clearly in his 1995 book, noting a similar process for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, each of which had limited agricultural land as they were industrializing. They each import a large percentage of their grain needs normal for an industrializing country with limited agricultural potential for expansion.
What is clear from the examples above is that no country can remain a proverbial island in the 21st century. Countries are finding that they must interact with and need each other in a variety of not-so-obvious as well as obvious ways, politically, economically and culturally. In other words they each need to be fed in some way — with food, water, energy, imports or exports, or humanitarian assistance. In coming years political leaders will have to adapt to a new world order and a new world culture, one that requires considerable reflection before action, compassion before self interest, and improvisation before retreat.
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“No Disaster Recommendations without Ramifications”:
MICKEY GLANTZ
SUNDAY, 24 MAY 2009
Every assessment of a disaster, where natural or human-caused, has begins and ends with a list of recommendations or lessons learned. I have done that in my reports as well for almost four decades. The recommendations or lessons are about “how to get it right the next time there is a similar disaster?” That is always the hope. That is always the dream.
Many of those recommendations or lessons learned are right on target in terms of requirements needed to reduce the adverse impacts of the hazards of concern. They are the result of serious scrutiny of hazards, their impacts and societal responses to them. They are the findings through serious discussion, brainstorming and plain common sense of what went right, what went wrong, and what wasn’t considered. For Katrina, for example, America’s most costly and most embarrassing so called natural disaster, one can find thousands of lessons learned from various levels of government from local to global, industries and businesses. That is the good news. However, it is, all too often, the good news in theory only. I say in theory because of a gut feeling have: that most recommendations are not acted upon. Phrased a different way, the disaster lessons we have been calling ‘lessons learned” are really not learned but only identified. When they are addressed they can legitimately be called lessons learned. Otherwise, they should be called “lessons identified”.
The problem in all this is that when recommendations and lessons have been identified, many observers in all walks of life tend to think that the recommendations and lessons are being enacted in order to avoid similar hazard-related disasters in the future. Given the reality of an issue-attention cycle of the American public that lasts but a couple of years (as identified by Anthony Downs in the early 1970s), for example, the public turns to focus on other pressing issues, no longer focusing on the previous disaster and its recommendations. How then can we get decision makers to take recommendations or lessons more seriously? How can we get them to realize that not following up on the lessons can have considerable costs?
It is essential to break the vicious cycle of disaster—lessons & recommendations— disaster — same lessons, etc. Many of the same lessons appear decade after decade. Our children and our children’s children will end up reading the same sets of disaster-related recommendations and lessons that our predecessors and we have been identifying. We can end the vicious cycle in the name of progress. It is a simple next step to take.
My recommendation:
Recommendations (and lessons learned) should no longer be presented without comment on what the consequences might be if the recommendations (and lessons) are not addressed. This way, decision makers can explicitly be made aware that there is also a likely cost for inaction when the next natural hazard turns into a national disaster. Succinctly stated, “NO RECOMMENDATIONS SHOULD BE OFFERED WITHOUT ALSO NOTING THEIR RAMIFICATIONS.”
The ramification (if the recommendation is not acted upon):
Business as usual (BAU) with regard to identifying lessons and making recommendations in post-disaster assessments will mean that policy makers in the future will continue to receive lists of lessons that had already been identified over previous decades and, as a result, their societies will continue to remain at risk to the impacts of hazards for which risks could have been reduced, had recommendations been pursued and identified lessons applied.
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“End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!
Mickey Glantz in Tokyo
22 May 2009
“End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!
When I was in graduate school back in the second half of the 1960s, the heart of the Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR, I took several classes on conflict. The conflicts that captured my attention were hot conflicts, wars particularly, and especially revolutionary wars. Such wars at that time were being carried out by political, cultural or ideological groups wanting to gain independence from the control of a larger hegemon whom they felt did not care for the well being of the people they claimed to represent.
At that time certain books were fairly prominent, but at least to a graduate student the writings of his or her professor took on an added value (such as higher grades for citing their works in an essay exam in addition to the value of the usable information within the books). One title that I recall that had a lasting influence on me apparently was a book by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe entitled “Protracted Conflict”. I recently perused the book in order to see if more than the title was still relevant to an enhanced understanding of today’s post Cold War conflicts. Many of the writings before 2000 seem to be lost among young researchers today as they were written “in the last century” and there is a feeling (I suffer from it too) that if the publication was not done after the turn of the millennium than there must be better, more current and more relevant stuff written today. Of course this is a dumb assumption, given that by now we are likely to be reading the latest book’s summaries of summaries of original works. In other words, as a result of this process we are highly likely to be losing information, as each summarizer is like a filter that sifts out what he or she feels is relevant for access by future readers.
The truth is that I did not re-read “Protracted Conflict” closely but I felt it did not really have a lot of direct relevance to an improved understanding of today’s conflicts, like the ones in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, I went to the Internet to search for a definition of a concept I heard somewhere in those Dark Ages of graduate school. The concept — an end run war — has been popping into my mind of late, and I am not sure why. So today, in a Tokyo Starbuck’s I could not find commentary on end run wars. So, now I have to wing it (lest I be forced, oh no!!! to go to a gasp, real library and do old-fashioned search).
As I recall the concept of an end run war, it was a war started by a weaker power who perceived that the stronger power was involved in some sort of quagmire — political, financial, military — and that it would be a good time to attack in order to gain some long sought after gain. That is what I recall as being an end run war. While perhaps successful at the outset, over time the weaker power tends to show up as just that, weaker, and the early gains on the battlefield are reversed as the major power regains its focus and rallies to pushback, if not overrun, the weaker power that attacked it.
Fast forward now to the present: Looking back at the origins of the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein from power, one could argue that the US-Iraq war was an end run war precipitated by a strong power in the belief that the weaker power would collapse. All signs looked that way as US troops (or the troops of the so-called “coalition of the willing”) made their way so quickly to Baghdad with little military opposition. It appeared and was presented to the public that Hussein’s army had collapsed in short order. Of course, that led to the premature disastrous and embarrassing ‘photo-opportunity’ by President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” staged event on a US carrier. And then the real war began. The infusion of foreign fighters joining Al-Queda, local dissidents, abandoned army and police members, rivaling ethnic groups caused a military backlash against the allies that converted what seemed like a quick-victory end run war and into a 6-year nightmare for the US President, his administration, the Republican Party (and fellow-traveling Democrats) and the American and Iraqi people.
Now we have a new president, He has inherited the falling out of the worst outcomes of what was to have been a successful end run war. While the war effort in Iraq winds down and the US government tries to put a happy face on it as it prepares to leave in the next couple years, that smiley face will begin to frown as the US troops are not sent home to American soil but into harm’s way in Afghanistan to fight the growing number of Taliban who in the last few months have spilled into neighboring parts of Pakistan. The region is in turmoil with Iran emerging as a regional superpower, Iraq unstable and a war in Afghanistan that is increasingly intractable.
It seems that end run wars regardless of whether weak attack strong or strong attacks weak, victory is not so assured for the perpetrators. Wars as we now are reminded are often easier to start than to finish. The escalating engagement in Afghanistan will be no different.
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Welcome to the Fragilecologies Blog!
Welcome! Fragilecologies will be posting all new articles in blog form right here! The articles from past years will be converted to this format, as well, over time. Please feel welcome to make your comments below!Thank you,
-Dr. Michael Glantz