Center for a New American Security

I wanted to follow up my post from yesterday with another related post on energy, though with a slightly different angle. We’ve done quite a bit of international travel this summer for work, and one observation that my colleagues and I have when we come home is wow, are we behind the curve when it comes to public transportation.

Living in Washington, chronic delays, service outages, unpredictable timetables and uncomfortable traveling conditions are all part of traveling on the city’s metro rail system (Did anyone else walk home last night when you found out that metro was single-tracking trains between Metro Center and Farragut West during rush hour?). Dangerous road conditions and near misses are unavoidable if you decide to bike to work. The bus system is hit or miss – usually overcrowded, too often no air conditioning in the summer, not to mention getting caught in Washington’s horrific traffic (though, to be fair, bus lanes do help alleviate that issue). By and large, I don’t think we do public transportation as well as our international partners.

• The New York Times Idea of the Day blog points to “Too Little Water” as Pakistan’s future problem.
• Foreign Policy profiles the environmental disasters you may or may not have been following this year.
• France announced plans to have 3,000 MW of offshore wind energy generation by 2015, CleanTechnies blog reported.
• The Obama administration’s offshore drilling ban has been overturned again by a federal judge, according to UPI.
• UPI also reports that geothermal energy is gaining attention.  

With about 20 hours of flying time over the last 10 days, hopping between Washington and Europe for a climate change simulation that we ran in Hamburg last week, I managed to get some reading done. The Economist generally makes for good airplane reading, so I read through the last two issues. In both issues, the science and technology sections of the magazine published interesting stories on “Energy conservation” that are worth reading in full.

In the August 21^st issue, the story “Watts up” identified an important hurdle to a successful energy revolution, leading with this: “People habitually underestimate their energy consumption.” The Economist was reporting the results of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found “that although people do grasp basic energy trends, they are decidedly hazy on the details.” According to the story, in a survey of 505 American volunteers:

Each was asked to estimate the energy consumption of nine household devices (such as stereos and air conditioners) as well as the energy savings incurred by six green activities (like swapping incandescent bulbs for fluorescent ones). The researchers then compared the volunteers’ estimates with the actual energy requirements or savings in question…   

On average, participants underestimated both energy use and energy savings by a factor of 2.8—mostly because they undervalued the requirements of large machines like heaters and clothes dryers. As a result, they failed to recognise the huge energy savings that can come from improving the efficiency of such appliances. Miscalculations like these hinder conservation efforts.

• Exelon, an energy company specializing in nuclear energy plants, is shifting gears and investing in wind power, the New York Times Green Inc. blog reports.
• The EPA and the Department of Transportation have announced new fuel-economy ratings that reflect a vehicle's fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions by giving the vehicle a letter grade. The ratings also display its 5-year fuel savings and annual fuel cost, according to USA Today.
• From NPR: Hawaii is suffering through a two-year drought that has fueled wildfires and destroyed crops.
• The New York Times is also reporting that the independent review panel tasked to review the IPCC, the UN's climate body, recommended to the United Nations that it revise the way it manages its assessments of climate change. However, it concluded that despite recent errors and criticisms of the IPCC's work, it has been "successful over all."
• According to Reuters, wheat planting is at risk in Pakistan after severe flooding damaged 3.6 million hectares of standing maize, rice, cotton and sugar cane.

Dear Readers,

We'll be on hiatus for a couple of days as we return from traveling to Europe for a climate change negotiations simulation that we executed in Hamburg. We will be back on the blog on Wednesday, September 1, 2010. Feel free to post anything here in the comments section that you think Natural Security readers would find useful or interesting. As always, thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Christine and Will

 An ice island calved off of the Petermann Glacier, located in northwest Greenland, on August 5th.  This image, taken by NASA's EO-1 satellite, shows the 275 kilometer island's migration (upper-left quadrant of the image).  The calving was significant because it represented the single largest area loss for Greenland. Professor Jason Box, posting on the Byrd Polar Research Center's blog, points out that "while it is unreasonable to pin an individual cracking event of a glacier on Global Warming, even if enormous, the retreat of Petermann glacier is most certainly part of a pattern of global warming."  The Petermann Glacier has retreated 21 kilometers since 2000, and based on data and images taken since 1962, its retreat has reached a new minimum. The 2009-2010 winter and May 2010 were the warmest on record in Nuuk, Greenland.  Abnormally high air termperatures in Greenland have been linked with observations of reduced sea ice concentration and warming sea surface temperatures this year.

Photo: NASA-EO

Note from Alex: This is officially my last post on the Natural Security blog!  I have learned so much in my time at CNAS. I had a blast writing for the blog and I look forward to engaging with the Natural Security community for years to come.  Working with Christine and Will, as well as the rest of the CNAS staff, has been a truly wonderful experience. As always, thanks for reading!

