Environmentalists have for years hectored the EU for not doing enough to fight climate change (when it is doing more than the world’s other major economies).
Now that it has proposed to force other nations to copy its standards or lose access to the European market — as part of its ambition to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 — the bloc is again assailed by leftists, this time for being “neocolonialist”.
Talk about being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (more…)
French lawmakers adopted a far-reaching climate law this week that puts the country on track to meet its Paris commitment of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.
That is short of the 55-percent cut the European Commission has proposed in its “Green Deal”, which has yet to be approved by member states.
The French measures do align with the EU’s new Common Agricultural Policy, which sets aside 20 to 25 percent of funding for “eco-schemes”, which can range from organic farms to forests and wetlands being retained for carbon sequestration.
Some of the policies flow from the citizen consultations President Emmanuel Macron held across France in the wake of the 2018 Yellow Vests protests, which were sparked by a rise in gasoline tax.
Here is an overview. (more…)
European judges have discovered they can compel politicians to take action against climate change.
France’s Council of State has given the government of Emmanuel Macron an April 2022 deadline (one month before the election) to ensure the country will meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 compared to 1990.
Germany’s Constitutional Court issued a similar ruling in April and gave the government an end-of-year deadline to update its policy.
A Dutch court has gone further, ordering Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, to reduce not just its own carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent but those of its customers and suppliers as well.
It’s like we’re living in a kritocracy. (more…)
Nobody is happy with the EU’s new farms policy. Greens argue ambitions for biodiversity and sustainability are too low. Agricultural groups complain they are too high, and farmers will receive lower subsidies to boot.
Which suggests the compromise — the outcome of two years of negotiations — may not be unreasonable.
Here are the most important things to know. (more…)
Poland will not be able to meet the EU’s 2050 zero-emissions target without additional funds. In an interview with the Financial Times, the country’s chief energy advisor, Piotr Naimski, argues that the European Union needs to take its particular circumstances into account.
Poland’s extreme reliance on coal makes the goal to reduce net emissions to zero a tall order. Coal generates about 80 percent of Poland’s electricity. It also curbs its reliance on Russian energy, which is of geopolitical significance.
There is a political consideration as well. Mining unions are still strong in Poland. The industry has long provided well-paying jobs with a high degree of stability. Miners enjoy special retirement provisions. This makes them a powerful voting bloc. (more…)
French president Emmanuel Macron has threatened to hold up ratification of an EU trade deal with Mercosur unless Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro does more to fight fires in the Amazon Rainforest.
Canada, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands have backed Macron up. Germany is less sure. Donald Trump is expected to side with Bolsonaro at the G7 summit this weekend.
Here are the arguments for and against the threat. (more…)
America is out of the environmental protection businesses; so says the haughty God-Emperor Donald Trump, whose word is apparently law.
Too bad even god-emperors cannot change facts. Too bad, especially, for the billions who are almost certain to be disrupted, displaced and decimated by the looming geopolitical effects of climate change.
That basic truth is denied heartily by many who have incentive to play games for short-term gain. These are old-school industrial concerns, for whom environmental regulation hammers a bottom line; alt-right, alt-truthers, for whom simple science is a threat to their incoherent worldview; and shattered working classes, seeking a simple scapegoat for the complicated story of their economic dissolution and disenfranchisement.
As written in Salon:
The executive order is another example of the Trump Administration’s ignoring basic facts in service of a right-wing ideology rooted mostly in a blind, irrational hatred of Obama.
Unfortunately for Trump, undoing Obama’s climate legacy will require more than the stroke of a pen.
The science of climate change is so basic, however, that it is shaping geopolitical forces on a global scale. Whether those forces will overcome the denialists remains to be seen.
Climate change will be the human event of the twenty-first century. It will be a shaping of our species unlike anything since the end of the last Ice Age. To presume that nation states, or their successors, will somehow carry on blithely in spite of it is naive in the extreme. (more…)
Amid the election victory of the intensely pro-coal, global-warming denier Donald Trump, the United Nation’s annual Climate Change Conference is underway in Marrakech, Morocco and is aiming to build on last year’s Paris Agreement.
