Raising Water Levels on London and China’s Drought/Grain Problem

As we close 2006 and look to 2007, two global warming major reports – one from Finland and other from China – presents the increasingly dire environmental situation we are facing globally.

And whether or not one believes climate change is chiefly man-made or not, we are both under prepared for the coming climate change and making only small progress in curtailing the pollution contributing to global warming.

The two separate reports suggests that:

• London will be partially submerged: “A sea level rise of a metre or more would be “very bad news” for major coastal cities, greatly increasing the risk of devastating storm surges. Particularly at risk are cities on or close to North Atlantic shores, such as London, according to his study in the journal Science.” (Telegraph, 12/18/2006)
• China will face drought and challenges feeding its growing population: “The official [government, SU's note] assessment concludes that hotter weather and increased evaporation will outweigh greater rain and snowfall. In the country’s south, heavier rainfalls could trigger more landslides and mudslides, it also warns. Luo indicated that by 2030-2050, China’s potential grain output could fall by 10 percent, unless crop varieties and practices adapt to the increasingly turbulent climate.” (Reuters, 12/27/2006)

What will the US Preparedness Plan and Response Be? Will it be Regional or Global?

Some examples of government response to pollution and climate change:

• China has been increasingly placing focus on environmental issues, as both as a way to undercut protests regarding deteriorating environment in parts of China and ensure the overall sustainability and stability of China.
• The UK has the Thames Estuary 2100 Project, which seeks to help protect London from a raising Thames through 2100.

With the considerable number of US cities on coastal areas – San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Miami etc – when should we expect a co-ordinate state and federal level of long term 20,50,100 years ahead study on risks of the US coastlines?

What studies and plans does the US have to protect the agricultural lands? Investments in agricultural technology? 10, 20, 50 outline of possible changes in fertileness of the land and how it will effect the US internally to feed itself and externally where it sells its food globally and as a diplomatic tool (giving grain as aid, etc).
Will the US take lead regional, globally in preparing and planning? Or at least focusing on specific areas where disruption of usual weather patterns can spark massive drought and with it conflict and war?

This is far too ambitious thinking for the Bush Administration, as it faces issues in Iraq and of a sitting-duck Presidency, but what will the next administration due?

These topics are less sexy than terrorism and oil prices; and addressing its challenges will be far more difficult too. Changing climates and changing demographics will cause major shifts on a very wide horizontal level- it will effect every aspect of the state from domestic issues like pensions to the state’s relative global power.

Because these changes will cause ripples on a wide horizontal space of issues, these challenges can reset the global configuration of power more so than terrorism can; this fact must not be forgotten.

Cold Spell in Europe and Economic Troubles
As being widely reported, much of Europe has fallen under a severe cold spell sending much of Europe well below freezing point. In the wake of the Russian-Ukrainian natural gas issue, there is the question of how vulnerable is Europe’s energy needs if such cold spells become increasingly common. The OilDrum has the scoop on how Gazprom has been unable to meet its commitments due to high energy demand brought on by the unusually bitter cold.

And if these cold spells will become more permanent, what is the economic loss brought on by the increasing cold? People are more likely to stay indoors away from the cold, infrastructure and agriculture would be hit hard by the cold and so on. Energy crisis brought-on by general energy scarcity and shift in the climate can cause more damage than that of terrorism.

There is no way for sure (yet) to know if this recent cold spell will be a more common feature of Europe and if its related to a wider climate change. But, the current events in Europe demostrate the challenges that will increasingly be faced by states as the climate changes.

Europe’s Demography Problem and Global Power
The issue of demographics is nothing new, but this week’s media reports illustrate that its becoming part of the normal daily discussion, along with all other national concerns. Indeed, this week’s issue of BusinessWeek has an article titled “How Europe Can Age Gracefully“, which outlines policy changes needed in the short-term to lessen the economic shock of a graying Europe.

And here are other articles from this week:

Telegraph UK: The Celtic canary in the UK’s coal mine

This was a story by Peter MacMahon, the paper’s “Scottish Government Editor”, and it begins thus: “Scotland’s demographic time bomb will explode in three years, when the number of pensioners north of the Border overtakes the number of children in school, the Executive has been warned.”

