Center for a New American Security

1. Lithium: Not Just A Nirvana Song
2. 5 Questions with Someone Interesting: Gregory Johnsen
3. Beware of Climate Change Denialism: You’re the Target
4. 5 Questions with Someone Interesting: David Axe
5. Reading Old Magazines: Rare Earth Elements and Security 

David Mamet's 1977 play The Water Engine could have taken many forms. Mamet could have taken his basic premise—guy invents engine that runs on water—and easily turned it into a contemporary thriller, a futuristic sci-fi story, or a legal drama. But he chose to set the story in 1934 Chicago, during the Century of Progress Exhibition, because the Exhibition's theme—scientific innovation—dovetails perfectly with Mamet's own theme: where technology is concerned, businesses will always emphasize profit over utility. The Exhibition's unofficial motto—“science finds, industry applies, man conforms”— becomes an ironic counterpoint to this story of avarice and betrayal.

The story is simple. Charles Lang, a young factory worker, invents an engine that runs on distilled water. With the water, and a simple battery to spark the ignition, Lang's engine can put out eight horsepower—enough to power a modern lawnmower or tricked-out La-Z-Boy. Lang tries to get a patent, but the first lawyer he approaches betrays him and brings in industrial agents to intimidate and blackmail Lang for his secrets. Even before meeting the lawyer, Lang worries for his safety— for someone who’s never seen a Michael Clayton-style paranoid corporate thriller, he seems oddly cognizant of the danger he’s in—but he’s still powerless to stop the threat campaign against him.

Is it just me, or since Copenhagen are we seeing more and more reports on non-success stories (for lack of a better term) on clean energy and climate change? The past year provided countless stories of quick fixes, perfect policy concepts, start-ups and new clean-tech gadgets, with far fewer on overcoming policy hurdles, implementation or sustained innovation.

• China will establish a rare earth reserve system in 2010, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced in the People’s Daily Online.
• The New York Times reports that the Nabucco pipeline should be viewed as a bridge between Turkey and Europe.
• Developing countries have begun to criticize the climate change accord that came out of Copenhagen, the Financial Times reports.  Meanwhile, some developed countries point fingers at China for the near collapse of talks, an accusation they flatly deny, The New York Times reports. India has reported that it is happy with the outcome of the talks and that its national interest has been "safeguarded," according to BBC.
• Green Inc. reports that Anchorage may face a shortage of natural gas as residents prepare for rolling blackouts.
• Meanwhile, Trade Arabia reports that the United Arab Emirates will build a food stockpile to help ensure food security in the region.

• According to Yemen’s news agency SABA, the UN is working to increase food security in Yemen, a country urgently in need of increased stability. Additionally, Reuters reports that the UN is calling on Middle Eastern states with oil wealth to help increase the food security of their less-fortunate neighbors.
• In a Newsweek interview, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton describes “reaching down” to the lower levels of the State Department to ask a critical question: “'What are we doing on food security?' There were riots last year. You look at changing climate patterns, migration patterns. Food is going to become more and more of an issue.” Meanwhile, Forbes notes that China is taking steps to secure its own food supplies.
• Stars and Stripes reports on what could become a crucial component of the NATO effort in Afghanistan: the ability to feed the starving portions of the Afghan population.
• In the end-of-the-year spirit, DOD Energy Blog offers its take on the Top Ten DOD Energy Events of 2009.
• Perhaps one bit of positive news coming out of Copenhagen: countries worked out a draft agreement to implement a working group reducing agriculture-based greenhouse gas emissions, according to Green Inc.

An American civil affairs soldier surveys a canal that feeds into a recently installed solar powered water filtration system outside Zadan, Iraq. The filtration systems were recently installed by Iraqi contractors and can sanitize 15 liters of contaminated water per minute, providing safe drinking water to hundreds of nearby Iraqi families. According to officials with Multi-National Force-Iraq, "The filters collect and concentrate ultraviolet rays from the sun, killing harmful bacteria and providing safe drinking water for the local populace." The filtration system installed outside Zadan can currently supply 240 Iraqi families with 30 liters of clean water per day.

Photo: Courtesy of Multi-National Division - Baghdad. 

Several years ago I was coaching a high school debate team in Boston and my students were asked to debate increasing alternative energy incentives in the United States. As one would expect, the debate became one about the effects of climate change. Some students used the tactic of arguing that climate change was a positive phenomenon. They mainly cited an author who wrote that CO2 emissions increase plant growth – in fact this became such a popular point that I heard it argued about five times a tournament, and never well. After digging around a bit more, what I found was that most of the students making this argument were basing their conclusions on one-sided evidence: literature that examined only one aspect of climatic effects on agriculture that negated the net result of increased global emissions (such as melting ice caps and rising sea level that destroy coastal vegetation).

With that in mind, for this week’s Reading Old Magazines I decided to look at a 1994 Nature study by Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research at NASA’s Goddard Institute, and Martin L. Parry, currently at the Grantham Institute, but previously a co-chair of Working Group II at the IPCC, called “Potential Impact of Climate Change on World Food Supply.” (pdf) Parry and Rosenzweig used the latest climate change models to determine the impacts of increasing CO2 emissions on agriculture, although they only looked at the atmospheric effects and not water acidification. They then applied the results to a trade model that examined how shifts in growing patterns would affect worldwide food distribution models.

