Jesse Parent [INFLUENCE]

A very interesting review essay by Andrew J. Nathan. Kissinger and Friedberg present two different takes on how Chinese-US relations and its outlook. Kissinger advocates an acceptance of China’s rising, and Friedberg proposes a more defiant US stance.

I’ll let you read the article, and perhaps we’ll all be lucky enough to read the related texts — in addition to Nathan’s own forthcoming book on Chinese security.

The thought in my head, after reading Nathan’s conclusion regarding US strategy (below), has to do with why US may not emphasize human rights as an means to best China…

It is no wonder that Chinese statecraft aims to establish the cultural relativity of human rights and to pose talk of human rights as the enemy of friendship. After all, the failure to respect human rights is a glaring weakness of Chinese power both at home and abroad, whereas promoting human rights has been among the United States’ most successful maneuvers on the wei qi board of world politics. What is surprising is that the United States’ master strategist wants to play this part of the game by Beijing’s rules. Would it not make more sense to emulate Chinese strategy than to yield to it? Emphasizing the principled centrality of the human rights idea to American ideology and keeping the issue active in bilateral relations even though it cannot be solved would seem to be — along with exercising the United States’ strengths in other fields — a good way to set the boundaries within which a rising Chinese power can operate without threatening U.S. interests.

It seems to me that there is not a great deal of unity within the US about how to best go about human rights celebration (or endorsement and support, in general). The country seems to have major rifts on several issues, such as: allowing homosexuals to be in the military, or become married; there is rampant disagreement about abortion (see the Susan G. Komen saga); continuing debate about immigration policy; and, perhaps less directly related, labor unions have come under scrutiny and in many states are facing heavy pressure to disband. This is not to say race relations and religious freedoms/tolerance are completely resolved, either. You could also argue that the economic struggles of the US have flared concerns about the growing wealth gap between rich and poor, and child poverty and related education issues linger (see end of article*).

Considering all these things, the US may not be in as much a position of human rights strength as it would like. Nathan agrees with Friedberg:

In a version of “we have met the enemy and he is us,” Friedberg says that in order to do all this, the United States must restore its economy, keep its scientific edge, protect its advanced technology, and maintain its margin of military advantage.

One can only say amen to the recommendation that the United States pull up its socks…

While I agree that those are worthy (and necessary) endeavors, I would add “strengthening human rights” to that list. It is not the time to rest on the laurels of the past. That said, making progress (or perhaps somehow working towards more national unity) on human rights issues is likely made easier with a robust economy; it’s easier to be enlightened when you are not starving. So perhaps the ultimate foreign policy recommendation for America is to figure out an economic policy that works, first and foremost, as it may be one of the best tools for having a positive influence towards the rest of the world.

(And if you were to ask me what that policy might highlight, I would suggest a very wise energy & resource strategy; a focus on combating structural unemployment; and retooling education - to develop research and technology for the globally competitive future, and for addressing domestic health and aging population. Easier said than done, of course.)

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For more of my thoughts throughout the week and see what news I’m following, I invite you to join the conversation via Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr. Or visit my main website, INFLUENCE with Jesse Parent to view Case Studies, Reports, Editorials and more.

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Fareed Zakaria via Facebook: ….We know that we have an education problem with the poor. Seventy-seven percent of our kids who entered high school graduated. Compare that with other rich countries: 90% in Switzerland, 91% in the UK, 93% in Finland and 97% in Germany. Studies show that dropouts are twice as likely to slip into poverty than high school graduates.

Children in extreme poverty do badly even when they are smart. A recent U.S. study tracked a group of eighth-graders in 1988. It found that students who did very well on a standardized test but were poor were less likely to get through college than their peers who tested poorly but were well-off.

The sad part is, these statistics are reversible. Compare child poverty rates in America and the UK. You’ll see that the UK’s rates were halved within a decade from the mid-1990s. The U.S. has actually risen since then.

There’s no secret sauce. Tony Blair’s Labour government simply made reducing child poverty a priority through various programs.