Seems straightforward enough: the country’s demographic death spiral is accelerating faster than expected. And, as far as the Scotsman is concerned, the alarming thing about this development is that it could put cushy state teaching jobs “in doubt”.

For crying out loud, man, get a grip. It puts every job “in doubt”. It puts the continued existence of your country “in doubt”. And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals. See you, Jimmeh? Not for much longer.

AP: “German leaders wake up to shrinking population”

“Each generation is being reduced by about a third,” said Norbert Walter, chief economist at Deutsche Bank. “The consequences are foreseeable,” he added, referring to the financial havoc a shrinking population is causing in areas ranging from the increasingly underfunded state pension system to weak consumer spending and sagging property values.

These articles discuss the issue at a limited domestic level, but what about the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications? If most of Europe’s population continues its decline, its population decline will be matched by economic decline and decline of world power. Things in Europe can still change but otherwise the whole European Project may die and with it will be the notion that Europe as one of the key centers of global power.

Who will replace them? Will it be India, Brazil and others? Even China has demographic issues to contend.

The Oil Drum has an excellent post covering the recently released findings over the major drop (30%) in the temperature of the the Gulf Stream, the warm currents that from the N. America flow east to warm Europe. (Note that this report was curiously timed against current discussion in Montreal on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.)

Immediate Implication

What are the obviously implications if the Gulf Stream deteriorates further?

1) Emphasizes the growing need for a stable energy supply to warm a chilling Europe, while the oil peak grows ever nearer and UK is already facing a potential energy crisis this winter.

2) As best said by Oil Drum’s Stuart Staniford:

That’s the warm water that didn’t go to Europe, and is now coming back into the tropics. Where’s it going again?

Smack into the region where North Atlantic hurricanes form, that’s where it’s going.

So if this result holds up and these trends continue, I think we can expect to see plenty more of this in the future: [Staniford shows a picture of wrecked oil rig in the Gulf Coast]

Broader Implications

The changes in the Gulf Steam is a microcosm for the broader implication of climate change:

1. There will be more extreme weather – very cold and very dry/hot. Both will lead to the increase use of heaters on one side and the use of air conditioners on the other. All energy hogs.

2. Extreme weather (like hurricanes) will make it more difficult and *expensive* to extract hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas etc) and difficult to transport.

Closing Remarks
In the distant land of Sudan (distant for the West, that is), a prolonged and extreme drought is partly to blame for the genocide, as conflict for water and land between herders and peasants gave with to a more ethnic conflict between Arabs (mostly herders) and Furs (mostly peasants).

While the role of climate change is little mentioned in the ongoing Darfur Genocide, with the climate change now bearing its weight to Europe we should expect to here more on this. While I doubt Europe will descend so easily to genocide, Sudan represents the extreme changes in human behavior to government policy that are possible and caused partly by climate changes.

China has made two recent announcements this week:
1. Earmarking 180 billion USD for Renewable Energy
2. Push Towards Building Sustainable Cities (first by 2010)

1. The 180 Billion USD Push for Renewable Energy

From China Daily “Renewable energy gets huge outlay“:

Up to 1.5 trillion yuan (US$184 billion) will be invested by 2020 to achieve China’s plan to boost renewable energy consumption to 15 per cent of the country’s energy mix by the benchmark year.

“We are committed to our promises,” said Zhang Guobao, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission. “Our renewable energy law will take effect beginning next year, and we aim to increase our renewable consumption in the energy mix from the current 7 per cent to 15 per cent by 2020.”

WSJ’s “Beijing vows to increase use of clean energy” points to the practical reason for energy diversification – security and environmental issues (which is also security related):

China has increased its emphasis on the use of alternative power sources out of concern for both the environmental costs of the country’s heavy use of fossil fuels and the security risks of its growing reliance on imported oil. But oil and inexpensive, but dirty, coal still account for most of the energy consumption in China, the world’s second-largest producer of greenhouse gases after the U.S.

