Category Archives: International relations

When Elites Threaten the Future: Peter the Great, Democracy and Climate Change

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In late 17th century Imperial Russia, Peter the Great sought to modernize his country – adapt the modern ways of the west, and put down the old backwards which held his country in the dark ages. A major force for backwardness in his kingdom were the Boyars. The Boyars were the highest rank of the ancient feudal aristocracies in Russia – dating back to the 10th century. They grew their beards long, liked their streets narrow and were opposed to the adoption of Western ways and new technology.

From Russian Project

Peter’s solution was to establish the Table of Ranks. The Table of Ranks disconnected the titles of the Aristocracy from the land they possessed and from their lineage – it was now tied directly to services they performed for the Empire. Instituting mandatory civil service for the Aristocracy was beneficial in two ways – first, the nobles were highly occupied trying to one-up each other to increase their rank, so as to be less able to organize their common forces and threaten the authority of the monarch. And second, it provided Peter with an army of bureaucrats organized in hierarchical institutions which he set himself atop, which could organize and carry out the westernizing reforms that would bring Russia into the modern European world. As a side benefit, it inculcated the idea of meritocracy into the Russian noble mindset.

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Europe’s fossil fuel dependence on Russia

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One of the most important levers through which Russia can exert pressure on Western European states is by controlling the flow of fossil fuels. As illustrated below, oil and gas pipelines originating in Russia are critical energy lifelines for the rest of Europe:

When Russia turns off the taps – as it sometimes does to put pressure on states like Ukraine – people can find themselves shivering in the cold. This could become even more problematic if pipelines like Nord Stream which circumvent Eastern Europe are completed. Then, Russia will be able to cut off states like Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland without denying fuels to France and Germany.

At the moment, it seems that European states are becoming ever-more dependent on Russia for energy. Partly, that has been the consequence of relying more on gas for electrical power. A recently leaked German report on peak oil highlights the geopolitical dangers associated with dependence on Russian oil and gas. At present, Russia supplies about 35% of German oil imports, along with 37% of natural gas.

In the medium- to long-term, Europe has an opportunity to achieve two major objectives by switching to zero-carbon forms of electricity generation and transport. They can reduce the severity of environmental problems: especially climate change, but also air pollution. At the same time, they can reduce the power that Russia holds over them, and increase their freedom to make policy on Eastern Europe in a more principled way.

One promising alternative is the massive deployment of concentrating solar power stations around the Mediterranean and North Africa, with high voltage direct current transmission lines to bring the electricity to Europe.

Export ethics: asbestos and coal

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Controversially, Canada is a major producer and exporter of asbestos – a material that has been judged too dangerous for domestic use, but which the government and Canadian firms apparently feels to be good enough for developing countries. At the same time as the Government of Canada was paying to promote asbestos sales abroad, workers in hazmat suits were carefully removing the material from our Parliament buildings. Driven largely by concerns about a small number of jobs in Quebec, Canada remains an asbestos booster, still willing to fund the Chrysotile Institute.

This raises a question that is profoundly related to the problem of coal: what is the ethical position of states with large reserves of a dangerous resource, for which there is a market overseas?

Equal treatment

Naturally, there are several different approaches that can be taken in evaluating this ethical question. One is to focus on some notion of equal treatment. If we think asbestos is too dangerous for Canadians, why is it OK to sell to Indians. Does it matter that they are buying it voluntarily? In a related question, does it matter that they have less ability to afford safer alternatives? One can certainly argue that Canada should not be willing to expose the citizens of other countries to dangers we would consider unacceptable here. In a counter-argument, it is possible to argue that depriving the recipient countries of asbestos would make them even worse off than they are now, by forcing the use of something even worse.

Cost-benefit considerations

Another approach is more economically inspired. One way of phrasing it would be: “Is absolutely everybody better off, in a situation where Canada chooses to export asbestos?” When allowing something to occur, such as a trade, improves the welfare of at least some people involved without harming that of anybody, economists say that the trade is a Pareto improvement. This is often a high bar, and certainly isn’t met in the asbestos case. At least some people in the recipient countries will get sick and die as a consequence of this international trade in asbestos.

