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ANALYSIS: Climate change: time to get real

openDemocracy | Tom Burke | 26 September 2006

The science is clear, the technology is available. To meet the challenge of "the most serious threat to humanity since the invention of nuclear weapons," climate-change campaigners now need to win the political argument, says Tom Burke of E3G.

The public argument on climate change has been transformed by a series of recent interventions by scientists. First, James E Hansen, the global doyen of climate scientists, announced that the world has only ten years in which to take decisive action on the climate. "I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most," he told the Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento, California.

Second, John P Holdren, the incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in his inaugural address that the world is already experiencing dangerous climate change.

Third, Britain's national academy of science, the Royal Society, sent a letter to the oil company ExxonMobil asking it to stop supporting organisations that were deliberately distorting the science of climate change.

We are much more accustomed to scientists entering the public debate about risk to say that our fears are exaggerated. There is no precedent for the kind of interventions we are now witnessing. They are a mark of the growing panic within the scientific community at the deepening abyss between what they know about the climate and what governments are doing.

Two things are now becoming clear. The climate is changing faster, and the impacts of this change are going to be nastier, than we first thought.

The hole we're in

But other, more hopeful, things are also becoming clearer. We may no longer be able to avoid dangerous climate change, but we can avoid catastrophic climate change. We already have the technologies we need to keep the eventual temperature rise to around two degrees Centigrade. But we need to deploy them with great urgency.

We also know that we can afford to do so. Economic analyses of the cost of tackling climate change suggest that it will require the equivalent of around 1% of GDP. This is well within the margin of error of these figures and would simply delay the arrival of the same level of wealth by a few months. Estimates of the economic damage resulting from a rapidly changing climate are often five times as much. It will not cost the earth to prevent catastrophic climate change, but it will cost the earth not to do so.

The problem is neither the economics nor the technology: it's the politics. Preventing catastrophic climate change requires nothing less than the complete transformation of the global energy system in the next forty years. We must both reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and stop the carbon from the fossil fuels we do use from entering the atmosphere.

We currently add about seven billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere each year. If we continue to fuel our expanding economy as we do today this will become fourteen billion tonnes a year by 2050. Agriculture adds another two-and-a-half billion tonnes that cannot easily be removed. The oceans and plants annually absorb some five billion tonnes of that carbon. By 2050, therefore, we must remove eleven-and-a-half billion tonnes of carbon a year from our economy, emitting close to zero from our energy use. Then we have to keep it there, effectively for ever.

This is certainly a daunting prospect. But the consequences of failure are terrifying. In the face of such difficulty there is much glib talk about adaptation. Some suggest that instead of trying to meet such a difficult challenge, we should concentrate our efforts on learning to live with a changing climate. This is a shallow and deceitful proposal.

It is a fantasy to expect already fragile governments in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia to peacefully manage and adapt to the disruption (including migration) caused by climate change. The politics of insecurity in countries affected there will erupt into factionalism and conflict; Darfur is already one stark example of this reality. Californians may be able to adapt to the loss of melt waters from the Sierra Nevada by building hugely expensive, and energy-intensive, desalination plants. But that option will not be available to the hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis who depend on Himalayan melt waters.

Some adaptation will be inevitable, as the climate is already changing. We who live in the rich world must be willing to help the poorest among us to deal with the consequences of climate change; this is an additional and obligatory, not a discretionary, responsibility for the industrialised nations that have benefited most from the profligate use of fossil fuels.

Since adaptation is not an option, we must address head on the difficult politics of prevention. The first step is to recognise that climate change is not just another environmental problem. It is a fundamental threat to prosperity and security. An unstable climate threatens the social and political stability on which all prosperity depends. Equity will suffer as the poorest are hit first and worst. Opportunity will contract rather than expand as the stresses of a rapidly changing climate divide rather than unite nations and communities.

