Environment
Author Bruce Sterling offered his “State of the World 2010” on The Well this week. A few excerpts follow.
As a result of “an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism,” he says,
we’ve ended up with our current “It’s a Wonderful Life” Pottersville, where Rupert Murdoch plays our Mr Potter. …. Societies that are top-heavy in this way are just not gonna have major prosperity. Too much of the civil population has been fenced off from the trough. The wealth-generating capacity of the society has been short-circuited. There’s zero political will to socialize the entire planet and re-channel its currency flows, so that’s not gonna happen. Basically, the political class is waiting for the civil population to come back to the church of the free market and get over the fact that its cardinals walk in public with no clothes on.
So you’re just not gonna see a lively, vibrant scene in Pottersville. You can have a Japanese Pottersville, where everybody’s getting older and they’re building huge concrete bridges to nowhere. Or a Managed Democracy Putin-Pottersville, where everybody agrees not to say anything much about the many Potemkin aspects. You could even get some Rio de Janeiro Pottersville full of armed, dropout-ethnic shantytowns where everybody’s high on medical marijuana. But not prosperity.
Continue reading ‘Bruce Sterling’s State of the World’
The environment was prominent on the program of The Economist’s World in 2010 conference this week. Some particularly interesting points:
Joe Lockhart, Founding Partner and Managing Director, The Glover Park Group:
- The rest of world is going ahead on climate change. If the United States steps away from leading on climate change again, it will continue our slide away from global leadership in general.
Gary Lawrence, Urban Strategies Leader, Arup:
- People at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are telling him that “we’re using your debt” to create a green system “that will run the world.”
- Fifty-two percent of the US economy is located in coastal zones that would be affected by a one-meter rise in sea level.
Gawain Kripke, Director of Policy and Research, Oxfam America:
- Climate change is the single greatest threat to global poverty reduction.
Vijay Vaitheeswaram, Healthcare Editor, The Economist:
- New nuclear power will not be viable in Western, liberalized energy markets; only places like China where the cost of investment does not matter will be able to use it.
Twitter: @Geofutures
(Image courtesy Rob Brewer, Flickr)
This week Brendan Borrell suggested in the New York Times that it was time to reconsider the status of Antarctica.
Antarctica is now effectively an international, stateless, demilitarized zone, on the basis of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Many countries have land claims, but they effectively put them aside when they sign the treaty, as most powers have.
Borrell advocates dropping the treaty and letting nations claim pieces of Antarctica, as he thinks that national interests would drive stronger environmental protection. This could lead to significant downsides, however:
- Opening up national claims could expand environmental abuses, both in the fisheries that concern Borrell and on land. Do we really want Chinese and Russian companies to have free rein in parts of the continent?
- Abandoning the treaty would mean stepping away from a system that has been remarkably successful in fostering cooperation and non-militarization, even at the height of the Cold War. Borrell himself notes the British and Argentines exchanged gunfire in Antarctica before the treaty.
- Letting the treaty lapse would open up Antarctica to competition just as climate change may make exploitation of polar resources more plausible, setting the state for more conflict.
Perhaps instead the treaty could be strengthened, especially those aspects dealing with marine conservation?
(Image courtesy Eli Duke, Flickr)
The Washington Post reports another ominous factor for the stability of Nigeria.
David Hecht writes that Nigeria “cannot feed its 140 million people, and relatively minor reductions in rainfall could set off a regional food catastrophe, experts say.” Increased rainfall variability — which is a likely outcome of climate change — could cause this.
“The reality is that if the rains are bad throughout the region or the price of inputs became unaffordable, there could be massive food shortages, and neither the government nor any other institution stands ready to help,” a Nigerian agricultural official told Hecht.
Thirty-eight percent of young Nigerian children already suffer from malnutrition, and 65% of the population is food-insecure.