The conference began on Monday and will run until the end of next week. (more…)
Last month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Peru brought new attention to a long-standing conflict between those seeking to develop the South American country’s economy and those trying to protect its environment.
Consecutive Peruvian governments have been accused of disregarding the effects of extractive activities on the environment and on its indigenous peoples. A general desire to cash in on Peru’s natural resources is seen as a threat in the north of the country while drug traffickers, illegal miners and loggers have helped contribute to the ransacking of the jungle areas of the east.
Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranks Peru 110 out of 178 countries worldwide. In the region, only El Salvador and Paraguay do worse. (more…)
China’s hydropower development activities on the Mekong and Salween Rivers are a clear illustration of the country’s potentially destabilizing strategy, with both diplomatic and environmental impacts, in Southeast Asia.
These waterways, along with the Yangtze River (one of China’s domestic targets for intensive development), constitute the Three Parallel Rivers UNESCO World Heritage Site in southern China’s Yunnan Province. China has thirteen projects planned on the Salween (known in China as “Nu”) River above its entry into Burma, including several adjacent to or within the ecologically sensitive heritage site.
The environment is clearly not a priority in the Chinese decisionmaking process on the topic of energy development. But what about the priorities of China’s neighbors?
Beijing is, in fact, planning and building dams on several rivers that originate in southern China and flow into other South and Southeast Asian nations, including the Mekong, the Salween and Yarlung-Tsangpo or Brahmaputra River.
Downstream riparian nations include Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, India, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. All of these countries will be affected by China’s dam building and hydropower operations in upstream reaches of the aforementioned rivers.
We may also consider nearby projects on the few Southeast Asian rivers that do not necessarily originate in China but in which Chinese investment and interests are focused.
As one example, in 2011 the president of Burma suspended construction of the Chinese funded $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam project on the upper Irrawaddy River over safety issues, resident relocation programs and environmental concerns. Nevertheless, China is pressing for resumed construction on the site from which it expects to reap the majority of generated power for Yunnan growth once the 6,000megawatt project is completed. Myitsone is just one component of a six dam Chinese project on the upper Irrawaddy River intended for energy export to Yunnan.
Despite the suspension, however, a recent report from an nongovernmental organization operating in northern Burma indicates that work surrounding the project continues, with Chinese workers continuing preparation on the Myitsone site and accelerated mineral extraction in the intended reservoir area.
Chinese impacts on the Mekong River community are not yet so overt or contested. Where the Lancang River exits China and becomes the Mekong, it contributes about 18 percent of the total mean annual flow of the entire Mekong River basin. The other 82 percent of Mekong River flow originates in the lower basin from its numerous tributaries there.
During the dry season (northern winter), as much as 30 percent of the total flow in the Mekong River comes from the Chinese portion of the basin. Compared with a population of roughly ten million in the upper basin, concentrated primarily in Yunnan Province, there are more than sixty million residents of five countries in the lower basin area.
With an overall basin size of 800,000 square kilometers, there seems more than enough water to sustain the people of the Mekong River basin, if water was all they needed. Of historically greatest importance to downstream nations is the productivity of the inland freshwater fishery along the Mekong River, which is estimated at more than two million tonnes annually.
Unless the river flow regimes and their influence on this fishery are better understood before further disruption, dam building activities and the ensuing strict flow regulation for hydropower production could decimate a principal food resource in downstream areas.
Working ahead of its downstream neighbors, China has five operational hydropower dams on the Lancang River in and above Yunnan, with three more projects currently under construction and as many as 23 more in planning stages.
All of these projects in China are on main reaches of the Lancang, as few workable tributaries exist in that narrow portion of the basin.
Downstream countries along the Mekong have been working consistently together on the Mekong River Commission and, until recently, have refrained from reservoir and hydropower construction on main river reaches.
Laos has proposed for MRC approval the controversial Xayaburi Dam, a $3.5 billion project that is expected to generate 1,260 megawatts of electricity for the country and could earn back its cost in a single year for the Thai developer.
A single dam along the lower Mekong River would certainly alter flow regimes in the region but will only marginally exacerbate the changes that are seen with China’s dam building activity upstream. However, spurred on by China’s concentration of projects, another ten dams on main river reaches are currently in the proposal and planning stages for MRC countries. That rush of project development is in addition to 41 hydropower dams on tributaries to the Mekong River that are expected to be complete by the end of 2015 and as many as 37 more lower basin tributary dams that could be developed in the 2016-2030 period.
