The Not-At-All Cold War

 

The Pentagon, the CIA, and a host of other national security experts are concerned about climate change too.

There are times in life when you’re best off playing the game on the other guy’s court. Say, for instance, you’re at a Memorial Day family barbecue, locked in a conversation with your uncle, and the subject jumps to climate change, which he dismisses as an overblown hoax. Or you’re watching hoops at the bar with a buddy who served two tours in Iraq and some flowery Prius ad flashes across the screen, prompting a jibe about smug treehugging yuppies. Don’t panic. This is your chance to take this climate change and clean energy discussion onto their turf.

Because there’s a boatload of bulletproof evidence that global warming and our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels—particularly oil—represent a couple of the gravest threats to our national security right here in the United States. This is not, for the sake of this conversation, an environmental issue to be fretted over by effete, knuckle-knawing, liberal arts-educated, coastal types. Rather, it’s a security issue, and you’re going to be talking about war and intelligence and the military and terrorism. (And, by the way, here’s what not to mention: Al Gore, polar bears, Europe, and any celebrity or politician who didn’t play a Terminator.)

You can make these arguments because the Pentagon, the CIA, and a veritable cavalcade of other national security experts have already made them for you.

There has been a flood of studies released over the past couple of years that tie global warming to global instability. Perhaps none has been as influential as the series of reports by the Military Advisory Board of the Center for Naval Analysis, a Pentagon-funded think tank serving U.S. defense agencies. The panel of 12 distinguished retired generals and admirals—including Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former head of U.S. Central Command—are far from environmentalists, some have said they came into the process as skeptics. But no more. Said Sherri Goodman, who chaired the board, “It’s now a mainstream security issue, not a fringe movement for tree-huggers and Birkenstock wearers.” Gen. Zinni put it even more bluntly: “We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.”

Back in April 2007, the CNA’s first report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” report (pdf), found that “climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world” by “seriously [exacerbating] already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states.” And that was just the military community’s first take. Ever since, the risks have been amplified and the threats honed.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security boiled down the security implications to a handful of key points in their “The Age of Consequences” report (pdf), which warned of:

•    heightened internal and cross-border tensions caused by large-scale migrations;

•    conflict sparked by resource scarcity, particularly in the weak and failing states of Africa;

•    increased disease proliferation, which will have economic consequences;

•    some geopolitical reordering as nations adjust to shifts in resources and prevalence of disease.

The first-ever National Intelligence Assessment of climate change (pdf), completed by the National Intelligence Council, found much of the same.

One of the authors of “The Age of Consequences” was Jim Woolsey, a former director of the CIA who has served under two Republican and one Democratic presidents, and advised Senator John McCain on energy issues during his campaign. These days, Woolsey is jazzing up talks about climate and security with some role-playing, during which he channels the spirits of environmental forefather John Muir and General George S. Patton, legendary commander of the Third Army. The two men, as imagined by Woolsey, begin with far different concerns—Muir worries about climate change while Patton storms on about terrorists. The two ghosts are surprised to find such overlap in the problems and in the common solutions—solar panels, plug-in hybrids, and so on.  (In a novel twist, it’s Woolsey’s Muir that leaves nuclear power on the table, and his Patton who takes it off for threat of proliferation.)

The terrorism link might seem at first like something of a leap, but Admiral T. Joseph Lopez, the retired top NATO commander in Bosnia, begs to differ.  “Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror,” Admiral Lopez warned in the first CNA report. “You have very real changes in natural systems that are most likely to happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism…More poverty, more forced migrations, higher unemployment. Those conditions are ripe for extremists and terrorists.”

Consider Egypt. The Nile Delta is the most fertile around, but arable land is disappearing. Mass migrations are already underway. Or Somalia, which we already worry about as a breeding ground for terrorism. How would the starving, displaced masses—who are now enduring the worst drought in a decade—react if they felt that rich Westerners were worsening their plight with our lavish lifestyles and enormous carbon footprints? That’s certainly the message Osama Bin Laden sent back in his late 2007 video message, when he singled out global warming as the “greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans” that America is inflicting on the Muslim world.

Or consider Bangladesh. Millions of poor, desperate Muslims will be permanently displaced. Now Bangladeshi Muslims have long been moderate and peaceful—the antithesis of Islamic extremists. But after losing their homes and struggling to survive, with no place to go and nothing to lose, will they stay moderate and peaceful when given someone to blame?

