by David Steven | May 12, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, North America
John McCain’s out on the campaign trail today promoting his green credentials, but its clear that his climate change proposals would put a McCain administration on collision course with many, maybe most, of its international partners.
Here’s McCain’s headline promise on climate:
By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by 2020, a return to 1990 levels, and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of sixty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050.
At first glance, this sounds pretty compatible with the ranges that the Kyoto countries (almost all countries bar the US) agreed to be ‘guided by’ in their side negotiation at Bali. Following the lead of the IPCC, these countries said that:
Global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) need to peak in the next 10-15 years and be reduced to very low levels, well below half of levels in 2000 by the middle of the twenty-first century.
McCain’s 60% by 2050 is ‘well below half’ of course (especially when you note the different baseline). But that fails to take into account how Americans emit at the moment. The US will have to cut much further and faster than McCain realises, if we are going to hit the global target.
Breaking out emissions on a per capita basis shows why:
- According to Nick Stern (pdf), per capita emissions will need to be around 2-2.5 tonnes gigatons CO2e by 2050, based on a population of 9 billion people.
- The US government’s own stats, however, show that its per capita emissions were around 24 tonnes gigatons in 2006 (based on a population of 300 million).
- McCain’s 60% reduction would take them down to just under 6 tonnes gigatons, based on a population that had grown to 420 million people (and obviously higher if population growth is less rapid.
In other words, the US would still be two to three times above the global average in 2050. By mid-century, under McCain’s plan, its per capita emissions would be higher than China’s – at around 5 tonnes gigatons – are today! (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | May 11, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
According to the latest Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index (CFPI), 60% of Americans say reducing energy dependence would strengthen their nation’s security “a great deal.” The report shows that the public has begun to zero in on economic and energy issues, and believe that becoming less dependent on other countries for their supply of energy should be the first priority for the US national security strategy.
Daniel Yankelovich, Public Agenda’s Chairman suggests that the most important thing for politicians and policy makers to take away is that the public’s concerns about energy policy aren’t limited to rising gas prices, Americans are connecting energy policy to national security issues in ways that they didn’t a few years ago.
A year ago, 29 percent said Iraq was the biggest problem while the economy barely registered at three percent as a foreign policy concern. Today only 19% think Iraq is a problem, while 11% say the economy’s the biggest international problem on par with terrorism at 10 %. The report also highlights how anxious Americans are… at 132 its down 4 points from last year but is still very high since records began.
by Richard Gowan | May 11, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
…or so suggest the exit polls after today’s national elections – see why here.
by Richard Gowan | May 11, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system
From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.
by Richard Gowan | May 11, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Exactly how bad has the first half of this month been for the UN? Where does one start? You could choose Burma, where the international organization’s ability to deliver aid in a hostile climate has been hurled into doubt. Or Sudan, where Darfuri rebels sallied forth to attack Khartoum, demonstrating exactly what they think of the security offered by the struggling UN forces on their patch. But the worst news of all (from an institutional rather than humanitarian point of view, given the Burmese horror) may yet prove to be that from Lebanon.
The spread of fighting between the government’s backers and Hezbollah, apparently delayed rather than halted by an attempted deal on Saturday, has highlighted a challenge for the UN that I’ve muttered about here before. The 12,000+ mainly European UN troops in South Lebanon are mandated to (i) support the army and (ii) prevent the flow of arms to Hezbollah. But it has been an open secret that the peacekeepers have a variety of understandings with Hezbollah to avoid trouble. As I pointed out in two magazine articles (here and here) it has never been clear how they would balance these ideals and deals in a full-on crisis.
One can cry wolf too often: I also predicted that such a crisis might emerge in December, along with simultaneous military set-backs for European forces in Kosovo and Chad. And I scored 0 out of 3. Or rather, all three trouble-spots stayed quiet-ish up to the start of 2008. But in the ensuing four months, it has all come to pass pretty much as predicted. In February, Chad blew up as the EU tried to deploy troops – in March, the UN and NATO had to fight it out with Serb rioters in Kosovo.
Two out of three, in this case, ain’t good. And Lebanon?
In April, there were signs that the modus vivendi between the UN and Hezbollah was starting to erode: the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that peacekeepers attempting to inspect a suspicious truck for arms were driven off by gun-toting militants. The UN denied this, but there have long been rumors that European UN units had backed off on meeting Hezbollah patrols, or refused to patrol at night.
And now Lebanon looks close to civil war, and if this starts to be felt in the UN’s operational zone in the south of the country (not yet the site of fighting) it’s hard to believe that the Lebanese government, the Israelis and the U.S. won’t demand that the peacekeepers get tough. As Global Dashboard’s Peacekeeping Cassandra, I’m also on record as saying that I fear they’ll run away instead. Let’s see.