Unlike dams on the main reaches of the Mekong River, which are subject to MRC approval, these tributary dam projects can proceed under the development practices of the individual lower basin countries.
China’s influence on the lower basin has, in effect, spurred the potential fragmentation of an historically strong MRC and its cooperative process. Instead of attempting to deal with the lower basin as a bloc, China could more easily overcome opposition to its own plans for the Mekong River on an bilateral basis, at which China excels when seemingly limitless investment packages are employed as leverage. For the MRC states, however, it’s not all about the money.
Lower basin riparians have, until most recently, recognized the delicate balance between hydropower projects to provide energy for economic development in individual nation and the need to maintain the ecologically vulnerable shared freshwater fishery that provides food security to millions of Southeast Asian residents.
China seems to see no such necessity for balance and is interested in the Lancang primarily as a resource for producing energy.
Widening the regional gap in priorities, China has refused to participate with fellow riparians in the MRC to date. Eventually, as China proceeds with its own dam building efforts, the lower basin countries will reach a point at which effects on river flow regimes become obvious and the sustainability of the vital Mekong basin freshwater fishery wanes.
With full dam building efforts applied in both upper and lower basin regions, complete collapse of the subsistence fishery ecosystem is well within the realm of likelihood, destroying 81 percent of the protein source for the lower basin peoples. A recent study has found that the tributary dams are actually more at fault for such a potential collapse, although flow regulating dams on the main Mekong River reaches will only hasten the demise of the Southeast Asian fisheries ecology.
As the first and most ambitious single actor, the overall upstream riparian and the basin country with the least apparent consideration for a cooperative and balanced approach to the river, China will take much of the blame for this decline.
As with the MRC, while the lower basin countries are all members of ASEAN, China is not. Without a common local or regional authority, MRC countries have little alternative but to appeal to the United Nations for intervention in their emerging dispute with China over the uses and hydrologic alteration of the Mekong River basin.
One potential outcome is a procedural stalemate, by which the long cycle of international mediation allows China to complete its dam building efforts on the Lancang River. At that point, the damage to the lower basin is done and MRC nations must simply deal with the consequences of a diminished resource.
Working sooner and more quickly, however, the lower basin countries could propose a river treaty with an independent overseer. A valuable precedent for this action can be found in the Indus River basin, where India and Pakistan have maintained the Indus Waters Treaty for more than fifty years with oversight by the World Bank. There are still disputes between the countries over (accused) abuses and violations of treaty provisions and allowances but at the very least there is an established mechanism for dispute resolution through independent evaluation and arbitration by a third party.
As a second potential outcome of the MRC complaint, and following on historical precedent, China may attempt to employ capital investment in infrastructure development as a way to get what it wants from the downstream nations.
China could make such a preemptive move in order to mitigate, by diplomatic and economic means, the physical impacts of its new dams on the lower riparians. Specifically, China may offer to help the MRC countries build their own dams, on tributaries and/or main Mekong River reaches, in exchange for freedom of construction and regulation on the Lancang River in the upper basin.
China has precious few opportunities to do that before any further alteration of the river flow regime occurs and downstream impacts become too difficult on the shared resources of the MRC nations.
Lower basin states must hold firm to an understanding of the impacts that their own dam building activities will have on shared resources and reject China’s “help” that is actually aimed at fragmentation of the lower basin system.
With such a realization of Chinese plans, the MRC states will finally recognize the potential impacts of Chinese involvement and push back at China in a concerted effort to bring the upstream nation’s own dam building activities under control and environmentally responsible oversight, though by then the fishery could be lost entirely.
Demands will be made for China to pay for lost resources in the lower basin and any dispute could lead to negotiation, conflict or both.
In any case, China stands to lose a valuable cache of trust and goodwill with its neighbors, if not also valuable investment and trade markets, not just in Southeast Asia. Other resource and trade partners watching all of this unfold will think twice about their relations with China after such alienating behavior in its own neighborhood. No country has it in their national strategy to be taken advantage of by a neighbor or trade partner.
