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COPENHAGEN—Under the vaulting sloped-glass roof of Copenhagen’s Bella Center, the excitement is palpable. I’m here for the two-week long “COP 15,” or the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention on Climate Change. The world’s environment ministers have arrived in advance of the historic gathering of 110 heads of state coming next week.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride so far. On Friday, spirits lifted after much uncertainty that any sort of deal could be struck, when a draft agreement that seemed to have some consensus finally circulated. It said that—using 1990 levels as a baseline—all countries together should reduce emissions from 50 to 95 percent by 2050, with rich countries cutting emissions from 25 to 40 percent by 2020.

But then at a ministerial meeting on Sunday, the United States dropped a bomb: it couldn’t commit to a legally binding target for emissions reductions because Congress hasn’t approved the proposal. Not surprisingly, Canada and other rich nations followed suit, saying essentially, “well, then we won’t either.”

“When that happened, the whole dialogue broke down,” said Papua New Guinea Minister Kevin Conrad, who was present. In rebuff, lesser-developed countries basically told the rich world to “sort out your problems internally and then you come back and talk to us about the things we can do.” Then they walked out, stopping negotiations for most of today.

By Monday, the conference chair, Danish Minister Connie Hedegaard, had managed to overcome the deadlock through some quick diplomacy. But the peace is fragile, and there’s an increasingly pessimistic sense among a number of country delegates and representatives from non-governmental organizations about the possibility of any significant deal being struck here.

The pessimism is understandable, given the vast differences in perspectives. For example, last week Washington scoffed at the idea that there exists a “climate debt” that industrialized countries owe to the world (an idea based on the inconvenient fact that wealthy nations have caused the vast majority of the current problem). But in a developing world press conference I just attended, cries were made for “twenty-four trillion dollars in reparations for climate change damages, as well as a radical reduction of emissions in the North.” Meanwhile, 1,200 protesters were taken into police custody over the weekend. Some of them held up signs that read, “Blah, Blah, Blah. Take Action!” referring to the perception that nothing of substance had come of last week’s negotiations.

Against this backdrop, the world’s leaders will soon arrive to try and hammer out the contentious bargaining issues like financing and exactly how deeply to cut emissions. It’s only going to get more interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

Some “5,500 journalists and 700 in the American delegation alone,” reported a London newspaper, describing the 1997 Kyoto global warming jamboree. And given the world’s newly awakened interest in climate change, there will doubtless be many, many more at the follow-up conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year.

If only one-tenth of those would turn up for a conference on supplying pure water and giving every girl a basic primary education, then we might be getting somewhere with the most tangible pressing environmental need of our age. (And one that cannot be scientifically questioned, to boot.)

Still, give Kyoto its due. This is the way issues get placed firmly on the political map. “I have only a modest proposal,” said Kierkegaard, “to make the true state of affairs known.” It may be the wrong issue, it may be an overblown issue; but if you believe in getting attention, this was the way to do it.

This approach has its dangers. Crying wolf can be counterproductive. More than 33 years ago I wrote a column for the The Washington Post that was provocative enough to trigger an editorial alongside. Having spoken with most of the world’s top climatologists I pronounced that the world was cooling, and dangerously so. It could trigger an ice age.

One of my sources, Stephen Schneider of the University of Stanford, pooh-poohed the evidence of the dangers of an increase in carbon dioxide. Where is he now, a third of a century later? A fervent advocate of the greenhouse effect and global warming and lambasting the press for equivocating. It is “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory],” he is reported to have said with a straight face at the Global Climate Change Roundtable in Washington, hosted by former Vice President Al Gore.

Twenty years ago, the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” introduced us to the wonders of exaggerated extrapolation. Its computer models were summarized for the non-initiated by the analogy of the lily pond. Where was the lily that doubled its size every day the day before it covered the pond? Answer: Only half way across the pond.

Yet none of the Club of Rome’s projections have stood the test of time. Neither vanishing raw materials (never so abundant), skyrocketing oil prices (back to 2006 levels), food supplies (ever increasing), nor population growth (although still a curse in many countries, it has peaked in the three countries that matter most—India, China and Brazil). None of these benchmarks has threatened humanity the way the Club anticipated. Even the AIDS doomsayers with some of their wilder projections overlook the lesson of the medieval Black Death—all plagues peak of their own accord in due time.