If you put your ear up to the Oval Office and listen very carefully, you can hear the gentle sound of ocean waves lapping. That’s because the presidentially-mandated Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force (hereafter “the task force”) has just released its full report to supplement the interim report (pdf) already released in September. We have covered issues relating to the task force periodically on this blog, but I wanted to create a one-stop reference on the task force for you, dear readers.

President Obama authorized the task force on June 12 (pdf). It is an interagency effort, guided by the Council on Environmental Quality and consisting of representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and other agencies. The task force was charged with “developing a recommendation for a national policy that ensures protection, maintenance, and restoration of oceans, our coasts and the Great Lakes. It will also recommend a framework for improved stewardship, and effective coastal and marine spatial planning.” (Note: though I hail from the greatest city in the country, I’m not going to focus on the Great Lakes here). To this end, task force members traveled the country and held a series of public meetings (pdf all) to gather information on ocean issues. These matters may appear to be solely the purview of environmental policy makers, but the world’s oceans raise major security issues for U.S. national security policy makers as well.

Yesterday morning I took the Red Line up to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to attend a presentation by the head of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Dr. Richard Newell. The event, “EIA’s Updated Energy Forecasts to 2035,” projected America’s energy profile for the next 25 years. This presentation was a preview of the EIA’s full projection, which should be unveiled in the next few months.

Dr. Newell first laid out the assumptions made by EIA researchers, which are mainly too complex to render here. However, one important example is that the EIA assumes that current laws and regulations will stay the same and that there will be no significant breakthroughs in energy technologies (alternative energy vehicles, or otherwise). With these assumptions in mind, here are some of the highlights from the projection:

• By 2035, crude oil will be trading at about $224/barrel (nominal 2035 dollars; this is projected to be about $135 in 2008 dollars).
• The ratio of oil to natural gas prices will be high, and oil will be about three times as expensive as gas.
• Non-fossil fuel energy use will rise, but in 2035, 78% of U.S. energy use will still rely on fossil fuels.
• Coal use will rise by 12%, mostly for electricity generation. Natural gas use will rise by 7%, and nuclear power use will rise by 11%.
• Energy efficiency will cause energy use to drop, but structural shifts will be even more significant (e.g., a continued shift in the United States away from a manufacturing-based economy and towards a service-based economy).
• Ethanol will be a significant biofuel, and its use in the United States will triple by 2035. However, liquid biofuels will not account for a significant portion of total energy consumed in the United States.

All of this may be disheartening for anybody hoping for more renewable energy use in the near-to-mid-term. Still, the EIA predicts that in 2035 that a greater portion of electricity will be produced from domestic sources of natural gas, resulting in a modicum of increased energy security. Also, biofuels and renewable energy production will be growing at steady rates, which could help eventually wean the country off petroleum dependence (but not likely by 2035).

Dr. Newell noted that interested energy-heads can poke around the EIA’s website to check previous projections against the actual energy numbers that were consumed. He also noted—when asked directly—that the EIA has historically fared better in predicting quantities of energy consumed than it has in predicting prices of individual energy sources. It will be interesting to check the site in 2036 to see how well this projection predicted the future.

You couldn’t swing a dead polar bear this weekend without hitting hundreds of reports and commentaries about Copenhagen or Climategate, so I’m going to focus my attention elsewhere.

Last week we CNASers gathered around for an informal lunchtime chat, and several of us voiced concern about the recession, lack of confidence in Wall Street, and – my favorite topic of conversation – informal markets. I don’t consider black markets by necessity threatening, wrong, or bad, but at times less-than-legal dealings become large, interesting, and potentially disruptive.

This weekend, The Washington Post reported on just such an event. It turns out that “Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years.”

• Yesterday during his acceptance speech in Oslo, President Obama announced that with climate change, “our common security hangs in the balance,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Meanwhile, The New Security Beat compiles a list of forthcoming events at Copenhagen about the security implications of climate change.
• Each member of the European Union has agreed to commit between $3.1 billion and $3.6 billion per year to help poor countries deal with climate change, BBC and The New York Times report, respectively.
• Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham unveiled new climate change legislation yesterday timed to draw attention to U.S. domestic efforts at Copenhagen, Green Inc. reports.
• Competition for oil continues in Iraq as the country starts its second round of bidding for new oil field contracts today. Unfortunately electricity generation still lags, underscoring the infrastructure problems of working in Iraq, The Financial Times and The New York Times report.
• Finally, yesterday the White House announced the nomination of our own Sharon Burke, CNAS VP, launcher of our natural security work and fearless leader here at the blog, as Director of Operational Energy Plans and Programs for the Department of Defense. Congratulations, Sharon! 

• Britain's Daily Mail chronicles a new UN report claiming that climate change will increase world hunger between 10 and 20 percent by 2050.
• The Australian reports on Japan's possible plans for a “resource grab” of rare earth elements, which are used in many Japanese electronic products and hybrid car engines.
• In Copenhagen today, U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern told developing countries they will not get a free pass on cutting emissions but instead need to make their own commitments, according to Scientific American. Meanwhile, the BBC reports on scientists from the Scripps Research Institute who will argue at Copenhagen today that the UN's numbers have underestimated the climate change problem.
• Multi-National Force Iraq reports that U.S. forces in Baghdad are working with Iraqis on solar-powered water filters to ensure water security.
• Navy News reports that the Department of the Navy received the Platts Global Energy Award for its environmental efforts.