Without preemptive engagement and China’s cooperation and a willingness to consider alternatives alongside fellow riparians in the lower basin, MRC nations will lose control of the Mekong River and the abundance of its valuable ecosystem. MRC nations can bring China to the negotiating table through diplomatic and economic sanctions, an action to which China must acquiesce for fear of losing one of its nearest and fastest growing markets.
Once China is forced to negotiate for its use of the upper basin in the Lancang and Mekong River system, the evaluation and arbitration process will slow China’s progress considerably by subjecting its dam building projects to international standards of environmental assessment on an individual and collective basis, which China has largely avoided to date. Its ambitions for a cascade of strictly regulated hydropower dams on the Lancang River, which are considered vital to economic and industrial development in its southern provinces, will be slowed or lost entirely.
This article was adapted from a strategic simulation run by Wikistrat, the world’s first massively multiplayer online consultancy.
When historians begin to look back at the first pivotal decade of the twenty-first century, what will they see? What types of words will they use to describe the 2000-2010 years, and how will those words hold up to other decades in terms of prosperity, popular culture, and innovation?
These questions seem out of the blue, given our ever changing environment. But these queries need to be answered, or at least pondered to some degree. Every single decade of the twentieth century has been labeled to some degree or another, usually with unique events in mind. The 1920s came to known as the “Roaring Twenties,” the 1930s saw the “Great Depression,” and the 1980s were considered to be the time of “the me generation” (whatever that means). Of course, the 1960s and 70s were both regarded as decades of immense cultural ferment in the United States, as social and political issues previously hidden or suppressed demanded their rightful place on the public agenda.
The verdict for the 2000-2010 period is still up in the air, and not without good reason; it takes generations before scholars can accurately analyze a time period in its full dimension. After all, it has only been seven months since the decade came to a close. But it’s interesting to start speculating, both because we have all experienced the tumult of those years and because the world changed drastically in a number of areas.
On its merits, the first decade of this century doesn’t appear to have been a particularly happy time for mankind. In the United States, it started with a terrible financial scandal at a huge corporation (Enron), where thousands of employees lost their hard earned livelihoods as a consequence of corrupt business executives. Of course, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 killed some 3,000 innocent civilians and gave birth a dark cloud that continues to hover over us up to this day. Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, the Haitian earthquake, and the SARS outbreak in China all demonstrated that humans are still unable to control everything, despite their technology and brainpower. Fighting erupted around the globe, from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from the Sudan to the Caucasus.
Despite all of these disasters and catastrophes, there were also tremendous achievements throughout the last ten years. According to Charles Kenny of the New America Foundation, literacy rates across the world rose to 80 percent of the human population. In Africa, the most destitute continent, two-thirds of people can now read and write, perhaps paving the way for a new era in African development. People are being paid more, with an average global annual income of over $10,000. Agricultural yields have increased in the developing world, and the low price of grains over the last decade enabled more families to afford food and provide for their children. The number of children that have died from measles (a preventable disease) has dropped by 60 percent due to the widening availability of immunizations. And child mortality has declined by 17 percent, which could potentially help poor countries beef up their economic productivity.
From where we stand now, the last ten years seem like a mixed bag. Terrorism and violence crept into areas that were previously quiet, but intelligence services have responded with improvement. The global economy is still struggling to get out of the hole, but families are bringing more money into the household. In other words, the decade has witnessed a lot of balance, with pros butting heads against cons and solutions creating even more problems. One year, you’re at the top of the game, and the next, you’re at the bottom of the pile.
How about “the roller coaster decade?”
The BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, still spewing after more than a week and several failed mitigation attempts, is certainly an environmental disaster, the extent of which will likely not be known for many weeks to come. But it is also a political disaster.
First of all, though the initial accident was not the fault of government, the failure to respond to the disaster was. The American government had certain regulations in place since the Exxon Valdez disaster near Alaska in 1989. It was supposed to have disaster mitigation equipment, in particular fire booms that would help to contain the oil and prevent it from spreading. But they did not follow their own rules.
