“Water is a huge problem, as you all know, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Tajikistan has one of the greatest water potentials in the world. . . we have got a water resources task force now set up in the Department to examine how we can additionally help the countries of the area, and particularly Pakistan with the water issue.”
Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Briefing on his Recent Trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Georgia and Germany, March 2, 2010.
This weekend’s natural security news seems to have been lighter than it has been in recent weeks. However, one common report appearing in The New York Times and Scientific American on the Interior Department’s recently released study, The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change, is worth mentioning.
As Scientific American reports, “climate changes will have ‘an increasingly disruptive effect on bird species in all habitats.’ Oceanic migratory species and birds living in Hawaii will face the greatest threats, according to the report [The State of the Birds].”
Some of you may be wondering how this relates to U.S. national security. I think Kenneth Rosenberg, Director of Conservation Science at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, captures the connection well: “Birds are excellent indicators of the health of our environment, and right now they are telling us an important story about climate change,” he told The New York Times. “Many species of conservation concern will face heightened threats, giving us an increased sense of urgency to protect and conserve vital bird habitat.”
We have reported before on the link between biodiversity and national security in our work here. Indeed, “Biodiversity loss is likely to be highly destabilizing, in that it will constrain access to a full range of natural resources, including food and potable water. Some of the drivers of biodiversity loss, such as poverty and poor governance, can also be drivers of instability, conflict, and insurgencies.” And when it comes to the impacts of climate change on birds, the classic canary in the coal mine comes to mind.
This Week’s Events
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Science & Technology Subcommittee on Investigation and Oversight will be holding a hearing on Rare Earth Minerals and 21st Century Industry at 2:00 p.m. On Wednesday, CATO will be holding an event on how Russia’s energy resources have shaped its social order beginning at 4:00 p.m. Finally, the Wilson Center will be holding an event Thursday on Building a Smarter Grid: Challenges and Opportunities for the United States and Canada starting at 9:00 a.m.
Big, big natural security news from The New York Times this weekend. You know how we’ve been sanctioning Iran and discouraging U.S. investment in its energy sector? Well – prepare to be shocked – it turns out that the U.S. government “has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran.” Wowzers.
The full article is a must-read. And not just the article – I’d say its supplemental materials are worth a glance as well. The Times provides a list of the companies it identified. In addition to most of the big financial and energy institutions one could think of, it includes many auto makers, airlines, and electronics makers and service providers (cameras, cell phones, etc.). I think looking through the activities companies engaged in since 2000 beyond energy development gives the Iran debate good context. At the bottom of the same link as that list, the Times provides its methodology.
To wrap up the coverage in that paper, see Jad Mouawad’s related piece framing various energy and geopolitical issues that will affect whether or not Iran’s energy resources provide it with an upper hand in the face of sterner sanctions. For a good contrast, then jump to Haaretz, which reported statements Sunday by an official of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company that despite having reduced subsidies, Iran’s oil and gas demand has not dropped. The article implies that this could make sanctions on Iran’s energy sectors more potent, though I’m not so sure given the China factor and the myriad other pieces of the picture involved with that. Meanwhile, Iran continues to work toward its nuclear program, which I hear tell is aimed mainly at increasing the country’s energy security.
The Week Ahead
At noon Monday the Wilson Center hosts "Warning of Global Warming? Politics, Economics and Ecological Change in Siberia's Far East" based on in-country research. Wednesday at 6:00pm, check out CFR’s discussion on "Developing an International Framework for Geoengineering." (I wish I could attend this one – if anyone takes good notes and is in a sharing mood, shoot me an email.) The National Building Council holds “For the Greener Good: Greening the Supply Chain” at 6:30pm on Thursday. At 11:00am Friday AAAS convenes think tank and government experts for "Climate Policy: Public Perception, Science, and the Political Landscape."