In fact, if we look through the well-publicized environmental causes of the 1970s, we can see how many false notes there were in the doom songs. There was the alleged destruction of the ozone layer by the newly introduced Concorde airliner. There was the pollution of ocean waters. There was DDT poisoning, the issue that made Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring famous. But as time passed it became clear that the breakdown of the ozone layer by supersonic aircraft had been grossly overstated. There is little pollution yet of the great oceans, and no evidence that it affects fish stock or marine life. Over-fishing is the real worry, but that only in certain regions. And we realize today that DDT is safer for the people that use it than the organo-phosphate insecticides that replaced it.

Let’s examine food in a little more detail. At the World Food Conference called by a worried Henry Kissinger in 1974, headlines read that “the world is running out of food.” Indeed, the evidence of failed harvests all over the place pointed that way. One third of humanity was said by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization to have “inadequate access to food.” But now the figure is down to one in five, although the world’s population has increased from by a billion to over 6 billion.

Perhaps the most telling recent parable for our times is the story of Germany’s Black Forest. Twenty years ago, the famous forest was considered all but dead. The casualty of ecological calamity, it was supposedly attacked by pollutants and climatic changes. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the forest’s death were premature. The forest today is verdant and growing faster than ever, for reasons that are as unclear to foresters as they should have been when the forest appeared to be on the wane.

All this is not to say we should ignore the serious limits on our planet’s seemingly endless magnanimity. Alas, in the age of super-hype one has to scream to be heard. But as Planche wrote in 1879, “Why, you’ve cried ‘Wolf!’ till, like the shepherd youth, You’re not believed when you do speak the truth.”

Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine in London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).

Closing Remarks: President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson of Iceland

Summary by Josh Sanburn, World Policy Journal

After three days in which global leaders, academics and entrepreneurs addressed the world’s most pressing problems, the closing keynote speaker identified the financial crisis, the need for a green energy revolution and climate change as the three most important issues, all of which are irreversibly linked. “None of these three crises can be solved without solving the other,” he said.

The financial crisis has shown that people around the world fell victim to the notion that the market is paramount, he said. Icelanders have learned how fragile that idea really is. “It threatened the complete breakdown of of the social fabric of our society,” he said, citing riots and social unrest that occurred soon after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States last year.

President Grimsson called on leaders around the world to create a new philosophical and moral framework to avoid repeating the same mistakes. He tied the rise of a green energy revolution to stabilizing the economic sector, saying that Iceland now has a 100 percent clean energy economy. And greening the energy sector will naturally lead to a reduction in emissions.

To solve these problems, President Grimsson said countries around the world should place more regulations on financial institutions in order to rein in the excesses of a market economy, and he also challenged the United States and other countries to harnass geothermal energy to limit the use of fossil fuels.

“The political system was tested to its limit,” he said. “Even in the most stable and secure democracies, it almost resembled the revolutionary situations we read about in history books. But we have the capability and the mandate to solve these problems.”

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan will probably ask President Obama for more U.S. forces. A leaked, classified document suggests that the mission “will likely result in failure” within the next year without additional troops. In a classified memo first leaked to The Washington Post, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said that failure to reverse insurgent momentum within the next 12 months “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” The report comes at a time when the White House, the Pentagon, and the American public are debating whether a troop surge, much like the one in Iraq in 2007, would reverse recent gains by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Reports suggest that General McChrystal will put in a formal request to the White House for more troops, possibly as many as 30,000. The 66-page document criticizes Afghanistan’s weak central government and notes a strengthening Taliban insurgency. President Barack Obama has yet to say whether he’ll approve a second round of troop increases. The U.S. president committed 17,000 additional troops in February and is facing a Democratic Party skeptical of whether more boots on the ground will aid the effort.

A new survey of public opinion in Iran finds that most Iranians consider Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president, despite the mass demonstrations that followed the hotly contested June elections. Of the more than 1,000 persons interviewed in the survey released by WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO), 83 percent expressed confidence in the election results that gave Ahmadinejad a second term, while two-thirds said they considered the June election to be “completely free and fair.” The respondents also showed strong support for domestic governing institutions. Some experts say fear could have played a role in the high approval ratings, especially in light of the harsh crackdown against the summer’s protests. “You can read it one of two ways,” said Gary Sick, an Iran scholar at Columbia University. “Either people are afraid to say things that could get them into trouble, or it could simply be that’s what they’re told day in and day out through public media, and that’s where they get most of their information.” The survey also examined Iran’s relations with the United States, finding that most Iranians (63 percent) favor restoring diplomatic ties with the United States, although a staggering 71 percent have little or no confidence that Obama can “do the right thing” in his handling of world affairs.