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time at CNAS working with the Natural Security team, it’s that climate events and natural disasters around the world (along with issues of natural resources, bio-diversity and energy resources) are having an increasingly important impact on US national security issues.  The floods in Pakistan are a prime example of one of these issues that defies the traditional boundaries of security studies, and provides an example of the ways that traditional conceptions of what constitutes a threat to the United States will have to evolve to match the increasingly tangled and complex nature and overwhelming scope of these new issues.

We’ve been following the story of the floods in our news and posts, but it’s worth reviewing the extent of the damage, which seems to expand exponentially day by day.  As floods continue to sweep south, the UN estimates that about 17 million people have been affected by the floods, and about 1.2 million homes have been destroyed.  Authorities are organizing mass evacuations of 200,000 people in the Thatta area of Sindh province, but these evacuations have come too late for many.  The UN also requested 40 more helicopters from the international community on Tuesday, noting that more than 800,000 people were isolated by the flooding and could only be reached with aid by air.  Conditions are now ripe for the spread of water-borne and potentially epidemic disease, such as cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery. The huge numbers are hard to properly digest, but for context, according to CARE, “this disaster has surpassed the number of people affected by the 2005 South Asia tsunami, the 2005 South Asia earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined.”

  Photo: Navy News Service/Tech Sgt. Cohen A. Young USAF

Yesterday The Washington Post reported that US gasoline prices have hit an 8-month low.  The article reports that “the sagging commodity market price for gasoline is good news for American motorists, promising a mild easing in pump prices. It also marks the end of a summer of relative stability for retail gasoline prices, which have fluctuated by about 20 cents per gallon since the beginning of the year and have stayed in an 8-cent range for the past 69 days.”  But the drop in oil prices may ultimately prove to be a bad thing for America’s energy policy, and particularly for the way that DOD shapes its energy strategy.

That’s because the high and volatile price of petroleum serves as a major incentive for DOD to switch to a greater use of alternative fuel sources.  In 2008, according to the US Department of Energy, about 78 percent of DOD’s total fuel use was petroleum. Since DOD is so reliant on petroleum as a fuel source, even small price fluctuations can have major budget effects: for example, in 2008 Defense Secretary Gates said “every time the price of oil goes up by $1 per barrel, it costs us about $130 million, and frankly, my credit card limit is getting narrow on that.”

Hydrocarbon finds in Greenland by Cairn Energy have sparked excitement in Nuuk, reports The Guardian.

The New York Times reports that the floods that have innundated Pakistan have disrupted the main supply lines for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's government is "seriously concerned" about the threat of epidemic diseases spreading in the flood-hit country, especially water-borne diseases like cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery, according to BBC.

The Washington Post reports that a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that petroleum-eating microbes have reduced the Gulf oil plume by half about every three days.

Iran has begun offshore oil production from the Hengam oil field in the Persian Gulf, from UPI.

Foreign Policy reports that India and China's rapidly urbanizing cities will put a strain on water and energy resources. 

Christine and Will are spending this week in Hamburg, Germany, where they will be leading a game simulation based on international climate change negotiations coming up this December in Cancun.  In their absence, welcome to a week of me on the blog!  Since it’s my very last week here at CNAS, I hope to share some of the things that I’ve learned in my time here as well as the typical news and events fare.  Hope you enjoy!

Last weekend, New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin posed an intriguing question on his Dot Earth blog: do the top billion need new goals?  He was referring to a new version of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of 8 comprehensive goals to achieve sustainable development for the poorest people in the world (often referred to as the “bottom billion” after Paul Collier’s book title),  including benchmark targets for income, hunger, maternal and child health, education, gender inequality and environmental degradation.  But goals for the already developed world would look at the opposite end of the spectrum: instead of finding ways to speed up development, these goals would identify factors that could slow growth and reverse prosperity in the rich countries in the future.

Throughout my all-too-short time here working with the Natural Security program, I’ve learned a great deal about energy policy in the United States, alternative fuel resources and the potential effects of climate change, some of it expected and some quite shocking.  But everything I’ve learned points me towards a conclusion that I (along with many others) had already reached- that the United States’ addiction to fossil fuels could very quickly prove an impediment to economic development, and sooner than many people think.

Crop failures during the 2005 food shortage in Niger, as compared to 2004.  This year's crisis is predicted to be worse.