… (See Zakaria’s GPS Blog here)

Mini-Editorial | A very curious article that is worth looking into. Germany cutting solar subsidies? Why? The article explains.

In light of the apprehension about nuclear energy following Japan’s meltdown, and now the unflattering situations of both Germany and the US (with its solar industry’s lingering dark cloud of bumbled Solyndra investments), the outlook for new energy developments seems to have taken a blow.

Lomborg concludes with stating governments must focus more on R&D before stressing production. Yet considering another recent Project Syndicate article, it must be pondered how these setbacks will influence public pressure (Political Will?) to request  continued R&D in a time of global economic uncertainty.

COPENHAGEN – One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere.

Illustration by Newsart

Germany once prided itself on being the “photovoltaic world champion”, doling out generous subsidies – totaling more than $130 billion, according to research from Germany’s Ruhr University – to citizens to invest in solar energy. But now the German government is vowing to cut the subsidies sooner than planned, and to phase out support over the next five years. What went wrong?

There is a fundamental problem with subsidizing inefficient green technology: it is affordable only if it is done in tiny, tokenistic amounts. Using the government’s generous subsidies, Germans installed 7.5 gigawatts of photovoltaic (PV) capacity last year, more than double what the government had deemed “acceptable.” It is estimated that this increase alone will lead to a $260 hike in the average consumer’s annual power bill

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For more of my thoughts throughout the week and see what news I’m following, I invite you to join the conversation via Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr. Or visit my main website, INFLUENCE with Jesse Parent to view Case Studies, Reports, Editorials and more.

____

A country to watch develop in the 21st century, China’s impact on climate change, the global economy, and development in general will be historic.

Can Smarter Growth Guide
China’s Urban Building Boom? The world has never seen anything like China’s dizzying urbanization boom, which has taken a heavy environmental toll. But efforts are now underway to start using principles of green design and smart growth to guide the nation’s future development.

by david biello

Coal money, generated by one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, has built a new Ordos, a municipality in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. A modern city is rising there from the steppes, featuring monumental government buildings, an imposing museum, and row after row of apartment buildings and subdivisions, all designed to accommodate more than a million new residents. Spacious roads wait for cars to zoom between residential and commercial areas or feed into the highway that leads to the existing — and inhabited — old city, some 15 miles away. But cars and people remain sparse.

Ordos is emblematic of China’s urbanization boom, a construction frenzy unlike anything seen in the history of the planet. Today, half of the nation’s 1.35 billion people live in cities. From the outskirts of Shenyang in the cold northeast to the mountainous precincts of Kunming in the subtropical southwest, buildings are rising to accommodate the people now crowding into the 170 cities in China that host more than a million residents. Across the country, construction firms have built some 2 billion square meters of new apartments, offices, and skyscrapers annually in recent years. The national bird of China has become the construction crane.

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I will have to include this report in my upcoming case study about Japan’s nuclear energy situation…

While I don’t envy Japan’s position, I have faith that the people of Japan can provide a valuable lesson in what can happen and how to rebuild following such a disaster. Unfortunately, it seems they will be leading the way in showing the world with how to cope with energy situations that may become prevalent in the 21st century.

New Data: Nuclear Down, Carbon Intensity Up in Japan

Japan’s nuclear power fleet has sat idle since a powerful earthquake struck the nation in March 2011, driving a sharp increase in fossil fuel imports and a spike in the nation’s carbon intensity.

By Mark Caine and Jesse Jenkins

Japan’s nuclear power fleet has sat idle since a powerful earthquake struck the nation in March 2011, driving a sharp increase in fossil fuel imports and a spike in the nation’s carbon intensity, new data shows. Together, these changes have battered Japan’s trade balance, increased the carbon intensity of its energy supply, and raised important questions about its future CO2 emissions trajectory.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster have exerted substantial impacts on the nation’s economy and energy system. Given Japan’s reliance on nuclear power, its lack of domestic fossil resources, the magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami, and the technical and political implications of a major nuclear crisis, these impacts were largely predictable.