I’m going to reach back into last week on this one, as President Obama teed up the topic last Tuesday with his announcement of over $8 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. Perhaps the best back-and-forth outlining the pluses and minuses of guaranteeing loans for new nuclear plants was in an exchange between Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Christine Todd Whitman on CNN last Wednesday.
The biggest natural security news through the long D.C. snowpocalypse weekend involved coverage of two energy-important elections, one now held and the other to come later this year. Opposition candidate and former Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich claimed a win yesterday in Ukraine’s race for the presidency, while Venezuela is gearing up for fall elections. Both races will come to have some serious importance for energy geopolitics.
There was a battle of fossil fuel backgrounds at play between the two main candidates in Ukraine’s election: Yanukovich was a former coal industry exec, while his opponent, current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was a natural gas baroness before taking on energy issues in elected office. The domestic energy politics in this election heavily involved which candidate could form better relations with Russia on natural gas and seal a better deal for Ukraine. Yanukovich has stated that he supports “the creation of the gas transportation consortium, with Russia as a supplier, Europe as a consumer, and Ukraine as a transiting country.”
It seems as though improved natural gas relations with Russia would be on that country’s agenda regardless of which candidate prevailed, but a few more energy similarities and differences are noteworthy as well. The Kyiv Post reported that:
Both Tymoshenko and Yanukovich believe Ukraine, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, could gain energy security through the development and construction of more nuclear power stations. Tymoshenko wants to speed up exploration and extraction of oil and gas on the Black Sea shelf, to shore up Ukraine's energy security, while Yanukovich wants to modernise the coal industry, that could fuel much of steel production – key to the economy.
Whoa, there. We’ll see what actually happens – Russia will surely have a say in what actually unfolds.
And though the next ballots aren’t cast until September, speculation is already beginning about the direction of Venezuela’s political winds, as they are being influenced by resource concerns. Time reports that Hugo Chávez is experiencing much disenchantment from his public in no small part due to water and electricity shortages. It further reports that Chávez:
…blames water and electricity shortages on a drought caused by El Niño. A report released at Christmas by one of the state electricity companies predicted a national collapse within 120 days if drastic measures were not taken…To alleviate drought, Chávez has turned to Cuba for "cloud seeding" technology. He has also instituted unpopular water and electricity rationing to ensure the country's hydro-electric dams are not drained before the rains come in June.
Geoengineering, Chávez? Me thinks you have some energy and water policy choices a bit more straightforward and effective than cloud seeding. Wait…Cuba is cloud seeding? Looks like it was when I had the swine flu, but I totally missed that gem.
The United States made an initial pledge to reduce greenhouse gases 4% by 2020 in a letter sent to the United Nations. How are we going to do it? Last week made clear that nuclear is likely to be touted as a significant part of the solution.
President Obama’s State of the Union support for “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country” was one of the few propositions that drew loud applause from the Republican side of the floor; he again emphasized in meeting with House Republicans two days later that they see eye to eye on coal and nuclear energy investments. And later in the week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the administration was forming a commission to study options and make recommendations on a real solution to the country’s nuclear waste, to be chaired by Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft.
Notably absent in the President’s speeches was a sense of scale. With the past decade’s talk of a “nuclear renaissance” and responses that such a buildup would have its limits in terms of adding capacity much beyond replacing those reactors coming offline, I’m interested in seeing what the President’s vision looks like in more detail. Or even whether it is a solid vision that involves nuclear goals and timelines, or simply incentives and conditions to better encourage more nuclear production. Further news last week covered new breakthroughs in nuclear tech, which we’ll need in either case. One of the most interesting came from a group of scientists from Northwestern, who have discovered a new process for filtering radioactive cesium out of nuclear waste allowing other materials to escape.
The Hill points out this morning that the nuclear industry crowd is pumped about Secretary Chu’s budget request, which would triple the current level for nuclear loan guarantees. It also reminds us that nuclear will be a major part of the narrative should the president push for climate legislation soon. An article this weekend in the Boston Globe also reminds us that many older plants have issues such as leaking pipes and collapsing cooling towers – and many of this country’s will likely be coming offline over the next few decades. Coupled with all the recent news of technical advances for the next generation of reactors, in addition to questions of expected scale I’m wondering how the pacing of adding nuclear capacity and incorporating new and improved technologies will play out.