Photo: NASA-Earth Observatory

For the past few weeks, the world news has been filled with stories natural disasters affecting the lives of millions: of floods in Pakistan and China, drought and fires in Russia.  Here's another side to the 'fires and floods' story (and another way that climate change could potentially be affecting the lives of millions of people right now): in Niger, NPR reports that protracted droughts and floods are causing food shortages and a building hunger crisis that will affect nearly 8 million people, or about half of the country's total population.  According to a regional spokesman from the UN's World Food Program, "because of failure of crops, because of erratic and late rainfall and the protracted drought, the whole region has been suffering a food crisis... the main reason why the people are suffering is that because of the [typical August] lean season being this year longer than usual — imagine that being protracted for six months instead of three." The UN agency has been coordinating with other international and local aid organizations, as well as Niger's military, to provide emergency food aid.  Despite the government and relief organizations raised concerns about a potential crisis back in November, a lack of funding has rendered the response inadequate to the scope of the problem.  This lack of funds has forced the WFP to make tough decisions: according to the report, "only children younger than 2 and their families will receive protein-rich nutrition distributions from the agency."

This portending crisis should of course be of concern to the US government for moral reasons.  But just as a slow humanitarian response in flood-ravaged Pakistan could ultimately become a security threat to the United States, weakening the central government and allowing insurgent and terrorist groups greater leeway to act, so could famine in Niger prove to be a greater problem for the United States.  The government, installed this February after a military coup, has already failed to protect aid workers from attacks by an Al Qaeda affiliate.  Floods, drought and other natural disasters this August have not only become humanitarian disasters in many cases, they have also caused a marked decrease in government control and security-as, for example, Pakistani citizens have accused their government of being unable or unwilling to act to avert the crisis following massive floods there.  This should make climate change negotiations in Cancun this December-primarily focused around funding for climate mitigation and adaptation measures-all the more urgent.

As of Wednesday, devastating floods in Pakistan had directly affected 15.4 million people, damaging or destroying nearly a million homes and 3.2 million hectares of crops.  The satellite image above shows flooding near Kashmor, Pakistan on August 12, right before the second wave of flooding hit.  Flooding traveled down the Indus River from northwestern Pakistan to this area of southern Pakistan: the flood-swollen river is muddy and brown and has covered much of the city of Khewali and surrounding farmland.  Flooding is already causing a vast humanitarian disaster, and although the United States and others have committed aid and emergency assistance, the UN warns that this will not be enough. The floods could prove a major destabilizing factor in the country and the region.  

Photo: Courtesy of Robert Simmon, NASA.

The National Academies Press recently released an overview and summary of “America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation,” a study by the National Research Council published last year jointly by National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.  Although the report looks at U.S. national energy consumption generally, it makes some interesting recommendations in light of some of the thinking that we’ve been doing on DOD’s fuel use. Look out for our report to be released this fall.

The report’s key findings included three points that are particularly interesting with regard to DOD’s fuel use.  On the first, energy efficiency potential, the report says:

The deployment of existing energy efficiency technologies is the nearest-term and lowest-cost option for moderating the U.S. consumption of energy, especially over the next decade. In fact, the full deployment of cost-effective energy efficiency technologies in buildings alone could eliminate the need to construct any new electricity-generating plants in the United States except to address regional supply imbalances, replace obsolete power generation assets, or substitute more environmentally benign sources of electricity.  Accelerated deployment of these technologies in the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors could reduce energy use in 2020 by about 15 percent (15–17 quads), relative to current projections, and by about 30 percent (32–35 quads) in 2030.

Stars and Stripes reports that the U.S. military opposes the use of force in the South China Sea and will maintain its presence in the region for years to come.

The United States and others ramp up aid efforts, sending supplies to victims of floods in Pakistan even as the UN reports that efforts may fall short, from AP.

The New York Times reports that mining magnates in India are accused of illegal mining and political corruption.

The Times also reports on research for new sources of clean alternative energy.

From Haaretz: new gas discoveries have not calmed fears that fossil fuel energy sources are running out in Israel.

This post was originally published yesterday by the Climate Compass blog at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change where Dr. Jay Gulledge is Senior Scientist and Director of the Science and Impacts Program at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Last fall I posted a blog about the unusual number and severity of extreme weather events that have been striking around the globe for the past several years. That entry focused on the alternating severe drought and heavy flooding in Atlanta in 2007-2009 as an example of the roller coaster ride that climate change is likely to be. As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming; I’ll return to this question later.

Tempestuous 2010

The weather of 2010 continues the chaos of recent years. In the past six months, the American Red Cross says it “has responded to nearly 30 larger disasters in 21 [U.S.] states and territories. Floods, tornadoes and severe weather have destroyed homes and uprooted lives …” Severe flooding struck New England in March, Nashville in May, and Arkansas and Oklahoma in June.