But although it was clear early on that Japan’s triple disaster signalled major economic and technical changes in Japan, only recently has good data become available to shed light on the specifics of the changes underway.*

Two notable trends emerge from this data, both relating to Japanese energy supply. Together, these trends are exerting profound impacts on Japan’s trade balance, the carbon intensity of its energy supply, and its future CO2 emission trajectory.

Carbon Intensity Spikes as Nuclear Plants Idle

First, the carbon intensity of Japan’s energy mix has spiked following the shut-down of most of the nation’s nuclear power fleet, which previously provided about 30 percent of the nation’s electricity and anchored the nation’s low-carbon energy plans. Currently, just 4 of the nation’s 50 remaining nuclear reactors are online. To replace this lost generation, Japanese utilities have ramped up imports and use of coal, oil, and natural gas, while industrial consumers have been more reliant on diesel generators to guarantee reliable energy supply.

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I would venture to say this article hints at on of the challenges of humankind in general; it has applications from global finance to climate change…right down to why people don’t make important changes in their day-to-day lives.

…If the problem has not been experienced before, the public is not convinced of the potential costs of inaction. And, if action prevents the problem, the public never experiences the averted calamity, and voters therefore penalize political leaders for the immediate costs that the action entails. Even if politicians have perfect foresight of the disaster that awaits if nothing is done, they may have little ability to persuade voters, or less insightful party members, that the short-term costs must be paid.

Talk is cheap, and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the status quo usually appears comfortable enough. So leaders’ ability to take corrective action increases only with time, as some of the costs of inaction are experienced.

Calamity can still be averted if the costs of inaction escalate steadily. The worst problems, however, are those with “inaction costs” that remain invisible for a long time, but increase suddenly and explosively. By the time the leader has the mandate to act, it may be too late.

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I would like to start a case study of DoD & EPA’s interactions. Here’s one reason why…

 The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced Dorothy Robyn, deputy under secretary of defense for installations and environment, and Paul Anastas, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator, signed an agreement that formalizes the partnership between the Defense Department and EPA to develop and implement technologies that will help create sustainable American military bases all over the world.

            Under this memorandum of understanding (MOU), DoD and the EPA’s Office of Research and Development will collaborate in the development of innovative technologies to help create sustainable and resilient military bases across the country and overseas.  The cutting-edge research of EPA and DoD scientists and engineers will be used to develop and demonstrate tools and technologies that will aid DoD in achieving its vision of sustainability.

The more awareness we have of how we function and operate, the better. Very interesting case study of Bangalore via Stockholm Environment Institute.

SEI project, presented at the Bangalore World Water Summit, maps ‘urban metabolism’ to support planning for sustainability.

Rapid population growth and economic activity in Indian cities have overwhelmed their ecological support base, leading to chronic shortages in electricity, water and road space while polluting the physical environment.

Aiming to better understand these dynamics – and help stakeholders grapple with them – SEI last year launched the project Urban Metabolic Mapping: Securing the Biophysical Foundation of Indian Cities, with Bangalore as the initial focus.

The idea, says project leader (and Bangalore native) Vishal Mehta, is to look at the city as a “living organism” to show how economic, social and demographic characteristics drive consumption.

“Much like a living organism consumes resources and produces waste, a city also consumes resources, its waste re-entering the natural ecosystem,” he says. “What are the limits to our natural resource base? What is the impact of the city’s water consumption and waste-water patterns on the future availability of safe and adequate water? How does a city’s extraction of water resources impact other communities in the larger river basin? These are central questions to assessing sustainable management of resources.”

BANGALORE GATED COMMUNITY / FLICKR-ED YOURDON

Bangalore as a case study
Bangalore has been one of India’s great success stories, Mehta notes, booming as a high-tech capital.  But this boom has also brought a surge in population: a 3 million gain in the last 10 years, to 8.5 million – three times the previous two decades’ growth. The local utilities and infrastructure can’t keep up with the growing demand for resources and services, resulting in disruptions and unmet needs.