Nigerian instability would be disastrous for Africa, potentially dragging down much of West and Central Africa with it. Hecht writes of the direct effect of Nigerian food shortages driving food beyond affordability in poorer neighboring countries, but instability could add massive refugee flows, economic disruption, and spillover violence.
On the positive side, Nigeria could feed itself: the article notes that more than half of the country’s arable land is not being used, and only 7% of the land that could be used for irrigated farming is under the plow. If this were changed, Nigeria could be self-sufficient in both rice and wheat.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
The website Treehugger suggests eight places — low-lying islands, more specifically — that will “soon” be uninhabitable due to climate change.
They are:
- the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean
- Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Carteret Islands (off PNG), and Majuro Atoll (Marshall Islands) in the Pacific
- Lamu and Pate, Kenyan coastal islands
- Bhola, in southern Bangladesh
- Key West, off southern Florida
“Soon” is a relative term here–many of these places would still be inhabitable for decades, under current sea-level rise forecasts.
The Pacific islands involve relatively small numbers of people; they could actually be moved, though this would involve irreparable cultural destruction.
Bangladesh illustrates another level of impact: millions of people live on these low-lying islands, and tens of millions in vulnerable coastal areas. Significant sea-level rise could dislocate so many people that the stability of countries like Bangladesh, and their neighbors, could be undermined.
(Thanks to Stu Gagnon for the tip.)
Image: Maldives from space, courtesy NASA
Writing in Foreign Policy, Jamais Cascio writes that the geoengineering capabilities that might help the world fight climate change could also be turned into weapons.
The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts.
Weaponized geoengineering, Cascio writes, might tempt nations by being both stealthy and fairly inexpensive.
The Washington Post today covered travel destinations threatened by climate change. They include:
- Glacier Bay, Alaska
- the reefs of Belize
- Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
- Scott’s hut, Antarctica
- the low-lying Maldives islands
- the Great Barrier Reef, Australia
- Arctic polar bears
- the glaciers of Glacier National Park, Montana
- the Outer Banks barrier islands, North Carolina
- Chan Chan archaeological site, Peru
The Washington Post yesterday reported on another example of sub-national governmental action on climate change (seen also at the state/province level).
Some 522 mayors representing 65 million Americans have signed a climate change agreement in the face of federal foot-dragging on the issue.
One driver: a third of Americans in an April poll now say that climate change is the world’s most serious environmental problem, double the number from 2006, the Post reports.
City-level action is particularly striking given that climate change is a global issue, beyond the reach of even national governments to manage on their own.
In a further sign that the United States may shift its stance on climate change, a Washington Post poll reveals widespread concern about the phenomenon:
- 70% of Americans want the federal government to do more about global warming, with 49% saying “much more”
- 33% say that global warming is the world’s “single biggest environmental problem,” up from 16% a year ago
- 59% trust the Democrats more than President Bush on the issue
Addressing this post about immigration and the environment, Brishen Hoff comments:
Canada’s environmental integrity is inversely correlated with its population growth. Canada is grossly overpopulated based on what we believe to be a healthy balance between human numbers and biodiversity. Canada’s natural environment is being damaged at an unprecedented rate. Since immigration is main agent of Canada’s population growth, we advocate a complete moratorium on immigration to Canada. We also support an end to: child birthing incentives, natural resource exportation and economic growth.
Curtailing immigration and reducing Canada’s already-low birthrate further will intensify Canada’s future demography-driven problems. However, some of these problems — reduced economic growth, more constrained consumption — Hoff would seemingly view instead as solutions. This is a values-driven question that cannot be resolved rationally, as it depends on the arbitrary weight given to humans or the rest of nature.
Such policies are also at odds with Canadian opinion: most Canadians favor immigration.
An alternative approach might acknowledge that richer countries are better able to protect the environment than poorer ones. Canada is projected to be a great deal wealthier in a few decades: if that were the case, it could dedicate much more money to preserving and restoring the environment while maintaining standards of living.