A less rigorous standard is called ‘potential Pareto optimality’ or Kaldor–Hicks efficiency. In this approach, you tally up all the costs and benefits associated with a decision. If the sum of the benefits is large enough that the winners could theoretically compensate the losers, then there is a certain sense in which making that choice could be justified.

There are a number of serious problems with Kaldor–Hicks, however. Firstly, there is no requirement that compensation actually be paid. That means that some people will suffer for the enrichment of others, and without giving consent to the arrangement. Secondly, there is the ever-tricky question of deciding what human health and lives are worth. In most economic analyses, the value of an Indian life is implicitly rated lower than that of a Canadian life, because governments and individuals are able to spend more to defend the latter than the former.

What about coal?

Some states – like China and the United States – both produce and use a massive amount of coal. Some, like Canada and Australia, are exporters on an enormous scale. The coal dug up in Canada, sold overseas, and burned causes harm to an enormous number of people. Some, like the Canadian coal miners, take on the risks in a relatively voluntary way. Others, like the members of future generations threatened by climate change, are completely vulnerable to the choices we make on their behalf. Other groups that are harmed include those who suffer from the air and water pollution that accompanies coal burning.

Eventually, I think it will be generally recognized that digging up coal for export is not ethical. It allows those who are alive today to enrich themselves, while forcing the associated risks onto innocent members of future generations. The path to a coal-free world will be a very difficult one, not least because of the massive investments that rely on the continued burning of the stuff. Achieving that outcome will require voluntary restraint, restrictions on coal burning imposed on companies and individuals by the state, and quite possibly the conscientious refusal of some states to sell the climate-wrecking stuff, even when there are still ready buyers internationally.

Cochabambma – a People’s Process to address the Climate Crisis

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After the failure at Copenhagen to breach the gap between scientific necessity and political will, more than 35 thousand people gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to develop a civil-society based consensus on how to deal with the climate crisis. Seventeen working groups dealt with topics such as “Structural Causes”, “Adaptation” and “Climate Debt“. The final result of the conference was the “Cochabamba People’s Agreement”, which differs considerably in content and character from climate agreements made between states.

The People’s Agreement calls for (among other things):

  • “The protection and recognition of the rights and needs of forced climate migrants.”
  • “The promotion of the establishment of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.”
  • “The consideration of a World Referendum on Climate Change that allows the people to decide what will be done about this issue, which is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.”
  • “A 50% reduction of domestic greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries for the period 2013-2017 under the Kyoto Protocol, domestically and without reliance on market mechanisms.”

One good thing about the Cochabamba proposal is the stress on what action is immediately required, or at least on action required in the near future. In the long term both developed and under developed nations must transition to Carbon Neutrality – but it certainly makes moral and pragmatic sense to cut emissions in the first world now, and allow the under developed world to transition to carbon neutrality over a longer period. It’s also relevant to start talking about the rights of climate migrants – the sooner we do this, the better change we have of avoiding a future which too much resembles Children of Men.

However, I think the single most important thing included in the Cochabamba proposal which is often missing from the mainstream discourse on climate change is the rights of indigenous peoples:

“The implementation of measures for recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples must be secured in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and applicable universal human rights instruments and agreements. This includes respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples; their rights to lands, territories and resources, and their full and effective participation, with their free, prior and informed consent.”

It’s difficult to over-stress the importance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If Canada were to sign this declaration, this would make it much more difficult to expand oil sands production – both because companies would be forced to respect Aboriginal title to the land under which which the oil sands are extracted, and also because it would allow many nations to block the pipelines required for Oil Sands expansion.

What I like most about the Cochabamba proposal is the emphasis on the importance of civil society rather than current failing political structures. This is manifested in their recommendation of a world referendum:

“The consideration of a World Referendum on Climate Change that allows the people to decide what will be done about this issue, which is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.”