Yet even on the issue of the environmental issues, environmental pollution has become an issue of domestic stability. Pollution from factories and power plants have prompted mass protests against the government. The Chinese Government has responded and is well aware of the danger of pollutions issues potentially igniting massive unrest. See my post “China – Environmentalism as a National Security Issue”

There is obviously a good amount of spin in the story, but regardless China’s announcement demonstrates that China is looking to confront energy security issues with greater resolve than the US has done with its latest energy bill.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 has been rightfully criticized for heavily subsidizes businesses in developing existing energy types (oil and nuclear) and makes exceptions on environmental regulation for various energy-related construction. China seems to be really pushing the development of new and more efficient, clean and renewable energy resources in a bid to avoid dependence on oil (and the global oil prices that dictate oil-based energy cost).

The Energy Bill does state, however, that 10% of energy from utility companies must be from renewable sources by 2020; China appears to be 15% by 2020, but China doesn’t give much detail on what that exactly means.

In addition, the Senate just passed a bill allowing the drilling of Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). While I think the US Government should always reserve the right to exploit readily available energy resources when needed, government attention would be better served to pushing for hybrid vehicles or at least more gas-efficient vehicles.

2. Push Towards Sustainable Cities
A British consulting firm, Arup, has won a contract to build sustainable cities in China – with the goals of sustainable energy and water use and zero emissions for its transportation system. See the article here at the Guardian’s “British to help China build ‘eco-cities’” for more information:

British engineers will this week sign a multi-billion contract with the Chinese authorities to design and build a string of ‘eco-cities’ – self-sustaining urban centres the size of a large western capital – in the booming country.

Arup, the London-based consulting firm that has already signed up for one such project near Shanghai, will announce it has clinched a deal to extend the concept into a string of cities around China.
…
The Dongtan development, on an island in the mouth of the Yangtze river near Shanghai, aims to build a city three-quarters the size of Manhattan by 2040. The first phase will accommodate some 50,000 people. It is on target to be open by the time of the Shanghai Expo trade fair in 2010
…
The eco-cities are intended to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems.

Some hints of the technologies involved are mentioned at Arup’s Press Release, “Arup unveils plans for world’s first sustainable city in Dongtan, China“:

The first phase of Dongtan is planned to be completed by 2010 when the Expo will be held in Shanghai. This phase will include a wide range of developments with urban parks, ecological parks and world class leisure facilities. Priority projects include the process of capturing and purifying water in the landscape to support life in the city. Community waste management recycling will generate clean energy from organic waste, reducing landfills that damage the environment. Combined heat and power systems will provide the technology to source clean and reliable energy. Dongtan will be a model ecological city, and its buildings will help to reduce energy use, making efficient use of energy sources and generating energy from renewable sources.

Again, surely a good amount of spin is involved, but I am not hearing anything remotely similar to this in the United States with such a high level of government involvement. Would the US Government at least try to make suburban sprawl areas more self-sufficient and sustainable?

Conclusion
I have no time to go to any deep analysis at the moment, but sufficient to say that the United States would be foolish in not taking concrete steps in addressing its energy security issues and taking a look at what China is doing.

Energy security can potentially be a more existential threat than terrorism, but its not being fully addressed by the US. In this regards, China is strengthening itself as compared to the US – at least in its stated goals.

More thoroughly analysis later…

Last week’s Economist points to China’s attempt to address the issue of pollution by including the enviorment as one paremeter in assessing some of its civil servents and party leaders. Check out the article here: The Greening of China

AN ELABORATE points system that determines the careers of officials is often blamed for many of China’s problems. In their drive to meet targets for economic growth, local mandarins squander money, ride roughshod over citizens and ravish the environment. So now China is trying to devise and embed into its assessment of officials a way of calculating a “green GDP”—which allows for environmental costs in national accounts—to help mitigate some of these excesses.

President Hu Jintao first endorsed the idea in March 2004, in a speech about the need to foster a “scientific concept of development”, a slogan intended to suggest that in pursuing growth China should pay more heed to such issues as the environment and the depletion of natural resources. Last February, the government said that ten regions, including Beijing, were carrying out a pilot project in green GDP assessment.

While this is marked progress, China is attempting the impossible in trying to quanitfy the unquantifable: what is the financial cost incurred with the lost of some perculiar speices of tree frog, how you assess the financial cost of a lost forrest, etc. Such calculations would most likely end up being mired in bureaucratic squabbling.