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I agree…

The real problem on U.S. energy policy is that we can’t seem to make fundamental decisions. There is no perfect energy source. Bureaucrats may issue licenses, but the Congress, the Administration, and the public at large will make the choices. Until they’re all making choices that recognize and accept the real-world consequences, we’ll barely make a dent in the problem.

I know I keep whining about the same “problem”, but I’m working on it, I promise. Just gathering more data….

Professor Sam Codjoe, Deputy Director of RIPS, said African institutions are being confronted with the challenge of mainstreaming the impact of climate change into their development planning and policy and there is the need to strengthen the national adaptation strategies and provide viable roadmaps for development investments.

The bottom line is, I can’t see how maneuvers like this are going to help anything, no less foster a serious energy discussion within the United States.

The Earth’s surface is mostly water, yet across increasingly large swaths of the planet, H2O reservoirs are drying up. This isn’t a metaphor, and it’s not hyperbole. It’s a fact that’s changing the destinies of companies and nations.

Three of the world’s greatest rivers, the Colorado in the U.S., the Nile in Egypt and the Yellow River in China, have been so depleted by cities, farms, factories and dams along their banks that they often no longer reach the sea. Growth in the desert city of Las Vegas, which depends on Colorado River water contained by the Hoover Dam, has been stunted not only by a spectacular real estate crash, but by a 46 percent drop in the amount of water in Lake Mead, behind the dam. Simply put, there’s no more water to be taken.

Read Bloomberg’s energy & sustainability news.

It’s not that the world is running out of water, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental research organization in San Francisco. It’s that there’s not enough water where it’s needed, and it can’t be easily transported. Globally, the amount of renewable water available for each inhabitant has dropped from over 10,000 cubic meters in 1990 to 7,770 in 2010. It could trickle to 4,870 by 2050, as the world’s population grows.

More in the battle for hearts and minds of the people.

John Hanger is described in the article as:

There are real environmental concerns about gas drilling, says John Hanger, an environmental activist, former Pennsylvania environmental secretary and sometimes sharp critic of the gas industry — but the concerns have little to do with fracking.

Who is John Hanger? Depends on who you ask, it seems. A quick search for John Hanger reveals a variety of those who think highly, and not so highly of him. The above quote is from the NY Post.

Yet elsewhere on the internet...

In a documentary about natural gas development that premiered this week on HBO, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the environment receives a decidedly unflattering portrayal at the hands of Josh Fox, who made the movie Gasland.

Fox portrays Hanger - a liberal who spent years in the mainstream environmental movement - as an equivocating tool of the natural gas industry. In one of the film’s signature moments, Fox pulls out a bottle of water he says was polluted by a Marcellus Shale gas well and challenges the state’s top environmental regulator to drink it.

As usual, it seems to depend on who you ask. A search for Hanger reveals this line of tags from Energy In Depth http://www.energyindepth.org/tag/john-hanger/ They seem to think fairly well of Mr Hanger.

For what it’s worth, Energy In Depth describes itself as…

Launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 2009, Energy In Depth (EID) is a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsibly developing America’s onshore energy resource base – especially abundant sources of oil and natural gas from shale and other “tight” reservoirs across the country. It’s an effort that benefits directly from the support, guidance and technical insight of a broad segment of America’s oil and natural gas industry, led in Washington by IPAA, but directed on the ground by our many affiliates — and IPAA’s more than 6,000 members — in the states.

Can think tanks sponsored by organizations devoted to the usage of one type of fuel be counted on to provide sincere and insightful criticism to that fuel? Is that a conflict of interest?

Nothing new in the realm of energy debates for NY’s hydrofracking decision.

Brulle and his fellow researchers seem to presume as much, for they write: “Given the vested economic interests reflected in this polarization, it seems doubtful that any communication process focused on persuading individuals will have much impact.” The intractable politics of climate change leads them to conclude:

Therefore, any communications strategy that holds out the promise of effectiveness must be linked to a broader political strategy. Political conflicts are ultimately resolved through political mobilization and activism. Further efforts to address the issue of climate change need to take this into account.