Such a referendum is certainly “politically impossible”. However, even it’s recommendation for consideration stresses the divide between the interest of the people of the world, and the interests on which world leaders currently act on. The recognition of this difference is recognition of the hypocrisy of the current system of national and international governance – a hypocrisy we likely can no longer afford.

Evental Turning Points in History: The Flotilla, and What it Might Mean for Climate Activism

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One thing environmentalist advocates have hoped for is that some environmental catastrophe might be interpreted as a call to action against climate change. It’s not a bad idea, but it suffers from a problem. While global warming does increase the frequency of catastrophic events, no particular event can be specifically linked with that increase in frequency – and therefore no particular environmental disaster can easily stand as a call to action.

Up until recently, the plight of the Palestinians has suffered from a similar problem – while the increasing violence and oppression of the state of Gaza might be recognized as a fact by Palestine’s supporters, those who wish to reserve judgment on the issue could look at any particular instance of violence and interpret it as justified in its particularity by Israel’s precarious situation in the middle east. That is, until recently – the murder of ten unarmed humanitarian NGO workers on a vessel carrying goods currently being barred entry into Gaza by an illegal blockade is not easily interpretable as justified by Israel’s “threatened” status. As The Globe and Mail put it:

Israel’s claim this week that its soldiers killed nine civilians in self-defence on an aid-to-Gaza flotilla it had boarded is at best tone deaf. It strains credibility. You attack unarmed ships at sea and when people resist, shoot them and then blame them. It’s beyond Orwellian.

More significant than the Globe’s analysis, is the fact Israel is being criticized in the mainstream press at all. This novel event signals the importance of the event reported – in it, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people has exceeded the ability of western business interests (represented in and by The Globe and Mail) to continue to stand by and mouth approval. In this event, the value of opposing barbarism exceeds the value of maintaining the status quo, no matter how profitable the current situation.

The importance of Margaret Atwood’s change of feeling with respect to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can not be underestimated either. As Canadian cultural figures go, they do not come much bigger than Atwood. And in her position as Canada’s preeminent writer, her introduction of the notion of “Israel’s shadow” is not likely to fade away after this first mention – it will likely become an enduring term in the political imaginary.

“The Shadow is not the Palestinians” but “Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.” It seems to me this is the key to what has changed and poses a new problem for Israel. The core for anyone examining the situation with a fresh eye, isn’t what “they” – Palestinians – are doing to Israelis; it’s what Israel is doing to them.

But what does this event have to do with burying coal? Precisely this: that in an era where disaster, not reason, is the event of politics, the purposeful production of disaster towards one’s own ends is the preeminent form of political change. This does mean “make a disaster – make change”, because the grounds, the conditions for the disaster must be adequately laid, and the disaster must be produced in such a way that it can not be re-adapted, re-interpreted back into the dominant narrative.

But isn’t there an obvious contradiction here – while it is feasible enough to provoke a state into killing you, isn’t it illogical, impossible, to provoke such a crisis that would relate to global warming and the need for drastic reductions in carbon emissions? I think this contradiction appears only if our notion of disaster remains needlessly narrow – politics is after all not about the disaster itself, but how it is produced, displayed, re-produced etc…. And, climate change mitigation is not only about the environment, but about humans living in the environment, and the moral demand to produce a future where humans can continue to live in their environment. The violent actors, therefore, under the optics of climate change, are emitters – but more importantly, those emitters which are not “policy takers”, but rather who have more power than governments, whose influence produces climate change denial, and who are not simply people with bad consciences, but structures which disallow people from acting on conscience at all (i.e. shareholder capitalism).

