Last year The Economist indicated that climate change would be the big issue of 2008. Until the economic collapse of last September, I think it was at least a major issue this year. Alas, my biased experience is the only evidence I can offer: this year the environment featured prominently in the federal politics of Canada (my home country), “eco” has become a major catchphrase in Japan (my resident country), and Apple (my favourite company) made its big push to go green.

At the end of the year The Economist did admit that we haven’t gotten very far this year. They aren’t too hopeful for next year in Copenhagen either. At least they didn’t make FP’s list of The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008

As for next year, I think it is obvious that the economy will be the main topic. I also think Afghanistan will take many headlines as well, many from the Iraq beat anyways. Finally, we are sure to see lots of analysis on how the Obama administration is transforming (or not transforming) American politics and America’s place in the world.

For other potential stories of the future see the BBC’s predictions for 2009.

Clean water is set to become the world’s scarcest—but most vitel—natural resource. Check out this global map of water scarcity.

Climate change will play a role in water scarcity. Demand will increase for water for domestic use, as well as for agriculture (including new biopharma and biofuel crops) and industry processes. And regions experiencing water scarcity will increase as the global population increases and as climate change induced droughts occur. Both developing and developed countries will be affected. Various industries such as agriculture, food, and beverage processing plants, as well as chemical, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor industries.

There is also discussion of clean water technology. This very general term is broadly defined as a range of potential technologies that enable faster and more energy efficient treatment of fresh water and waste water and desalination of brackish and sea water, with the goal to provide sustainable and diverse water sources useable for domestic, agricultural, and industrial purposes. The technologies include advances in existing technologies such as membrane bioreactors, substitutions and advances in other separation and purification technologies, including the use of unique chemical and physical properties of nanoparticles and nanofibers to remove toxins, bacteria, and chemicals from water that is safe for human use in one way or another.

Countries that are the first to develop and deploy cheap energy-efficient clean-water technologies could gain huge geopolitical advantages. Without such technology, one of the greatest threats to the rising influence and power of India and China could be as basic as insufficient clean water.

Turkmenistan has been making tremendous strides since the death of President “Turkmenbashy” Niyazov several years ago. For example, the country has reinstated the PhD degree, which was abolished in 1997. But some bad ideas remain, one of them being the “Golden Age Lake.”

As much a wasteland as California’s Death Valley, the 90 mile long Karashor Depression is a natural depression filled with black sand. Yet in 2000, Niyazov leaned against a spade and breached an earthen dam that started the flow of putrid water into the first segment of a canal intended to fill Karashor to its rim. Niyazov touted Golden Age Lake as a symbol of Turkmen revival.

The plan calls for two canals to bisect the country and funnel runoff from heavily irrigated cotton fields into Karashor. The $6 billion project is designed to drain swamps and combat the buildup of salt and other minerals that have degraded Turkmenistan’s arable land and eroded renowned archaeological monuments. Next month, Turkmen engineers will complete phase one, excavation of the two “collector” canals, each hundreds of kilometers long.

Of course, most experts—i.e. PhDs—are highly skeptical of the project and believe the putrid runoff will poison the land and turn the lake into an artificial Dead Sea. Some experts believe that runoff will be insufficient to fill the lake, as the drainage water will evaporate or seep into the desert through unlined feeder canals. And to prevent Golden Age Lake from running dry and to dilute tainted water, Turkmenistan might top it off with fresh water from a river on Uzbek border that Uzbeks rely for irrigation.

To the north of the Golden Age Lake you’ll see the arid Aral Sea, drained by decades of irrigation of Central Asia that had little net positive result. I don’t have an engineering degree and know nothing about the hard numbers behind environmental science, but the inner skeptic in me thinks this is yet another bad idea.

(Map and information from a recent article in “Science” magazine.)

Readers would not often catch Lord Curzon perusing the pages of Mother Jones, a liberal-progressive commentary magazine. However, a recent article subtitled, “Can the world survive China’s headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?” caught my eye like few other articles have so far in 2008. That question is, I believe, the most important question we must ask ourselves over the next few decades.

China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world’s steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world’s new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars’ performance on the city’s clotted roads.

American consumption patterns such as personal transporation in the form of automobiles, high meat consumption, and a carelessly profligent lifestyle by the average consumer is simply not sustainable on a wordlwide scale. How the world copes with that reality may be one of the dominant questions of the 21st century.

Rinderpest, an animal disease that plagued livestock and their human keepers across Eurasia and Africa for millennia, may be on the verge of joining smallpox as the only viral diseases to have been eradicated in human history.

The virus never became established in the western hemisphere. In the 1920s, Europe eradicated it by controlling animal movements and slaughtering infected animals. Worldwide control became a priority of the fledgling United Nations’ agricultural efforts in 1945. A vaccine grown in goats became available in the 1950s. And in the 1960s, a live attenuated vaccine became widely used in rinderpest-eradication efforts. A global campaign established in the early 1990s did much to control the spread of the virus and “reinfection” between Arabia and India through livestock export.

Sri Lanka and Iran reported their last outbreaks in 1994, India in 1995, Iraq in 1996, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1997, and Pakistan in 2000. In Africa, the virus was last detected in 2001 in wild buffaloes in Meru National Park in Kenya, which lies on the edge of the Somali ecosystem. This may be the last remaining reservoir of the virus. And pending confirmation it may finally be eradicated.

