Showing posts by Meaghan Parker.
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Three Out of Three Candidates Agree: Climate Is a Security Issue
›April 17, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerIt was hard to tell which environmental adviser was representing which presidential candidate at a recent news conference sponsored by SEJ on climate change (watch; listen; read)—all three explicitly named it a security priority, and called for a mandatory cap and trade program and the development of new technology. (The question of whether to build new nuclear power plants revealed the only major difference: Clinton’s generally con, McCain is pro, and Obama falls somewhere in the middle.)
Clinton adviser and WilmerHale partner Todd Stern charged out of the gate first, deeming climate a “first-order national security issue” that is “going to exacerbate food security problems. It’s going to exacerbate water scarcity. It’s going to make desertification worse, increase resource competition, and produce, undoubtedly, large-scale migration and refugee problems and increase border tension.” Citing the CNA report, he called climate change a “threat multiplier for instability in volatile parts of the world.” He also quoted Sir Nicholas Stern’s claim that climate change has the potential to cause “economic disruption at a scale of the Great Depression and the wars of the last century.” Clinton will establish a National Energy Council (à la the National Security Council), form an “E8” of major emitters, and increase R&D; efforts—including creating a government agency for energy R&D; modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). No proposals, however, on how to mitigate the existing impacts on our current security situation.
Quoting McCain, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said climate change was “a serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenge.” Taking a harder security stance, Woolsey linked U.S. oil dependence to terrorism not only because it increases “our vulnerability to cutoffs, to terrorist attacks in Middle East” on energy infrastructure, but also because oil fuels oil fuels “Saudi Arabia’s spreading of its hateful Wahhabi doctrine, into madrasas and religious schools around the world”—and funds Iran’s belligerence as well. Unlike Clinton’s representative, Woolsey did not focus on environmental degradation’s links to conflict. He supports market-based incentives to encourage the commercialization of existing technologies—such as plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles, new lighter car body construction, alternative liquid fuels—that could end the “oil monopoly on transportation” and thus fight terrorism at same time. Somewhat cynically, he promoted this vastly oversimplified argument as a politically practical way to convince climate change skeptics to back mitigation efforts.
Like his boss, Obama’s representative Jason Grumet took a big-picture approach, telling the crowd that Obama “gets it”; he recognizes that energy “affects our national security in a dramatic way” and thus requires “dramatic change”—a fundamental transformation of our energy policies to “make us safe and secure.” However, he offered few specific details. Obama supports the development of clean coal (he’s from Illinois, putative site of the now-stalled FutureGen project) and advanced nuclear power, but says we must solve the existing problems with nuclear technology before beginning new development. -
“Bahala na”? Population Growth Brings Water Crisis to the Philippines
›January 4, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerA report by Filipino TV journalist Melclaire R. Sy-Delfin—recent Global Media Award winner and subject of an ECSP podcast—warns that a water crisis could threaten the 88 million residents of the Philippines as early as 2010. According to Delfin, 27 percent of Filipinos still lack access to drinking water, despite successful government programs to increase supply.
Why? “There has been too much focus on developing new sources of supply rather than on better management of existing ones,” said Department of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Angelo Reyes at a January 2007 conference. Almost all of the country’s watersheds are in critical condition, devastated by logging, erosion, sedimentation, mining, overgrazing, and pollution.
Population growth is also erasing the government’s gains. “From 1995 to 2005, the government has successfully provided water for an additional 23.04 million. However, the population increased by 24.5 million over the same period,” National Water Resources Board Director Ramon Alikpala told a UNDP meeting.
Growing by more than 2 percent annually, the Philippines’ population could top 90 million next year. Delfin told a Wilson Center audience she has met “women with eight children who want to stop giving birth but no knowledge of how to do it,” and decried the “lack of natural leadership” from President Gloria Arroyo.
The Philippines House of Representatives’ version of the 2008 budget—currently in conference—includes almost 2 billion pesos for family planning programs. “We cannot achieve genuine and sustainable human development if we continue to default in addressing the population problem,” Rep. Edsel Lagman said in the Philippine Star.
However, current Environment Secretary Lito Atienza said at the Asia-Pacific Water Summit that population growth should not be considered part of the country’s water problem. But his opposition to family planning is well-known: Advocates in the Philippines recently launched a suit against him for removing all contraceptives from Manila’s clinics when he was mayor.
“We must not leave things to fatal luck when we can develop the tools to prevent harm,” said President Arroyo at the launch of UNDP’s report on water scarcity. That’s an encouraging attitude, but without focused efforts to improve degraded resources and reduce population growth, the Filipino philosophy “Bahala na”— roughly equivalent to “que sera, sera”—may let the wells run dry. -
Pop Goes the Environment: Op-Eds Break the P-E Silence
›April 11, 2007 // By Meaghan ParkerThe population-environment connection is riding the climate change bandwagon into the Op-Ed columns—at least overseas. The Observer’s Juliette Jowit lays out four reasons why “No one is willing to address the accelerating growth in the world’s population” including:“[T]he uncomfortable suspicion that environmentalism is a soft cover for more objectionable population agendas to stop or reduce immigration or growth in developing countries. Sometimes it might be. But that doesn’t take away the underlying fact: that more people use more resources and create more pollution.”
But, she concludes, this is no reason to “to ignore one half of the world’s biggest problem: the population effect on climate change.” The lively comment board takes sides on this sometimes-controversial linkage with gusto.
London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer argues in the New Zealand Herald that despite some progress, the “Population bomb [is] still ticking away” in many developing countries. Like Jowitt, he bemoans population’s perceived political incorrectness, which means it “scarcely gets a mention even in discussions on climate change.”
But not talking about population growth is a “failure of government”—especially when the consequences include not only poverty, but war, he says:“Often, however, the growing pressure of people on the land leads indirectly to catastrophic wars: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Angola, and Burundi have all been devastated by chronic, many-sided civil wars, and all seven appear in the top 10 birth-rate list. Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, which have suffered similar ordeals, are just out of the top 10.”
Aside from the rough correlation he draws between fertility rate and civil conflict, Dyer doesn’t cite any reasons or research supporting this indirect link. Experts writing in the ECSP Report’s “Population and Conflict” series provide a more nuanced look at this relationship.