We can thus think backwards to the kind of event one would need to produce, from the evental transformation we need such an event to produce. Perhaps most essentially, we need to reconsider why we are at home with living in a society so deeply hypocritical, and why we are unwilling to change the structures that reproduce that hypocrisy. The event can not be violent – both because of the hypocrisy inherent in violent action acting against violence, and because of the trivial ease of trivializing violence. And yet the event can not be merely peaceful – because hypocrisy always wears the face of peace – it is essential that the flotilla met the IDF and not an Israeli public relations team. The event must be, above all, provocative – both in the sense that it should provoke an unjustifiable response, and in the sense that the unjustifiability of that response should be provocative of a change in attitude towards the political situation that made such a response normal. Ideally, the provocation would require the Globe and Mail to respond with a critique of our Prime Minister like the recent one:

And in this situation, who is a real “friend of Israel” – as they say. Is it Margaret Atwood, who raises questions and doubts, or Stephen Harper, who encourages Israel along the same perilous route that brought it to this point?

What events could shift the public imaginary with respect to climate change policy? The BP oil spill is perhaps an example of an immediate tragedy as part of oil extraction whose true disaster is long term. Perhaps police oppression of climate justice activists at the coming G8/G20 could be a political event to show up the hypocrisy of the current systems. The key, I think, is to allow the reception of an event in such a way that the long term catastrophe can be seen reflected in a particular happening – this may be the key to real political transformation surrounding carbon emissions and their unimaginable impact on our future.

West Virginia and the 2000 election

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West Virginia is one of the poorest states in America. Only Arkansas and Mississippi are poorer. It is also a swing state, in terms of federal politics. In the past 37 presidential contests, the state has ended up supporting the Democratic candidate 20 times. The state has had 19 Democratic governors, 15 Republicans, and one independent. Since 1933, 12 out of 16 governors have been Democrats.

West Virginia is a major producer of coal, second only to Wyoming, and those companies felt profoundly threatened by the possibility that Al Gore might have been elected president in 2000. He had been raising awareness of climate change for decades, and helped to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol. In response, coal companies in West Virginia helped to organize and support the campaign of George W. Bush in that state.

Ultimately, West Virginia voted by a margin of 6.33% to give its five electoral college votes to Bush. Bush won the close-fought election with 271 electoral college votes, compared to 266 for Gore, after the 27 votes for Florida were assigned to Bush. That is to say, if Gore had won in West Virginia, it is quite plausible that the history of climate policy both in the United States and globally would have been very different.

If serious American leadership on the issue had begun back in 2000, it seems very plausible that the modest targets in the Kyoto Protocol would have been built upon in subsequent agreements by now. It also seems highly likely that the Iraq War would never have been launched, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and that huge expenditure of American wealth and energy would never have taken place. Even in the face of strong opposition in Congress, it seems likely that a Gore administration would have taken significant steps in dealing with climate change: tightening rules on coal mining and toxic emissions from coal plants, reducing coal’s economic advantage, and maybe even managing to put a price on carbon emissions.

Of course, the same can be said of all the states where the results were close and where more than five electoral college votes were at stake. That being said, the situation does seem illustrative of how relatively small prompts can telescope out to have wide-ranging effects.

Which ethical systems can we tolerate?

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Once again, the issue of morality has arisen in a discussion on my blog.

Contemplating it, it seems to me that there are two general types of moral systems that can exist in our world. There are (1) the whole range of moral systems which can be in place elsewhere, without really affecting us, and then there are (2) those that can fundamentally affect the kind of world we and our descendants will live in.

Universal human rights

The conventional notion of human rights doesn’t give much importance to this distinction. It tells us that we should be appalled about the murder of journalists in Russia, the virtual enslavement of women in many Islamic countries, and the torture of political prisoners in Myanmar. We should object to these things even in cases where they do not affect the lives of anyone who we know.

There are many reasons why this point of view is admirable, and has the potential to help create a better world. The recognition that everybody is human, and that this carries with it some sort of universal moral standing, seems far preferable to the idea that some people are sub-human, and thus not worthy of any moral consideration. That being said, in situations of extreme difficulty, it is natural enough that we will stop worrying about the human rights of people in distant places, and become almost exclusively concerned with the welfare of those around us. That shift may not be admirable, but it is the kind of thing that can be recognized as a general practical necessity.

