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01 Dec 09

Chinese View of Greatest National Threats | The Progressive Realist

  • Like statistics on almost anything coming out of China, opinion-survey results from there should be considered approximations of reality at best. (For instance, it is just about impossible to get reliable results from the poor, rural majority of China's population. Therefore polls unavoidably make the responding public seem more educated, urbanized, richer, etc than the whole Chinese public is.)
  • The Lowy Institute, in Sydney, today released a poll of Chinese attitudes about their own country
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18 Nov 09

Op-Ed Columnist - What They Really Believe - NYTimes.com

  • But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.
  • My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.
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China's middle class threatens US resource security by Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • The nugget of his speech that really struck
    me though, being a "natural
    security"     nerd, was when Casey said that the "middle class in China is
    larger than the entire population of the United States; this will increase
    pressure on resources." A few sentences later he listed this as a source of
    future conflict.
11 Nov 09

Harvard Business Review: SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability « Climate Progress

  • Product image of Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top

  • Instead, let’s just think about the business benefits of changing our products and processes to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of the atmospheric benefits. How will changing to a lower-carbon economy help companies? Well, there’s real money involved here — energy and other resources are getting fundamentally more expensive over time as demand around the world rises and supply gets harder to find. Oddly, the SuperFreakonomics authors acknowledge this Econ 101 supply problem in passing with the statement: “In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years…to make.” So why wouldn’t we want to move away from a declining resource?


    Put really simply, it saves money to reduce greenhouse emissions. It makes businesses more competitive to use less energy and to help customers do the same. It also creates jobs in a wide range of industries that help build a low-carbon economy — from the obvious solar panel builders and installers to the less sexy home weatherizers, electric vehicle manufacturers and mechanics, and building efficiency consultants and experts.

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The Oil Drum | Geologists Vote that Peak Oil is a Concern

  • The debate took place in the plenary session, with a change in speakers from the original announcement. BP chief geologist David Jenkins argued for the motion that peak oil is "no longer a concern," and Jeremy Leggett argued against, incorporating the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security conclusions into his case. At the end of the debate, approximately five hundred oil-industry geologists voted. Only about a third voted in favor of the motion "Peak oil is no longer a concern." The debate has been written up in November's issue of Petroleum Review.

Eunomia » “No Limits”

  • There is another passage in Continetti’s Palin article that tells us a lot about the mentality of Palinites and those who would pander to them:


    Dismiss airy prophecies about “peak oil,” “green jobs,” and “limits to growth.” Pledge, instead, that Americans will have access to as much of the cheapest, cleanest energy they need to stimulate the economy. Palin is right. No limits.

  • In other words, the right-populism of which Palin can supposedly be the great leader is going to a movement of irresponsible consumption, limitless appetite and unfettered desire. This is so obviously at odds with both Christian stewardship and conservative temperament that it scarcely seems necessary to mention it, but here we find the moral vacuum at the heart of Palinism. It happens to be expressed here in connection with the use of natural resources, but it conveys hubris, arrogance and self-indulgence and indifference to the welfare of the commonwealth that will be inherited by those not yet born. “No limits” is the slogan either of the anarchist or the libertine. There is no sane populism that would embrace such an idea, and it certainly has nothing to do with anything recognizable as conservatism.
02 Nov 09

The Associated Press: As US looks for exit in Afghanistan, China digs in

  • At a former al-Qaida stronghold southeast of the Afghan capital, a state-owned Chinese company is at work on a $3 billion mine project to tap one of the world's largest unexploited copper reserves, a potential financial boon for an impoverished country mired in war.
  • Aynak
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09 Oct 09

What’s Your Consumption Factor? - New York Times

  • What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.
  • The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.
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27 Sep 09

Anyone Want to Bet the Planet?

  • Some people say that the prices of the metals went down because technology triumphed over geology, as it always will. Of course there are fewer minerals in the ground than there were 10 years ago, but new ore deposits have been discovered, there are new mining and refining processes, and new materials are substituting for old ones. Microchips, satellite signals, and fiber optics are replacing copper wires. Food is packaged more in aluminum and plastic and less in tin. Fluorescent lights are replacing tungsten bulbs; hard ceramics are replacing tungsten steel.
  • When the bet was struck in 1980 mineral prices were at a peak, because the second, Shah-induced oil shock had inflated the prices of all energy-intensive commodities. Since then the world economy has stagnated, energy efficiency has improved, and oil price has plunged, carrying with it the prices of metals.
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28 Aug 09

Water shortage threatens 2 million Iraqis | FP Passport

  • But the damage of below-average rainfall for two winters in a row has been exacerbated by a number of new dams built in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, sucking dry the once-mighty Euphrates River that has provided the region with water for centuries.
10 Aug 09

Would Climate Skeptics Listen If The Messenger Was The Military? : TreeHugger

  • In it, Broder reports that for some time the military has been factoring in climate change into their war game scenarios. They expect that in the decades to come, global warming will cause population displacement, mass drought, and food shortages that will provide the U.S. will significant national security threats.
  • Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

    An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

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