General Zinni doubts it. “These places are Petri dishes for extremism and for terrorist networks.” That’s why the Pentagon and various other wings of the American defense infrastructure have been devoting so much attention to climate change over the past two or three years. Even while the Bush administration denied the scientific reality, the military was getting serious about transitioning to cleaner energy operations, and to start figuring out exactly what a warming world will mean to our own security here in America and around the globe. It’s clear from their early findings that climate change isn’t just a national security issue, but that it will be one of the most urgent national security issues of this century.

The Decline of the Financial Industry

Over the last three years, the percent of graduating seniors from Harvard University who have gone on to take jobs in finance and consulting has dropped.

The Death and Life of Model “Eco-cities”

From Florida to China, showcase “green” communities are popping up all over the globe. But some have already failed. Here are four model cities that might actually make it.

Dongtan, China was supposed to be “the world’s first eco-city.” And if you were to believe the press releases, government officials, and a deluge of articles lauding the project a few years back, construction of this planned low-carbon, car free community near Shanghai—should be well underway.

It is not.

Rather, the site on Chongming Island where planners had promised to showcase “a methodology for sustainable communities across China and beyond”—where superefficient buildings would be clustered in dense, walkable neighborhoods, where 90 percent of all waste would be recycled, where energy would be produced locally by wind, solar, and bio-fuels, where high tech organic farms would produce nearly all the food, where public transport would run on hydrogen fuel cells, and where half a million people would call home within 30 years, at least 25,000 of them settled in in time for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010—remains an untouched greenfield. Permits to develop the land have expired. Pretty much everyone involved—from Chinese officials to the prominent British design and engineering firm Arup—have distanced themselves from the project. A local farmer with fields inside the development site told the Telegraphearlier this year that he’d “never heard of it.”

Dead is Dongtan, the project that Worldchanging publisher Alex Steffen once described as “absolutely the best current model for bright green Chinese city planning” and that a similarly glowing Wired articlesummed up as such: “If Dongtan lives up to expectations, it will serve as a model for cities across China and the rest of the developing world—cities that, given new tools, might leapfrog the environmental and public health costs that have always come with economic progress.”

So much for expectations.

But what happened?  It’s hard to pinpoint a single cause for the abandon of Dongtan. Some scapegoat the Shanghai official who was in charge of the project, and who is now serving 18 years for fraud. Since his sentencing, the project has been a political hot potato in China. Some claim that the Chinese government and Arup couldn’t agree on who was paying for what.

Still others more cynically believe that Dongtan was never more than smoke and mirrors, a much hyped government greenwash that created a ton of positive PR for Shanghai and Chinese leaders, hiding the realities of rampant, dirty, inefficient urban development behind pages upon pages of fancy renderings.

But just because Dongtan has fallen flat, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other places to look for the “model green city” of the future. Here are a couple other candidates:

MASDAR CITY, United Arab Emirates

If anyplace is the frontrunner to take over the mantle of premiere model green city, it’s surely Masdar.

Using wealth accumulated over half a century of oil extraction, the Abu Dhabi government is purportedly aiming to shift their local economy to one of clean, renewable energy technology, and Masdar will be a living showroom. If all goes according to plan (a huge if), within 15 years the city of 50,000 will burn no oil or gas, allowing for it to become the “first city where carbon emissions are zero.”

Personal cars will be banned, but electric “personal rapid transit” systems (which look like something out of The Jetsons), will move residents around. Seawater will be desalinized by a solar-powered plant, and 80 percent of water will be recycled. Nearly all waste will be recycled or converted to energy. Produce will come from local greenhouses.

These are all bold claims, but some early skepticism over the true carbon neutrality of the construction process have been quieted by the completion this week of a 10-megawatt solar plant that will power the building boom.

Likelihood it’ll live up to the hype (1-10): 8

The project weathered some uncertainty as the UAE economy stalled, but as oil is back on the rise, it will get built. Whether a completed Masdar will showcase all the bells and whistles (and personal transit pods) that it now boasts is another question.