At least 18 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in renewed fighting between soldiers and rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Sudanese army confirmed a battle against the main rebel group, the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), last Thursday, and that it had “purged the areas of the remnants” of the SLA. The joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force, UNAMID, is sending an investigation team to verify the conflict and assess the humanitarian situation. The clashes are the first since Gen. Martin Luther Agwai, the outgoing commander UNAMID, said that war in the region was effectively over. Since the conflict broke out in 2003, 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been displaced, according to UN figures.

China plans to leapfrog the United States in energy efficiency, renewable sources of power, cuts in vehicle pollution and closures of dirty plants, says UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer. In an interview with the Associated Press on the eve of this week’s climate change summit in New York, de Boer said China is poised to join the European Union as a “front-runner” in countries battling climate change. Reuters reports that Chinese President Hu Jintao may lay down a “carbon intensity” target, and a senior Chinese official has promised an important speech laying out “the next policies, measures and actions that China is going to take.” The steps would send a strong signal to the United States, which under the Bush administration pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol because emerging powers like China and India were not required to reduce emissions. The summit is intended to forge a consensus between developing and developed countries on climate change in preparation for a new deal set to be signed in Copenhagen in December, which if successful would replace the Kyoto Protocol. For more on global climate change, see Maurice Strong’s piece in World Policy Journal’s Summer 2009 issue: Facing Down Armageddon: Our Environment at a Crossroads.

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh urged Hillary Clinton to back off on climate change mandates when the two met in New Delhi last month.

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have amongst the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Ramesh brazenly told the secretary of state.

Not quite the Bollywood ending Mrs. Clinton was expecting. Certainly not the ending desired by scientists and policymakers as they look ahead to December’s Climate Conference in Copenhagen as a last-chance-dance for a meaningful international accord.

But Bret Stephens, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, sees the Clinton-Ramesh exchange as a perfect outcome for an unsuspecting group: the billions of humans living on less than $2 a day. “The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost,” he writes in his August 4 Wall Street Journal column, describing Ramesh’s shut down of Clinton, whose climate policy, Stephens believes, will threaten India’s access to the free market.

Read the rest of this entry »

This past month, two resource-rich countries saw political protests turn deadly as the people tried to reign in the autocratic dictates of an incumbent government. One country was, of course, Iran—where every day it seems the government strangles a little more life out of the people’s protests.

With 24/7 news coverage of that disastrous election, you might be forgiven for not having heard about what happened in Peru, where for a change, the people won.

Beginning in 2008, Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, issued a series of executive decrees to open up 210,000 square miles of the Amazon region, including some land legally protected, to foreign oil, gas, logging, and agribusiness investment.

Garcia aimed to develop a multi-billion dollar industry to aid Peru’s growth (not in itself a bad thing) and saw the fertile and resource-rich Amazon as a golden opportunity, simply too good to waste. The president oversaw the signings of dozens of contracts with a wide variety of foreign officials and companies.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Garcia underestimated the vociferousness of his opposition. The Amazonian region is home to only 330,000 indigenous people (roughly 1 percent of Peru’s population) arrayed in some 60 tribes. In general, these Amazonians live in remote areas, speak different dialects, are much poorer than the national average, and lack political or social cohesion.

But this time around, the indigenous people were organized and determined. They had spent years getting ready for Garcia’s assault on their native land. Decades of negative experiences with oil extraction companies had forced them to come together, and to plan ahead. Past protests had not been taken seriously by Peruvian elites and legislative leaders, who merely ignored their claims or temporarily suspended action until the furor died down. Then, as always, they returned to business as usual. Read the rest of this entry »

Long-time World Policy Journal editorial board member Shashi Tharoor has been elected to India’s parliament in the country’s fifteenth general election.  Running from his home town of Thiruvananthapuram, Tharoor garnered a historic margin of victory of more than 100,000 votes. “I am truly humbled by the extraordinary level of trust the voters of Thiruvananthapuram have placed in me, and I am conscious that now is when the real work begins,” wrote Tharoor, a man on the move, from his Blackberry.

