Center for a New American Security

The Washington Post reports that flood waters in Thailand have killed more than 400 people and displaced approximately 110,000.

Meanwhile, Bangkok braces for more heavy flooding, according to The Guardian.  

United Press International says scientists are warning that serious action must be taken this decade to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent a 2 degree increase in global temperature.

Daniel Yergin comments on CNN.com about the rebirth of renewable energy.

FoxNews.com reports that NASA successfully launched the National Polar-orbiting Observational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project on Friday; the satellite will provide crucial environmental and climate data.  

The Earth Institute at Columbia University reports that scientists predict a faster retreat for Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier.

Bangkok continues to reel from devastating floods, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Reuters reports that Exxon Mobile has discovered sizable gas reserves off the coast of Vietnam.

Climate change could be making countries’ water challenges even worse, according to Reuters.

Patch.com reports that California assemblypersons are warning that the state must adapt to climate change.

Last month, I wrote a post trying to explain China’s energy strategy in order to make an observation about why China is so invested in protecting potential hydrocarbon resources in the South China Sea. That is, that China’s energy strategy relies in part on developing a broad portfolio of energy sources that does not overly rely on Middle East oil that must transit the Strait of Malacca or overland pipelines from Central Asia that must pass through vulnerable transit states like Burma and Pakistan. Indeed, for Beijing, the South China Sea is one potential input into China’s broader energy strategy that can help the Chinese mitigate their vulnerabilities elsewhere. Thus, China is determined to protect its interests there, which means challenging other states that could potentially exploit the seabed resources for themselves.

Yet, importantly, China’s energy strategy is based not just on those external challenges it faces, but domestic energy challenges as well. In recent years China has been investing heavily in coal development and hydroelectric projects to generate energy from domestic resources in order to reduce its dependence on oil imports. But these domestic energy resources themselves have their own vulnerabilities that only reinforce China’s need to seek energy abroad – and its assertive action to acquire those energy resources.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that China once again faces an energy shortfall this winter in part because of limited energy resources at home. The report said that China’s State Electricity Regulatory Commission cautioned “that falling hydroelectric power output and tight coal supplies could result in a shortfall of at least 26 million kilowatts in the months ahead.”

The decline of Arctic summer sea ice and the opening of passage to commercial travel for at least one month of the year have been pointed to as the silver lining of a dark cloud that has cast a shadow over a world experiencing global climate change. And while it may be true that Arctic ice melt could be a boon to the commercial shippers plying the High North, climate change is likely to pose challenges to the same industry elsewhere.

Experts caution that climate change could disrupt global trade by impacting sea ports in key cities around the world. In September, The New York Times reported that port operators have done little to prepare for such potential climate effects. “Though the impacts of climate change have been extensively studied in other areas, especially in agriculture and for flood zones, up to now there has been little comprehensive investigation into how shipping ports will be affected,” The New York Times reported.

But the slow call to action is worrying given the cities likely to be disrupted by climate change, specifically by sea level rise. A new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that the majority of cities most vulnerable to economic disruption from climate change lie in developed countries, with American cities like Miami, the greater New York area (New York and Newark), New Orleans and other bustling international hubs like Tokyo ranking among the top 15 most vulnerable. Developing countries are also exposed, with quickly emerging economic hubs like Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangkok and Guangzhou, China extremely vulnerable to sea level rise.

These trends are quite unsettling when one considers that nearly 80 percent of global trade is done by sea. “With hundreds of ports tied to one another in often intricate and complex trade links, even a temporary disruption to one far-flung port facility can have wide-ranging implications on all global trade if there are no suitable alternative ports nearby,” according to The New York Times. With global climate mitigation efforts potentially stalled in the near term (we’ll find out for sure in Durban), port operators and the authorities governing them will likely need to invest in climate adaptation programs to hedge against these kinds of potential disruptions.  

The UN Conference on Trade and Development held a meeting September 29-30 with experts to discuss the potential impacts of climate change on existing ports and port development in some of these key cities, and how to adapt to the changing environment. (A number of presentations made at the meeting are available online.)

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus addressed the 20^th International Seapower Symposium on Thursday where he stressed the need for international partners to look for opportunities to collaborate around energy security. “Energy and security are increasingly affecting how the world looks at its relationships," Mabus said. Indeed, joint development and testing of alternative fuels is one opportunity for the United States to strengthen its ties with international partners while promoting its energy security goals. 

Photo: Courtesy of Logistics Specialist 1^st Class John Stone and the U.S Navy.

Despite the vast amount of water on Earth, demands for human consumption are reaching constraints with regard to accessibility, quality and use. This concept of “peak ecological water” – limitations to the regional availability of water – has been developed by MacArthur Genius Fellow Peter Gleick in his biennial report The World’s Water, which was launched this past Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Now in its seventh volume, The World’s Water continues to build on a diverse set of issues centering on water and its implications for energy security, including the necessity of reforming U.S. water policy and the implications of water contamination as a result of producing alternative energy sources.

The U.S. government’s lack of vision is in part to blame for America’s current inability to revamp aging laws and infrastructure for a 21^st century environment. In The World’s Water, Volume 7, Gleick and his colleagues devote a chapter to the need to reform outdated water laws and policies. Policymakers working on water issues across the U.S. government have not sufficiently worked together to develop coherent legislation, in part because most of over 30 federal agencies and programs with water-related responsibilities do not view water as their central mission. For example, Gleick recommends improved collaboration, especially between the Farm Service Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency and State Revolving Loans, in prioritizing projects that better manage the country’s river basins. Concerns over internationally shared water systems with Mexico and Canada will also require increased planning and diplomacy in order to reduce tensions among neighboring countries. According to Gleick, as demands for water increase alongside the growing population, a more integrated water policy that includes all relevant stakeholders in the U.S. government is needed in order to sculpt a more sustainable approach to federal water management.

