From Climate Change to Wars and Rebellion
Pastor Dale Morgan
From Climate Change to Wars and Rebellion*
by Martin Walker
Washington (UPI) Jan 11, 2009
The Copenhagen summit showed that climate change is as much about
geopolitics and power as it is about the weather. China's blunt refusal
to accept any binding limits on its carbon emissions, despite the
agonized pleas of small island governments facing extinction,
demonstrated that this new aspect of the game of nations is going to be
played as hardball.
And yet, as Cleo Paskal argues in her pioneering new book "Global
Warring," China is also powering ahead on every aspect of climate
change. While protecting its right to pollute (because it depends
heavily on coal as its main homegrown energy source), China is using
state subsidies to seize the lead in solar power manufacturing.
The Beijing government is pursuing a ruthless drive to secure exclusive
rights to oil and natural gas supplies in Africa, Central Asia and the
disputed waters around the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea. It
started the new fashion for buying exclusive rights to food from land
deals in Africa.
Above all, with dams in Tibet and on its share of the Mekong, China is
seeking to grab the lion's share of the water from the vast (but
imperiled) Himalayan catchment area, while building a massive canal
system to send the water to its arid north, where soil erosion has seen
the Gobi desert advance to within 100 miles of Beijing.
But perhaps Paskal's most striking story is the way that China is also
seeking to become a major player in the arctic. China has acquired an
icebreaker, a seat with observer status on the Arctic Council and its
own arctic research base at Svalbard. (China also has two research bases
in the Antarctic.)
Strikingly, China is also courting Canada's native peoples (who control
vast land rights across the northern territories), inviting over two
dozen "First Nationan" chiefs and tribal leaders to China, to be told
they were fellow-victims of white imperialism and also genetic brothers
since the first Canadian had walked across the Bering Strait from Asia.
"Canadian aboriginals own or control about a third of the Canadian land
mass," Chief Calvin Helin, leader of the delegation, explained after the
trip, whose purpose was "to tell China that Aboriginal Canada was open
for business. And to be greeted and hosted at the level we were is quite
unbelievable and quite historic."
Paskal's book is full of such vignettes, illustrating the way that
climate change and the intensifying competition for resources is
starting to change the nature of power politics. Paskal, a Canadian who
is a fellow of London's prestigious Chatham House think tank and a
consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, has been a pioneering
scholar of the new terrain where climate change confronts national
security, where geopolitics, geoeconomics and global warming all
collide. It is not just rivalry for oil and gas supplies and water, but
also for fishing rights and undersea mining and mineral rights that may
well be up for grabs when some of the lowest-lying Pacific island
countries disappear under the rising waves.
The Maldives government, Paskal reveals, has already started talks with
India about relocating its population there. But under the confused
state of current international law, it is not clear whether a country
that loses its land would also have to lose its mineral and other rights.
This matters a great deal to Florida, which could, under some scenarios
of rising sea levels, lose Miami and the Keys. Under current law, the
United States would then lose a lot more than that, since the
"exploitation frontier" between Cuba and the U.S. mainland would then
shift to the halfway point between Cuba and the remaining Florida coast.
At a stroke, Cuba would gain mineral and other rights over the seas that
cover what used to be Key West, and the United States could need Cuban
approval to enter the Gulf of Mexico.
"We need to start thinking about the legal and economic implications of
these developments now, before we have to start tackling them in the
middle of a crisis or a humanitarian emergency," Paskal told a seminar
at Washington's Woodrow Wilson center Friday. Among those attending were
National Intelligence Council officials and members of the White House
interagency task force on implications of climate change.
Paskal sees China and Russia taking these issues more seriously that the
United States and Europe, and her book is not just a wakeup call for
Western leaders but is also an arresting and original work on climate
change, probably the most important book on the environment to be
published this year.
"As pressure is put on food, water supplies and national boundaries,
famine and war may become more frequent," Paskal concludes. "This
instability may make populations more tolerant of autocratic
governments, especially nationalistic capitalist ones where the
political, economic and military sectors combine to protect existing
resources and aggressively try to secure new ones. China and Russia
already have a head start on this model."
"Global Warring," by Cleo Paksal, Palgrave Macmillan, $27.