Dealing with menacing ideologies

Within the second set of value systems – those that do affect us – there is a further sub-division. Specifically, there is a division between value systems that are deeply threatening to us and those that are not. For European nations in the interwar period, both German fascism and Soviet communism were deeply threatening. For First Nations groups in many parts of the world, value systems based around the extermination of traditional languages and cultures were deeply threatening. Today, given the threat from climate change, value systems that permit the unlimited burning of fossil fuels are deeply threatening to everybody, though many people have yet to really internalize this.

As a result, we cannot simply permit such ethical perspectives to continue operating unchecked. Challenging them is both an ethical and a practical necessity. That means challenging domestic political ideologies in developed states that deny the need to deal with climate change. It also means challenging the actions of foreign governments and entities that continue to advance the world towards destabilization and ruin. Ultimately, that will probably mean intervening in the ability of the places like West Virginia, Alberta, and Saudi Arabia to burn or sell the dangerous fossil fuels they possess.

None of this will be easy, but denying the fact that climate change policy-making is fundamentally bound up with ethical issues simply obscures what needs to be done, without making success any easier.

The End of China’s Steam Railroads, or Coal and International Prestige in the 21st Century

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While the phasing out of steam engines from North American railroads was virtually complete by 1960, other regions saw a much slower decline. Due in part to the high costs of the war on Europe, U.K. mainlines were not completely dieselized until 1968, and in Finland and France the process took until the mid 70s. While there are other examples of steam power remaining in service in the 80s and 90s, such as South Africa, India and Russia, the only major power to continue to use steam into the 21st century is China. The continuation of coal-fire steam in China into the 21st century, and it’s eventual phase out in favour of more conventional diesel motive power, serves as an example for understanding importance of economic conditions as well as branding and prestige in state-level transportation planning. More specifically, it might serve as an example of how the international recognition of global warming helped pressure a nation to cease its use of the dirtiest carbon fuel (coal), and therefore possibly prefigure the role of international prestige in future phase outs of coal-electric plants and non-traditional sources of fuel oil.

To understand why Chinese mainline freight and passenger railway service was largely steam powered in the year 2000, it’s important to recognize that diesel trains were introduced far later in China than in most of the rest of the world. Whereas the United States, Russia, and the U.K had their first diesel locomotive engines in the 1920s, the first diesel was not  in service in China until 1959 – at which point dieselization in the USA was almost complete. And China’s transition, although starting in the 50s, did not “pick up steam” until the 80s and 90s – the last mainline steam loco was built in 1999 , and very powerful QJ engines continued to pull coal trains on the Jitong railway until 2005.

Some of the reasons for China’s late use of motive steam power are simple – cheap, easily available labour meant much smaller savings would be acquired by switching to the small crews which diesel operation allows. Also, with huge reserves of coal mined by disposable, non-unionized wage labour, steam trains remained isolated from international oil prices. Russia acted on this principle as well – keeping a full thousand steam locomotives on standby in case of national emergency up until 1989. Other reasons are more complex – military industrial complex funding in the U.S. meant there was money to translate advances in tank engine design into locomotive design. Moreover, diesel operation has many benefits that go beyond simple economics which are highly valued in first world countries, such as cleanliness, simplicity of operation, but most important they are perceived as (or were in the 50s and 60s) “modern”. Capitalist, desire-based economies emphasize the new – there is always some new feature, or function, or things are getting faster, or smoother. Command economies (like the military-industrial complex, incidentally) are needs-based: if steam locomotives are fulfilling the needs of industry and transportation, there is no need to replace them with expensive modern equipment until the upgrade makes simple economic sense – and in a land of very inexpensive labour, this was perhaps never going to happen.

So, what happened – why did China ever switch to diesel and electric operation if steam fared so well for them – if they continued to construct large and powerful locomotives into the 1990s to pull coal trains on the Jitong line through Inner Mongolia until 2005, what was the final reason for switching over to diesel? I’m sure some would like you to believe that Chinese labour conditions are improving, and as a result there are greater savings from reducing the amount of labour required to run the Jitong line. But I think it’s far more likely that the dieselization of the Jitong line has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with international prestige. In 2005, just prior to the end Jitong steam, the International Herald Tribute reported:

There is no sense of regret in the Chinese government, which is anxious to crush all memory of something as old-fashioned as steam just a few years before the 2008 Olympics reach Beijing.