It’s a good piece. I feel like stressing/emphasizing something, though: the planet will exist whether or not favorable conditions for human beings; this isn’t just a sort of altruistic adventure to save trees. The delusion is that our well being is separate from the planet’s. We have no capacity to sustain ourselves anywhere else but this planet, and our ability to do so, at present, is non-existant as per the trajectory we are on; so something is going to have to change.

It’s going to take more than switching lightbulbs, it’s going to take the changing of how things are done in very broad ways. Those who are benefiting most, or have the easiest time of living, as things are will likely be most averse to changing - if typical human nature holds sway. How we feed ourselves and produce our energy and in relation trade and commerce, all of it will be affected, one way or another.

He’s right, though, it is about awareness ultimately.

In order to save our planet, a few steps need to be taken by everyone, and the cumulative efforts will give us a more sustained planet to pass on the baton of life. The first place to start is by conserving energy resources available. This can be achieved if everyone turns off the fans, lights, televisions and every other electronic appliance whenever they are not in use. Conducting a regular servicing of household devices is also an essential part to utilize less energy, thereby reducing the menace of global warming. In addition, proper maintenance of cars and other motor devices is one of the most important steps to be taken in order to save this planet. Exhaust from vehicles has been known to be a major contributor to environmental pollution.

Considering the number of problems and challenges plaguing the world, the task of saving the planet is a duty we all have to accept. Think about taking a walk when it is not necessary to take the car. Doing this will be a boost to health, save some gas and ultimately save the planet. There are a whole lot of these small actions that can be taken by every individual. Every inhabitants of the planet should contribute their bit and these will accumulate into all the differences we need to save the planet.

In the meantime, the most significant of all changes is the modification of consciousness, which is important for the purpose of reaching out to fellow human beings. Forming resistance against this change will harm our resolution to tackle the modern challenges surrounding us. Moreover, as the world travels through the magnified forces of globalization, the age-long rational mode of consciousness will soon become a source of danger to all humanity. Without doubt, the future implications that are expected to arise from the surfacing of the empathetic consciousness will be profound and extensive. Therefore, the time to act is now. This is our planet. We have to save the Earth!

This is an open access journal !

Zakaria: How oil is propping up Putin

By Fareed Zakaria, TIME

If you’re trying to understand the recent protests against the Putin regime in Russia, one of the best guides is an outspoken columnist who has been writing trenchant essays in the nation’s leading newspapers over the past month. “Political competition is the heartbeat of democracy,” he writes, noting the absence of such competition in contemporary Russia. He describes Russia today as “very different from what it was in the early 2000s,” with a middle class that is now economically stable and connected to the world and is demanding political rights. “Today, the quality of our state does not match civil society’s readiness to participate in it,” he writes.

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Putin seems to understand Russia’s problems better than your average dictator. But he does not seem to understand that he is the source of those problems in many people’s eyes. In Putin’s worldview, he is the savior of modern Russia, the man who stopped its descent into chaos and poverty in the 1990s. His opponents see him as a warmed-over KGB apparatchik presiding over a new, improved Soviet state. Neither view is entirely accurate. The real hero of Russia’s rescue was oil. The dramatic rise in the average Russian’s income has been a consequence not of Putin’s policies but of oil prices. Russia’s future - and Putin’s - will likely depend on this factor and not on Putin’s skills, the opposition’s strengths or the power of Facebook.

The price of oil when Putin came to office was $27 a barrel. From that point it began an almost unbroken rise and is now $116. And oil is the lifeblood of Russia’s economy, providing two-thirds of its exports and half of federal revenue. It’s not just oil: 85% of Russia’s exports are raw materials or primary commodities, and their prices have also risen to unprecedented levels over the past 10 years. The Russian state has used the revenue to dole out largesse across the country. It is widely believed in the West that Putin stays in power through repression. In fact, he does so in larger measure through patronage and bribery.

Read the full article at TIME.