Here are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.

• China’s willingness to cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan over its East China Sea dispute woke up the larger world to the heavy dependency on China for supplying these key inputs into the modern (and green, in particular) industrial economy. Chinese attempts to take back their shot across the bow are bound to fail, as illustrated by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke’s call for the G20 to guarantee rare earth access, Wednesday at the Wilson Center.

• The National Geographic headline, “Replacing Oil Addiction With Metals Dependence?” raises another key long-term question, explored in detail on NSB in several previous posts.

Speaking yesterday at the Wilson Center, Circle of Blue Senior Editor and New York Times reporter Keith Schneider called his organization’s latest project, reporting on the intersection of finite water resources and growing demand for energy around the world, one of the most important stories of his career. First in the series is Choke Point: U.S.:

This summer, Secretary Clinton gave a speech at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Hanoi that Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called “in effect an attack on China.” What did Clinton say that prompted such a direct response? She called for negotiations over the rights to resource extraction in the South China Sea to be multilateral rather than bilateral:

Over the past year, there have been a series of new initiatives on U.S.-China energy cooperation. These initiatives have focused primarily on low-carbon development, and have covered everything from renewables and energy efficiency to clean vehicles and carbon capture and storage. Central to the long-term success of these efforts will be strengthening the U.S.’s incomplete understanding of China’s electricity grid, as all of the above issues are inextricably linked to the power grid itself.

“Climate Change and China’s Agricultural Sector: An Overview of Impacts, Adaptation and Mitigation” from the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) explores mitigation and adaptation strategies to avoid the worst effects of climate change in China’s farming sector. The authors, Jinxia Wang, Jikun Huang and Scott Rozelle, point out that, although often overlooked in favor of the industrial sector, a disproportionate amount (greater than 15 percent) of China’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Challenges include over-fertilization, high methane levels, water pollution, and water scarcity. Wang, Huan, and Rozelle predict that trade “can and should be used to help China mitigate the impacts of climate change” and programs promoting better calibration of fertilizer dosages and “conservation tilling” practices will help farmers reduce emissions.

From the Guardian’s DataBlog comes an excellent overview of some of the extreme weather affecting the globe this summer, from the devastating floods in Pakistan which have inflicted “huge losses” to crops and exacerbated an already tenuous security situation, to the wildfires in Russia which have smothered the capital in dangerous smog and crippled domestic wheat supplies.

“Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago,” writes author and graphic artist Mark McCormick.

“Copenhagen was many things to many people,” said Chatham House’s Cleo Paskal, in a video interview with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, but “what was very clear was that India, specifically, was playing quite a strong, clear role in deciding how alignments would be working.” We spoke to Paskal following her presentation at a recent Wilson Center event.

As the world moves toward clean energy alternatives, companies in the United States and China are working to develop new, more cost-efficient manufacturing processes and increase their shares of the domestic and export markets for new renewable energy technologies. Controlling production lines and growing market share will certainly have important economic implications for both countries. But over the long term, a broader perspective suggests that cooperative initiatives to increase the capacity and reduce the cost of renewable energy technologies may produce benefits on both sides of the Pacific.