Indeed, the Economist article itself ends in a rather sobering note:

China’s top leaders themselves may be getting cold feet. A draft of the national economic-development plan for the next five years, published this week, stresses the need for an “a resources-saving and environment-friendly society”. But it makes no mention of a green GDP.

But as one partial to the realist camp, I believe this sort of simplitic portrayal needs to be rejected. State power can be defined not only by the number of tanks and guns a country has nor oil, but the number of colleges, schools, hospital, energy conservation and, yes, the state of the enviorment. Case in point, check out Slate’s “As Green as a Neocon Why Iraq hawks are driving Priuses“.

There many reasons to support enviormentalist causes: 1) Less pollution => healthier people => healthier and more productive workforce + potential source of manpower 2) If we perform energy conservation instead of drilling Alaska’s ANWAR means less dependence on foreign oil and puttings some oil reserve (ANWAR) “in the bank”, for when we really need the oil. 3) Investing in alternative energy sources now, allows us to help withstand the coming oil shock that will also effect our enemies. And so on…

Then, there are the more practical concern like simply antagonizing the people of the state. See this Washington Post report back in June 2005:

[Up] to 20,000 peasants from the half-dozen villages that make up Huaxi township had responded to the alarm, participants recounted, and they were in no mood to bow to authority. For four years, they had been complaining that industrial pollution was poisoning the land, stunting the crops and fouling the water in their fertile valley surrounded by forested hills 120 miles south of Hangzhou. And now their protest — blocking the entrance to an industrial park — was being put down by force.
…
The confrontation was also a glimpse of a gathering force that could help shape the future of China: the power of spontaneous mass protest. Peasants and workers left behind by China’s economic boom increasingly have resorted to the kind of unrest that ignited in Huaxi. Their explosions of anger have become a potential source of instability and a threat to the party’s monopoly on power that has leaders in Beijing worried. By some accounts, there have been thousands of such protests a year, often met with force

In this week’s Jamestown Foundation China Brief, Nathan Nankivell covers a piece on the linkages of China’s pollution issue with local unrest and geopolitics:

[Economic Effect]

[Cost] of environmental destruction could, for example, begin to reverse the blistering rate of economic growth in China that is the foundation of CCP legitimacy. Estimates maintain that 7 percent annual growth is required to preserve social stability. Yet the costs of pollution are already taxing the economy between 8 and 12 percent of GDP per year [1]. As environmental problems mount, this percentage will increase, in turn reducing annual growth.

[Geopoltical Effects]

In addition to the concerns already mentioned, pollution, if linked to a specific issue like water shortage, could have important geopolitical ramifications. China’s northern plains, home to hundreds of millions, face acute water shortages. Growing demand, a decade of drought, inefficient delivery methods, and increasing water pollution have reduced per capita water holdings to critical levels. Although Beijing hopes to relieve some of the pressures via the North-South Water Diversion project, it requires tens of billions of dollars and its completion is, at best, still several years away and, at worst, impossible. Yet just to the north lies one of the most under-populated areas in Asia, the Russian Far East.

In an extreme situation, such as national water shortages, social unrest could generate widespread, coordinated action and political mobilization that would serve as a midwife to anti-CCP political challenges, create divisions within the Party over how to deal with the environment, or lead to a massive show of force… Though most violence would be directed toward dissident Chinese, a ripple effect would be felt in neighboring states through immigration, impediments to trade, and an increased military presence along the Chinese border. All of these situations would alter security assumptions in the region.

The United States faces its own issues with resources, enviormentalism and especially energy. While globalism and being a global player make it all but impossible for major states in pursue autarky (full indepedence, as in no dependence on other states, in economic issues), the more a state depends on resources for its growth the more vulnerable it is to shocks in the market – such as an oil shock. The continual and growing issue of water in the westerns states of the U.S. are also a source of contention, constraning the growth of cities and with it the growth of the economy.

Enviormentalism needs to broaden its focus beyond “saving the Earth” merely for its own sake or some concept of “saving for the future generation”, but rather direct and visible impact on the state in the long term – in the health of the people (workforce), economic security, energy security et cetera.

PS: On a darker note to be fair as I mentioned taking a realist position, a country could intentionally poison a weaker state through dumping waste in/directly on a weaker state or provoke a state in to conflict.