BABCOCK RANCH, Florida

Amidst the strip malls, sprawling subdevelopments, and golf courses of Southern Florida, ex-NFL lineman Syd Kitson is building a solar-powered “city of tomorrow.”  (“Some people think I got hit in the head a few too many times,” he says.) A deal with Florida Power & Light ensures that the self-contained, “live where you work” city of 45,000 will be powered by a 75-megawatt photovoltaic plant (nearly twice as big as the world’s current largest in Germany), and the company’s slick website paints the picture of an eco-utopia: “Ultramodern electric vehicles will glide along avenues beneath the glow of solar-powered street lamps, plugging in to recharge at convenient community-wide recharging stations. Revolutionary smart-grid technologies will monitor and manage energy use, while smart-home technology will allow residents to operate their homes at maximum efficiency.”

Likelihood it’ll live up to the hype: 7

Kitson might have picked the nation’s toughest real estate market to launch this experiment. Still, his deals with the state of Florida and the utility are promising. In a more progressive (and less foreclosed) part of the country, Babcock Ranch would be a better bet.

TIANJIN, China

Possibly China’s best shot at Dongtan redemption, the Tianjin Eco-City, a joint project with Singapore, aspires to create a home for 350,000 migrants from the countryside in an area described as “wasteland” from decades of salt farming. All water demand will be met by desalination and rain capturing, public transit will cover 90 percent of all transportation, and buildings will be outfitted with renewable energy systems.

Likelihood it’ll live up to the hype: 5

We’ve learned our lesson from Dongtan, and will keep a skeptical eye on Tianjin. Still, the project has sped from concept (revealed in April 2007) to groundbreaking (last September) with ridiculous ease, an enormous contrast to the dozens of other Chinese “eco-cities” that have languished on the drawing boards for years. (Many credit Singapore’s involvement for the actual progress.) It’ll be worth following the reporting of Julian Wong, who writes the great Green Leap Forward blog about China’s sustainability evolution, who most recently posted some great images comparing the lofty plans for Tianjin with progress on the ground.

GREENSBURG, Kansas

Two years ago, a tornado ravaged this town of 1,500 residents, killing 11 and leaving little more than concrete slab foundations and driveways. Even before the twister, the town was struggling with a declining population and a scarcity of jobs. But in the aftermath of the disaster, some folks saw potential in this new blank slate.

And an opportunity for the town to grow into its name. Now Greensburg is rebuilding sustainably—new homes will be 50 percent more energy efficient than old structures, businesses are being decked out with solar panels and green building materials, and the new City Hall plans call for geothermal heat pumps, rainwater collection systems, solar energy cells and ‘living walls’ of plants and grasses.

A “green” town in plaid country is something of an anomaly. And, hopes Daniel Wallach, director of the non-profit Green Town Greensburg, a model for other not-so-liberal heartland communities. “These are conservative people,” said Wallach, “so you talk about conserving energy, conserving money. People get it.”

Likelihood it’ll live up to the hype: 9

Given all the national attention focused on Greensburg, it’s nearly impossible to imagine anything short of great things. Leonardo DiCaprio has produced a show about the town’s plight for Discovery’s Planet Green (soon airing it’s second season), and the respected carbon offset company Native Energy has created a special offset product for the town. And while there won’t be too many lessons for cities to learn from the small town’s eco-resurrection, Greensburg will certainly live up to very lofty expectations and prove the benefits of sustainable design at any scale.

The More People Bike the Safer It Gets

The case of the frilled shark nicely illustrates two important points about our oceans. First, we’re pretty clueless about what they contain. And second, we’re screwing them up.

This trend is due in part to New York’s aggressive and smart Bicycle Network Development Program—begun in the mid-1990s—which expanded bike access on greenways and established a number of new on-street biking routes chosen, in part, for their low conflict with “existing modes of transportation.” This map from their 1997 bicycle master plan shows what they had in mind at the time.

 

But, as Ben Fried and Matt Yglesias point out, there’s also a “safety in numbers” effect. As more people bike, everyone (especially motorists) gets used to accommodating them on the streets, and cycling gets safer.

World Ocean Day Edition

In honor of World Ocean Day (help here), here’s a video of a frilled shark that wandered into shallow waters near Japan in 2007. The frilled shark is a “living fossil”—it’s the only surviving species from the familyChlamydoselachidae and was thought to be extinct for a time.

 

The case of the frilled shark nicely illustrates two important points about our oceans. First, we’re pretty clueless about what they contain. And second, we’re screwing them up.