We often hear the argument that energy and climate policy should focus on efficiency in the near term, leaving switching to more sustainable energy sources to the future. Yesterday, a New York Times article on Idaho showed the benefits of doing just that: the utility has been paying citizens to cut their energy use, and this has until recently obviated the need to build new power plants.
Bill Gates has apparently heard a lot of that policy prescription as well, and last week he blogged this response (cross-posted to Huffington Post):
Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation? If addressing climate change only requires us to get to the 2025 [emissions] goal, then efficiency would be the key thing. But you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero [emissions] no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say. You can never reduce consumerism to anything close to zero.
Gates declares that we need both, but emphasizes that there’s not enough emphasis on energy innovation. I’ve got to agree with him on this one, in part because of the U.S. experience after the 1970s oil crises. You can now find dozens of books from the late 70s and early 80s proposing energy innovation that never quite came to fruition. Energy prices dropped, incentives shifted, Reagan took Carter’s solar panels off of the White House. There was a great focus on efficiency and conservation back then as well. We set and later raised fuel economy standards, and as vehicles became more energy efficient we began driving more and more SUVs. Without significant focus on innovation now, I fear that when another energy crisis hits in 20 or 30 years, scholars will again look back at all the books from the 2000s on cleaner energy futures that never came to be and scratch their heads at how little change had occurred.
I didn’t see one major unifying theme in this weekend’s news, but good, in-depth articles on several important topics.
Pipeline Politics. First, news of pipeline politics offered a great [case] of contrasts. Several South American countries are developing more domestic natural gas reserves and increasing liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports to ensure that their energy security is not dependent upon Bolivian supplies or pipelines through third countries. As reported in The New York Times,
The reorganization of South America’s energy relationships is being closely followed by countries trying to limit their reliance on energy-rich nations that are in political flux or that use their resources as a political lever, as Russia’s state energy company has bullied former Soviet republics and Europe.
By comparison, Nigeria’s oil pipelines are once again in the news for making such ideal targets. Last Friday gunman attacked one of Chevron’s pipelines, setting production back by 20,000 barrels per day; when a recent (apparently fragile) peace deal was struck oil companies were able to increase production “to almost 2 million barrels a day from about 1.6 million barrels,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
This long holiday weekend, the plethora of commentary on the state of the economy at the beginning of 2010, dissections of the past and projections for the future all indirectly provided me with more depth than usual on one of the big-picture questions rolling around in the natural security universe: just how is the world economy is changing, and what are the resulting effects on resources and security? Most every media outlet devoted time and attention to economic change over the past year and past decade, with much wrangling over the lessons of past effects and the directions in which future winds will blow.
For a fun diversion on changing world trade, check out Time’s list of 10 exports endangered by the effects of climate change on regional agriculture. Even more fun, the guests on CNN’s Saturday afternoon Your Money special on predictions for 2010 seemed to have natural security heavily on their minds, including psychic Roxanne Usleman. She predicts that “Oil will fluctuate up and down, and then it will literally go through the roof to all-time highs, more than we've ever seen it before,” and “In 2010, it is a very good idea to invest in water because there will be problems connected to water, and anything with advanced techniques to clean the water system is a great idea. Also, food because food prices will go up so that's another stock that will be a good thing to invest in.” Non-psychic guests also focused on oil, minerals and metals; one investment advisor and author stated a belief that “there's going to be precious little silver in the world. Every time you build a gigabyte of solar energy it requires maybe 50 to 80 tons of silver. I don't think we have enough.” (Note: I didn’t verify this stat; estimates appear to vary greatly depending on what nature of solar energy is in question but it’s notable that commodities folks seem to be more and more interested in minerals consumption related to clean energy.)
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 countl
ess 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.