Tharoor’s success helped the Congress Party, on whose ticket he ran, win a landslide victory. Trouncing predictions of a fractured and fragile coalition as the most likely outcome of an election in which more than 400 million of India’s 700 million-plus eligible voters cast ballots in five phases over one month, India’s grand, old Congress Party won outright 262 of the 272-seat majority required to form a government. The stunning victory by the party that came to power with the birth of the Republic of India more than 60 years ago has left both India’s Left and Right in tatters.

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Such a clear mandate by a party that has positioned itself as a force for religious tolerance and economic growth tempered by concern for India’s very poor majority has been hailed by business leaders around the world as a welcome outcome. India’s stock exchanges shot up on the news.

But as Tharoor points out, Congress has little time to waste on celebration. India is facing a gauntlet of serious challenges, and the ability of the new government to chart a course through a widening wealth gap, a deteriorating environment, a growing water and agricultural crisis, and hemorrhaging cities—while dealing with a region fraught with conflict and insecurity—is not made easier by the current global economic and climate crises. Read the rest of this entry »

Many countries in the developing world look to energy and mining to bring in foreign investment. The contracts that these countries sign with extraction companies often offer lop-sided terms when it comes to money, transparency, information, or in certain cases, environmental protection to the host country—all of which heighten the problems of the resource curse.

The International Senior Law Project (ISLP) is a non-profit organization which volunteers world-class legal counsel globally on economic development, human rights, and access to justice. The group works with governments who need their services but are too poor to pay, and partners with large established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to bring their skills to developing world civil society groups. They also offer commercial law skills training. They have worked on projects to deal with extraction related problems in several poor countries, including in Mongolia and Liberia.

ISLP’s roster includes about 600 lawyers from the United States, Canada, and other countries. Jean Berman, the executive director, says, “We’ve been very lucky in finding the perfect lawyers for the situation.”

Joseph Bell is the Secretary of the Board for ISLP.  He is also a senior law partner at Hogan and Hartson, and chair of the Advisory Board at Revenue Watch Institute, an NGO which works to counter the resource curse. His background is in commercial and regulatory practice, focusing on energy and mining. Recently, he led the ISLP team(s) that renegotiated several important contracts between the government of Liberia and interested multinational corporations, resulting in a great improvement of terms for the government.

The following is an interview with him on negotiating with extraction companies for the world’s poorest countries.

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Jodi Liss (JL): What problems do developing countries face when negotiating contracts with these huge multinational corporations?

Joseph Bell (JB): There’s the problem of asymmetry—in knowledge, information, capacity—between the government and the company. Some countries recognize this and hire outside counsel, which sometimes can help.

JL: Do these countries have the existing legal frameworks to guide these contracts?

Read the rest of this entry »

These days, throughout northern Wayne County, PA, farmers are talking less about livestock and dairy prices and more about Norwegian oil policy, Devonian geology, market capitalization, and seismic thumper trucks.

Wayne County sits atop part of the enormous Marcellus Shale gas field, and each farmer is looking at a small fortune in future leasing royalties and bonuses. They are also in the process of solving a problem that has stumped the World Bank, the United Nations, and governments around the world.

The problem is the so-called resource curse. Usually, when countries discover oil, gas, or minerals, most nationalistic governments in the developing world seek to keep all the wealth that comes from such extraction by claiming exclusive rights to everything below the topsoil. Instead of economic development, what they get is corruption, environmental destruction, violent conflict, a worsening economy, and hoards of angry local people.

The resource curse’s current poster child is Nigeria, where corrupt government officials—on all levels—stole hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands died from ethnic conflict and environmental devastation in the oil-producing zones, and the majority of people throughout the country live on less than $1 a day.

Map of the Marcellus Shale

In Wayne County (as elsewhere in the United States), it’s the locals who will decide the terms of how the gas is extracted from the ground. Here, the farmers who have farmed the land for generations formed a collective bargaining group, hired lawyers and environmental consultants, and are negotiating with several gas companies on the financial details and the local environmental risks.

Drilling for oil or gas has a long, ugly record of contaminating land and water—a potential catastrophe since this area is an aquifer for New York City and Philadelphia. So, many newly arrived former city dwellers in Wayne County are, at best, doubtful and are demanding that regulatory commissions provide even broader environmental protections.

They point to people in central Pennsylvania and in the West who signed bad leases and found themselves with environmental nightmares like noise pollution, ruined land, contaminated water supplies, and leaky holding pools full of toxic chemicals.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.

Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.

The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year.  From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.

Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming. Read the rest of this entry »