If we want to know why steam was phased out in Mongolia, or why coal fired steam is phased out anywhere it still makes economic sense, the only answer is political prestige. In his book “The Weather Makers”, Tim Flannery makes the point that North America too still runs on coal:

“Some power plants burn through 500 tonnes of coal per hour, and so inefficient are they that around two-thirds of the energy created is wasted. And to what purpose do they operate? Simply to boil water, which generates steam that moves the colossal turbines to create electricity that power our homes and factories. Like the great aerial ocean itself, these Dickensian machines are invisible to most of us, who have no idea that this nineteenth-century technology makes twenty-first-century gadgets whirr.” (The Weather Makers, p. 30)

The continuance of coal fires steam power plants in North America to this day demonstrates quite clearly that the “Age of Steam” never ended – it ended only in public perception. In reality, many ipods, laptops, electric trains, even coffee makers are powered by coal-fired steam. And, there is no reason to think that our age of steam will end for any reason other than the one that motivated the demise of the Jitong railway – public perception, and political prestige. If sites like this one contribute to making coal perceived as a fuel of the past, and for the right reasons (the science), then we can rightly be said to be contributing to the conditions under which Stephen Harper finds it politically useful to institute the phase-out of coal-fired electricity.

The Shtokman gas field

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The Shtokman gas field, located in the Barents Sea, 600km off the Arctic coast, is the embodiment of unconventional gas. Russia’s Gazprom, Norway’s StatoilHydro, and France’s Total are planning to collaborate to access the field, which is the farthest offshore and most ice-exposed of any ever slated for exploitation. The prize they are after is an estimated four trillion cubic metres of natural gas, the second largest field in the world, and enough to provide for Europe’s current level of gas usage for fifty years.

The plan to extract it is to use a ship-shaped floating platform capable of facing towards incoming ice, which will also be broken up by accompanying icebreakers. In the event of ice too heavy to manage, the platform will be able to disconnect from the undersea well and move out of the way. From the platform, a 600km pipeline would have to run to shore. If you want confirmation that the world is running out of cheap and easily-accessible fossil fuels, you need look no further than projects like this. The risk and capital costs they involve are tremendous, and evidence that companies are now attracted by reserves that would once have been written off as too remote and technically difficult to access.

Of course, when it comes to climate change, it is the total quantity of fossil fuels burned that matters. Giving Europe another fifty years of gas will inevitably add to those cumulative emissions. Indirectly, it will also perpetuate the fossil-fuel-powered status quo, delaying the deployment of renewable low-carbon options. Finally, continued dependence on Russian-controlled gas deepens Europe’s geopolitical vulnerability. As long as Europe depends on Russia to keep people from freezing in the winter, they will be unable to effectively criticize its increasing authoritarianism or aspirations for regional control over former Warsaw Pact states. Those Eastern European states, in turn, face an increased risk of Russian dominance.

Australia’s coal deal with China

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Given their level of water scarcity, Australia may be the developed nation most exposed to climate change risks. Unfortunately, that has not translated into political action. Now, Australia is cementing its role as a carbon-intensive state, with a $60 billion deal to provide China Power International Development with 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next two decades.

This is exactly the wrong thing to do for so many reasons. It locks two important states into the usage of yesterday’s energy source, in defiance of the risks that both face due to climate change. Rather than supporting China’s destructive coal habit, advanced economies like that of Australia ought to be helping them to develop and deploy low- and zero-carbon forms of energy. Unless rapidly developing states like India and China can put themselves onto a low-carbon development path, our chances of avoiding dangerous or catastrophic climate change are slim indeed.

Also, if developed countries continue to supply the world’s dirtiest fuels to states like China, they cannot continue to use Chinese inaction as an excuse to do nothing at home. China, Australia, and everyone else need to move beyond fossil fuels. This deal does the opposite.