Archive for the ‘conflict’ Category
|Is a post-Copenhagen roadmap emerging?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Over the past few years, there have been a couple of major approaches for dealing with climate change:
- Use political tools to set emissions targets (e.g., 80% reduction by 2050);
- Invest heavily in green technology to drive green energy prices lower. Only then will these technologies take hold. Carbon reductions are an important byproduct but not the main goal.
Of course these are not mutually exclusive, but they might as well be given the way they have played out on the political stage.
With a lot of people down on political solutions to deal with climate change, strong advocates of the latter approach may now gain the upper hand. Folks like Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been arguing that green energy needs to be produced as quickly and cheaply as possible—forget all of the games with cap and trade or carbon taxes. Tom Friedman has also argued the need for swift action on energy, while also endorsing political solutions like carbon taxes.
If you look for areas that are gaining or have the potential to gain traction, there seem to be two levers that may work:
- the link between fossil fuel dependency, climate change, economic stability, and national security;
- the fact that China is eating our lunch with respect to clean energy development.
Both of these general concerns have attracted Republican support for green energy and climate change mitigation, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
This may be a signal of potential game changers and the clearest path forward that we’ve seen in awhile.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Tags: Copenhagen
Posted in climate economics, conflict, energy, policy, risk analysis, solutions | 1 Comment »
Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
The cost of warming—393,000 increased deaths from civil war in Africa by 2030
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
A new article1 by Marshall Burke and colleagues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access) explores the relationship between climate and conflict.
Their argument is that historically warm years have correlated strongly with increased warfare in Africa. Based on this relationship and GCM projections of African climate, they forecast a 54% increase in armed conflicts by the year 2030, resulting in 393,000 additional battle deaths.
One might wonder about precipitation changes associated with climate warming—Do they alter this result? Short answer: No. The temperature-conflict model was robust regardless of whether or not precipitation was included.
1Burke, M. et al. (2009) Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:20670-20674.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdptcar/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Posted in climate change science, conflict | No Comments »
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