On Monday, I attended an event sponsored by the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.  Dr. Gary Machlis, the Science Advisor to the Director of the National Park Service, spoke on his experience as the lead scientist for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Strategic Sciences Working Group during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.  This was an experimental working group designed to aid in the natural resource damage assessment process.  Because it was experimental, it was conducted outside the standard response structure mandated for oil spills by the National Contingency Plan, the Incident Command System (ICS). The ICS is also the standard command structure under the National Response Framework and National Incident Management System for all domestic incidents and offers the benefit of a known cadre of key positions and structure that is easily recognizable across first responders from the federal, state and local governments. It does not, however, currently call for a strategic science working group either within the command staff or within the general staff.  Having this group outside the formal ICS did not prohibit them from briefing key leaders within the organization on their findings, but they were not staffed or funded by the formal ICS process.

One of Dr. Machlis’ most interesting points was the concept of incorporating strategic science within crisis response.  From his presentation I took strategic science to mean a methodology by which an environmental system can be evaluated based on the best available interdisciplinary science being used to assign a likelihood of occurrence to cascading events under desired scenarios.  It is not the tactical science used to develop the capping stack, or monitor the flow of oil.  His group modeled the impacted human ecosystem, including biophysical resources, socioeconomic resources and cultural resources, and examined the expected impacts across three scenarios: oil flow containment until recovery began; short term and long term recovery and restoration; and recovery and restoration where stress on the human ecological system was declining.  Each scenario was based upon the best available scientific information and included variables such as flow rate from the well, time to contain the oil flow, length of time for recovery and others.  Each potential event was assigned a probability of occurrence.  The likelihood of occurrence drove subsequent events until the scenario had been played out.

Dr. Charles Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists, has a terrific piece in this current issue of Foreign Policy that explores the future of nuclear energy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.

According to Ferguson, the nuclear renaissance is very much still alive. Though several countries have announced their retreat from nuclear energy since the Fukushima meltdown, Ferguson explains that these states “were the exceptions rather than the rule.” As he notes:

The United States is reviewing its safety procedures for nuclear power, but not changing course on it; overall support for the energy source among Americans has hovered around 50 percent since the early 1990s. In France, which gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, President Nicolas Sarkozy said shutting down reactors was "out of the question." And as for China, India, and South Korea -- countries with a growing appetite for nuclear power that account for the bulk of active plant construction -- only the first has put any of its nuclear plans on pause, and that's just pending a safety review. India and South Korea have vowed to tighten safety standards, but have otherwise forged ahead with plans for nuclear expansion.

According to an August 2011 Congressional Research Service report, the list of states with planned nuclear developments is quite striking (see page 24). The number of planned nuclear facilities in the world – those with approval, funding and that should be operational within the decade – totaled 158. (Note that there are 440 in operation today.) Another 322 nuclear power plants have been proposed, and 61 others are already under construction. Indeed, when experts say that the nuclear renaissance is still alive, they mean it. But how will growth in nuclear energy make nonproliferation more difficult, if at all?

Ferguson takes on the challenge of evaluating the risk of proliferation quite diligently. It is not necessarily true that more nuclear energy production means more nuclear proliferation, he argues. “It's true that the nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities used to produce fuel for peaceful reactors can just as easily be used to make fissile material for bombs,” Ferguson acknowledges. “For now, however, this threat starts and ends with Iran. Most of the 30 countries that use nuclear power don't build their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities, instead buying fuel for their nuclear power plants from external suppliers.”

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Japan continues to reel from the radioactive fallout from the March Fukushima nuclear disaster. According to the Times, Japanese citizens groups have started to monitor for radioactive hotspots in Tokyo after they learned that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government had no plans to monitor radioactive fallout in the city. “Like Japan’s central government,” the Times reported, “local officials said there was nothing to fear in the capital, 160 miles from the disaster zone.”

Yet citizens’ testing has uncovered a worrying number of radioactive hotspots around Tokyo, which “were contaminated with potentially harmful levels of radioactive cesium.” As a result, experts have criticized the government’s efforts to understand long-term radioactive fallout from Fukushima. “The government’s failure to act quickly, a growing chorus of scientists say, may be exposing many more people than originally believed to potentially harmful radiation,” according to The New York Times. “It is also part of a pattern: Japan’s leaders have continually insisted that the fallout from Fukushima will not spread far, or pose a health threat to residents, or contaminate the food chain. And officials have repeatedly been proved wrong by independent experts and citizens’ groups that conduct testing on their own.”

China is investing billions of dollars over the next decade to avert crippling water shortages, according to Agence France Presse.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Solyndra was in discussions to secure a deal with the Navy.  

The Washington Post’s Wonk blog explores which cities are likely be the most impacted by rising sea levels.

United Press International reports that Edwards Air Force Base has broken ground on new solar facilities that are expected to provide 10 percent of the base’s energy.

Officials are in part to blame for Thailand’s disastrous floods as warnings about deforestation and unsustainable development have gone unheeded, according to The New York Times.

The New York Times reports that China and Vietnam have agreed to hold discussions twice a year and establish a hotline between the two countries in order to reduce tensions in the South China Sea.

Burma will compensate China for suspending construction of the planned Myitsone dam, according to The Irrawaddy.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao met in Beijing on Tuesday and moved closer to a deal for Russia to supply natural gas to China, The Global Times reports.

The New York Times Green blog explores the future of food.

British scientists warn that world demand for consumer electronic products could produce a worldwide shortage of metals, United Press International reports.