Nearly the entire northern hemisphere is experiencing a massive heat wave this summer. Back in February, heavy snowfall in D.C. prompted some politicians to decry global warming, but those voices are now silent in the searing heat that has gripped much of the world this summer. The first half of 2010 has been the warmest January-July period in the global temperature record, stretching back to 1880. I would be the first to question the significance of this single-year observation, but it fits perfectly into a multiple-decade pattern in which each year between 2000 and 2009 was warmer than the average temperature of the 1990s, and every year in the 1990s was warmer than the average temperature for the 1980s.

News this morning that a suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi Army recruiting center, killing 48 and wounding 129, comes weeks before the U.S. military prepares to drawdown troops from Iraq. By August 31, 2010, the U.S. military will shift from combat missions to training and security assistance, leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in the country – down from a high of 160,000 in 2007 during the military surge that helped improve stability in the Iraqi state. But as U.S. troops prepare to drawdown, I wonder what our long-term commitment will look like in Iraq.

With the U.S. military drawing down, our long-term commitment will undoubtedly rely heavily on our civilian assets. Tens of thousands of private contractors, a large civilian corps and embassy staff will play an increasing important role, perhaps helping the Iraqi government build capacity where it hasn’t otherwise been able to.  

In a guest post I wrote back in June for Tom Ricks’s Best Defense blog, I discussed some of the acute challenges that have been marginalized in the post-war years that could undermine long-term stability, principally around natural resources, such as water and agricultural productivity. I’ll be honest, I don’t have a lot of confidence that in the near term the Iraqi government will be able to adequately address these enduring challenges, like that one in four Iraqis don’t have access to fresh water; the Iraqi government has been in limbo since March when national elections failed to form a national government. Needless to say, the government still has much to do to strengthen its legitimacy – and the attack this morning suggests that near-term security challenges – direct threats to the state – could be where the Iraqi government’s attention is focused as it begins to completely take over responsibility for state security.

From BBC: Russia's ban on grain exports until the end of the year has taken effect after fires decimated the grain harvest; bread prices in places like the Middle East are expected to rise as a result.

The Guardian reports that Russia has launched an inquiry into the world's oldest seed bank in Pavlovsk after a court ruled in favor of converting the research station into private housing last week.  The Russian agricultural minister had argued that the research station is crucial for food security in the face of climate change.

Two articles this weekend especially caught my attention.  The first, an article in The New York Times, starts to draw the climate connections between the extreme weather events that have been happening all over the world throughout the summer with frightening intensity and regularity.  The article asks the question that many have probably been asking themselves: are these bizarre events mere coincidence or related to a broader pattern of global change?  According to the Times: "the collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably."  Extreme high temperatures are particularly indicative of a changing climate, when taken as part of a larger pattern.  Climate change models predict that warming will result in an overall pattern of more record high temperatures and fewer record lows, which is apparently exactly what is playing out.  Even higher amounts of snowfall fit into the predicted patterns (a fact that certain DC residents might be surprised to hear).

I know you've probably heard enough from me on climate change, but hear me out on this one.  Last week, I wrote that sometimes the best way to sway a climate skeptic is to let them see tangible changes from warming, like a melting Arctic, with their own eyes.  A friend who kindly reads my blog posts asked me whether that matters for most people in the world, saying "we can't very well ship everyone up to the Arctic." Fair point, but maybe we don't need to.  A quote from the article explains the general global patterns that we can expect to emerge from climate change: "theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves."  Sound familiar?  Yes, it's pretty frightening that we may be seeing the tangible impacts of climate change sooner than expected, and in our own backyard too.  But ever the optimist, this also offers me a little bit of hope for those pessimists and deniers out there, because the sooner that more people reach a consensus that climate change is real, immediate and will change our world for the worst, the sooner we'll be able to take concrete steps to potentially avert this crisis.

Pakistani civilians prepare to board a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter during an evacuation mission in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan on August 5, 2010. The U.S. military is conducting humanitarian and disaster relief missions to assist Pakistanis in flood-stricken regions; floods have claimed more than 1,500 lives. Concerns have been raised that the Pakistani government's inadequate response efforts could fuel unrest and boost the appeal of militant groups, which could threaten U.S. security interests in the region.  

“Just based on our troops in the region, our goals in the region, our work with allies like India in the region — anything that destabilizes Pakistan or affects its government's ability to keep control of the country has enormous stakes for the United States on the security side,” CNAS fellow Christine Parthemore said on NPR's All Things Considered earlier this week.

Photo: Courtesy of Staff Sgt. Horace Murray and the U.S. Army.