The real ones responsible for the containment and cleanup, not to mention prevention, should be BP themselves, of course. If you make the mess, you clean it up. But since the government did have regulations in place and did not follow them they are culpable as well. In fact to the extent that government takes on accountability and responsibility themselves they remove it from corporations like BP. We have turned government into the nursemaid of the nation.
But even that is not the real disaster here. The worst part of this is the response that will come from the progressive federal government in Washington because of the oil spill. Regulation on oil companies will increase. No new oil exploration or rigs will be built. Alaska will have a tougher fight than ever to build their pipeline. America, in the mid of plentiful domestic oil reserves, will become more and more dependent on oil from countries in the Middle East and South America, many of which despise her. America will indirectly be funding the terrorists that attack America and Europe.
Further it will be the catalyst for more crises, such as out of control energy prices, which affect every other sector of the economy. Food, lights, heat, durable goods, and jobs will become scarce, particularly if the OPEC countries decide to limit availability or raise prices. If the American government continues to restrict the use of domestic oil and other energies, we are very possibly looking at a future in this country of a period that will make the 1930s look like good times.
The oil spill in the Gulf, through mismanagement and fear in government is destined to become not only the catalyst for more environmental regulations, but also a serious threat to our national security and our economic future. This could not have happened at a worse time.
Nuclear power plants currently generate over 20 percent of the power in the United States. In other countries, like France, they power upward of 80 percent. There have been 884 coal mining related deaths since 1980 in the United States alone. Even wind turbines cause more deaths than the nuclear power industry, amounting to a total of sixty deaths (PDF) since the 1970s.
In one case you have an industry that is guaranteed to cause death and severely lower the life expectancy of those involved. In the second, you have an alternative technology with a large number of accidental deaths. Third, you have a proven technology with a solid history of little to no problems and much fewer deaths. You do, however, have a word that can also be associated with powerful weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear as a word tends to scare people. We think of bomb drills and nuclear holocaust. But it’s really just a word like any other. Nuclear power need not be feared like the red death!
This quote is from Greenpeace’s website. I decided to break up the summary against nuclear power into section to better analyze it:
Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars
Building a nuclear power plant costs more than building a wind farm or a collection of solar panels, but the ratio of wattage output of a plant isn’t comparable on a per watt basis. Where did they get “trillions of dollars”? I’m at a loss about where to begin with that one. And besides, the implementation of nuclear power plants will decrease the need for old fossil fuel burning plants that output tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases. I personally could care less about greenhouse gas emissions, but since they do I’m surprised they forgot to mention that.
Create tens of thousands of tons of lethal high level radioactive waste […]
If disposed of properly, Mother Nature and radioactive half life do all the work for us. You just need a place to put the waste.
I personally think we should launch it into space, but a more cost effective solution would be to use a massive mountain in a desert where you don’t have to worry about water runoff or a nearby population. In fact, such a site already exists, Yucca Mountain, although the project has recently been shut down. Which makes no sense considering instead of being stored in the best possible location, it will now be stored in higher risk locations, but I digress.
[…] contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade.
The plants in operation today aren’t even remotely in the same class as the plant in Chernobyl, at least in the United States. And that is including the oldest plants in operation! And since they have been in operation for forty years (that would be four decades for all you non math folk), and there hasn’t been one Chernobyl scale accident, I would have to disagree.
For Three Mile Island fans, there were no casualties and the radiation amounted to that of an X-Ray you would receive at the doctor’s. Did I already mention that if these organizations had left the industry alone, we wouldn’t have any older plants to deal with anyway? And we would already be off of foreign oil and fossil fuels? And our air would be cleaner?
Perhaps most significantly, it will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions.
By resources I assume they mean money? I don’t understand that logic at all, considering it will be more expensive to create the same amount of energy with wind and solar, not to mention the existing loss in tax revenue due to the tax credits that have existed for quite some time.
That said, I’m not against other technologies. In fact I love technology and new ideas. I love entrepreneurship. I do’’t love intangible promises from new technologies. Sure, a breakthrough could happen in solar and wind power that makes them the clear choice. But the same could happen in nuclear or even coal power too! In the short term, I would place my money on nuclear and get us off of reliance of foreign oil, something that inherently undermines our position in all things foreign policy and affects us in a tangible way every day.
