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.

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.

  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.”

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.

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.

Recommendation 3: The Department of Defense should partner with private sector innovators and establish an Operational Energy Innovation Center. In pursuing its most urgent energy vulnerabilities, DOD should take steps to ensure that it receives input from all innovators, including those in the smallest companies. However, information and communication barriers, largely related to the size disparity of the organizations, impede such collaboration. One potential avenue to connect DOD to innovators is through technology incubators, which provide the expertise needed to get small innovators firmly established. By cultivating a partnership, DOD could provide the testing data and initial market necessary to commercialize new clean energy technologies. Furthermore, to address its most urgent energy concerns, DOD could combine the innovators from nascent businesses with researchers from larger private firms, universities, and national laboratories in an Operational Energy Innovation Center, modeled on DOE’s Innovation Hubs. The Center could be funded through a competitive Operational Energy Innovation Fund.

This is shaping up to be a summer marked by its extensive natural disasters around the world. In addition to the heat waves, projections hinting at a bad hurricane season in this hemisphere, Russia’s massive wildfires, and floods hitting Central Europe, Pakistan’s already-terrible flooding is expected to grow worse. First, according to The New York Times, the Russian wildfires have “forced the military to transfer rockets away from a garrison near the capital” after “they burned through forests toward a nuclear missile warning center outside Moscow.”

Second and even more concerning in its scale, yesterday The Washington Post highlighted concerns of Pakistani officials that the extensive damage from flooding, which has killed about 1,600 to date, could set back gains against insurgents:

Over the past year, Pakistan's army has succeeded in driving Taliban fighters out of key sanctuaries in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley. But the damage from the floods could jeopardize those gains, officials acknowledge, unless infrastructure is quickly rebuilt -- an undertaking that will cost billions of dollars and will likely take years.

In domestic news of bad (but likely politically necessary) investments, the Department of Energy announced last week that we’re putting another billion dollars into a reconfigured plan for the FutureGen project, which has proven about as successful as the attempts to keep Lindsey Lohan out of jail.  Several articles covering this move by DOE pointed out that a simpler option (that’s technically feasible today) could be to use natural gas for power generation rather than continuing reliance on coal, as several other countries are already beginning to do. But they reveal that part of that decision is coming back to price: if you ignore price supports and externalities that we don’t price at all, coal is cheaper than natural gas. And as we’ve seen lately, policies to price in externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions are unfortunately beyond the political will of Congress at the moment. (On that note, The Washington Post’s “On Leadership” section yesterday included commentary on why the country can’t muster the leadership needed to act on climate change.)

While the historical record shows that no states have ever fought a war over transboundary water resources, such resources have long served as focal points for potential conflict. But despite growing water scarcity in regions of the world – due in part to global population growth and increased drought in those regions – there are still great efforts among states to negotiate and even cooperate over many contentious and increasingly constrained water resources. 

Two examples strike me as being particularly relevant to U.S. national security: the Nile Basin Initiative and the Mekong River Commission.  The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) is a partnership of all 10 Nile Basin riparians to develop the river in a cooperative manner, share the socio-economic benefits, such as hydropower, that the river provides and “promote regional peace and security.”  Similarly the Mekong River Commission, an agreement between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam and with China and Burma as “dialogue partners” but not full participants, is meant to help regional riparians to manage the Mekong River’s shared water resources and develop the economic potential of the river.  

Both organizations are good examples of integrated water resource management, a process to manage a river or body of water as a whole to maximize the development potential of an entire river.  Yet both organizations are still missing a crucial piece: that is, the cooperation of the most powerful state in the river basin and the state that has historically been able to control the river’s water resources. 

The past few days witnessed a bit of debate on electric vehicles and related policies after the president swung by Detroit and appeared behind the wheel of a Volt, and GM increased its estimate of the number of EVs it would produce in 2012 from 30,000 to 45,000. The Washington Post’s Charles Lane ran pretty much the same critiques as an editorial in the Post and an opinion piece in Slate (the former owns the later). The gist is this: a Deloitte study identified that the upper classes only will be the early adopters of EVs, so tax breaks for EVs constitute a just-plain-wrong tax break for the rich. I don’t disagree that this is the demographic most likely to take advantage of the tax incentive, but I do think it misses the point. The goal of this particular policy is to pull along new energy technological development, and it should therefore be judged by 2 basic questions: is it one of the most effective and clear-cut ways to accomplish that goal; and does it produce intolerable negative side effects? On both counts I think this tax incentive does just fine, at least for the near term. If Lane is correct and relatively few people purchase EVs anyways, then the better focus of cutting government tax breaks and incentives solely for budget purposes would be on the larger pools (think maybe the oil industry?) than the small, individual-consumer-based chunks of change.

Noticing this twin push against EV tax breaks, I did a Google news search on it and most of what I found indicated a far more positive outlook than the Post/Slate pieces. To get beyond just the knock on the tax incentive, check out CNET’s video test-drive of the Nissan Leaf, and its photo slideshow on EV charging infrastructure. Because, you know, CNET rules. And if, like me, you think our heavy petroleum usage is a major security problem, it’s worth taking time now and again to watch where EV technology is heading.

(Obama also did his weekly address from this Detroit visit, embedded here courtesy of the White House.)