One small step for… well, certainly one giant leap in shrinking the gap.

In a follow-up to Younghusband’s post on The Economist stating that climate change would be the big issue of 2008 comes this dated, but relevant, article from the January 1 edition of the New York Times.

Findings
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
By JOHN TIERNEY - January 1, 2008

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

Read the rest of this entry »

Waterworld is a long feature from this month’s Atlantic Monthly in which Robert Kaplan gives a narrative of his travels in Bangladesh – a country struggling with Islamic fundamentalism, weak governance, overpopulation and climate change. The themes of this article are reminiscent of his famous mid-1990s work – and namesake of this blog – The Coming Anarchy. Here is a sample from the Waterworld article:

Here is how global warming indirectly feeds Islamic extremism. As rural Bangladeshis flee a countryside ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest, they are migrating to cities at a rate of 3 to 4 percent a year. Swept into the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments, they lose their local and extended-family links, becoming more susceptible to a form of Islam with a sharper ideological edge. “We will not have anarchy at the village level, where society is healthy,” warns Atiq Rahman. “But we can have it in the ever-enlarging urban areas.” Such is the weakness of central authority in Bangladesh following 15 years of elected governments.

Share and enjoy.

I was struck by the prominence of climate change in The World in 2008 – the annual forecast by The Economist. In 2008 the two big events will be the US presidential election and the 2008 Olympics in China. But the underlying issue of global warming featured heavily in articles throughout the magazine.

Nancy Pelosi claims that global warming and greenhouse-gas reduction is “one of our highest priorities in Congress. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon calls global warming “the defining issue of our era.” In the business world sustainability reports and a net-neutral impact on the environment are desirable trends for the new year. The big polluters China and America are urged to come to an environmental agreement and even smaller powers such as Canada will go greener. The melting polar caps in the Arctic got space in the magazine, and even the term “greenwashing” made it onto the jargon list.

I have nothing against green – I support the cause in my own way. I just hope we don’t get caught up in the fad and remain skeptical like The Economist was back in 2004.

Germany’s moderately left Social Democrats (SPD) are proposing sanctions on what they deem to be wasteful American products, i.e. those that use too much energy such as cars. This comes of course as both France and Germany oppose new EU legislation that would reduce CO2 emissions from cars.

However, hypocrisy aside, the SPD’s effort sheds light on what will likely happen in many Western countries. As the issue of climate change (or rather trend) becomes more popular, parties on both sides of the political spectrum are finding they have to deal with it or increasingly risk being on the losing side of elections. While the environment is the pet issue of the Green and left wing parties, they are finding it appropriated by their opposition and thus are struggling to compete on what was previously solely their issue.

In the Unites States, as Republicans are grudgingly becoming more environmentally friendly to compete with Democrats and rising demand for green policies, the environment, consumers and the country will be better off. Politics, however, will remain interesting as both sides fight to own an issue. Who knows, maybe the Democrats will start championing the second amendment! But on a more serious note, it could be the next point on which everyone can more or less agree that doesn’t involve national security.

Saint…? Anti-Christ…? Or neither?

In the public debate on environmental policy and global warming, there appear to be only alarmists and deniers. There are those who feel that global warming is the greatest threat facing humanity today, that we must devote all our resources to countering its effect to prevent utter catastrophe for human civilization. And then there are deniers who think the Earth is not warming, that even if it is man is not the cause, and that even if it could be fixed it would cost too much and doing so would cause more harm than good.

That Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on encouraging world governments to tackle global warming shows how much a leftist joke the post-Cold War Nobel committe has become. (Not since Arafat (1994) Jimmy Carter (2002) has the prize been such a big joke.) But I don’t say that because I’m a denier. Although it’s hard to stay in the middle of this debate, there is a third way: Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001) who challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces, has a new book titled “Cool It,” which is brimming with useful facts and common sense on how to tackle global warming.

The book starts with a calm review of the many supposed calamities that will result from a hotter planet—extreme hurricanes, flooding rivers, malaria, heat deaths, starvation, water shortages. It turns out that, when these problems are looked at from all sides and stripped of the spin, they aren’t as worrisome as the alarmists would suggest. In some cases, they even have an upside.

• FLOODS: After the 2002 floods of Prague and Dresden, Blair, Chirac and Schroeder all argued that the floods “proved” the need for Western governments to commit themselves to Kyoto. Mr. Lomborg agrees that global warming increases precipitation. Yet truly bad floods have historically accompanied colder climates, since plentiful snow and a late thaw produce ice jams that block rivers and produce high water levels. These sorts of floods have in fact decreased in the 20th century, at least in part because of global warming.

• SEA LEVELS: Yes they will rise, perhaps a foot over this century. But they have already risen a foot since 1860, and the world has coped. More people will die from heat, but significantly more people will not die from cold.

• KYOTO: Implementing Kyoto will cost trillions of dollars that would only result in a 3% reduction in flooding damages. If we instead adopted smart flood policies—an end to subsidies that encourage people to settle in flood plains, levees—we could achieve a 91% reduction in damages at a fraction of the Kyoto cost.

In short, Bjorn makes the case to be concerned about the environment we live in resource consumption, but not sacrificing economic development for meaningless benefits. His argument is convincing, and we can only hope it wins out the day.