Politics is often referred to as the art of the possible. Meeting the climate challenge means expanding the realm of the possible dramatically. David King, chief scientific advisor to Britain's prime minister, is right to say that climate change is a bigger problem than global terrorism. In fact, it is the most serious threat to humanity since the invention of nuclear weapons. In developing and responding to that threat the world has invested many trillions of pounds over the past sixty years. To respond to climate change, we have yet to invest more than a few billion.

The way out

It is time for those engaged in the battle for a stable climate to get real. Political battles are essentially battles for resources.

We face a shared dilemma. To ensure wellbeing for a growing population with unfulfilled needs and rising expectations we must grow our economies. Should we fail, conflict and insecurity will be the result. To grow our economies we must continue to use more energy. Much of that energy will be in the form of fossil fuels. If we use more fossil fuels we will accelerate climate change. If the climate changes rapidly we will destroy the very prosperity and security we are trying to build.

There is a way out from this narrow ground between rock and hard place. It involves the very rapid expansion of energy efficiency, of biofuels and other renewables and of carbon capture and storage. Left to itself, the $17 trillion that will be invested in energy technologies by 2050 will add the other seven billion tonnes of carbon a year to the atmosphere. To keep our climate stable we are going to have spend enough public money to make those technologies carbon-neutral.

This will be easier than many think. A relatively small carbon tax will yield vast amounts of revenue. That revenue can be dedicated to paying the difference between carbon-intensive technologies and those which are carbon-neutral. As the switch is made, the need for the revenue will decline and the tax can be reduced.

Europe currently spends 46% of its annual budget on a problem it has already solved: food security. It spends practically nothing on a problem that threatens the livelihoods and wellbeing of every single citizen in the union: climate security. It is time to look to the future rather than remain trapped in the past. That means a radical reallocation of European funds from the common agricultural policy into a climate security fund. Some of this can, of course, be spent to enhance the role farmers can play in preventing climate change.

Successful campaigning requires the relentless hammering away at a deliverable goal that can easily be understood. The present cacophony of ideas coming from climate campaigners simply confuses the public and lets governments off the hook. Good campaigning builds public awareness and then leverages it to compel specific actions. There is no shortage of public awareness about the threat to the climate. But this has not yet been leveraged by the campaigners. It is now time they focused that awareness on three simple questions: how much governments need to spend, on what, and by when.

openDemocracy

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NEWS: Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

New York Times | Mark Mazzetti | 24 September 2006

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States, it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document's general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said that its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said that the White House "played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism." The estimate's judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe," concludes one, a report titled "9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges." "We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism."

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. "The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry," it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, "exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies."

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says that "Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack."

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of "self-generating" cells inspired by Al Qaeda's leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda's current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate's conclusions in public speeches.

"New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge," said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. "If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide," said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte's top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said that the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain's domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, "emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat."

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of "D+" to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that "there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking."

New York Times

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ANALYSIS: Saving the 'men who lean against walls'

csmonitor.com | Tom Regan | 14 September 2006

Experts warn a growing number of disaffected Muslim youths in the Middle East will turn to radical Islam.

The Toronto Star reports that in the foreseeable future, groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda will "have no problem replenishing their stock of young fighters, suicide bombers, explosives experts and logistical planners, virtually at will."

The reason for the ease with which these groups will be able to recruit can be found in the demographics of the Middle East. The Star notes that between "the 1970s and 1990s, a dramatic drop in infant mortality coupled with high fertility rates and migration into cities" has led to an enormous population boom in the Middle East. Between one-half and two-thirds of the 380 million people who live in the region are 24 years old or younger.

The region's demographic profile is the exact opposite of the West's, where populations are aging and fertility rates dropping. Canada's birth rate is 1.5 per woman; the global average 2.2. But the majority of Muslim states still average three-to-seven births per woman. At the same time, the region's illiteracy rate, though starting to drop, is still higher than the international norm. The World Bank estimates there are 10 million youngsters not in school, a figure that could rise to 14 million within the next decade.

Another problem is that many of these youths live in authoritarian regimes that haven't been able to compete in the global marketplace, leading to economic and political conditions that make it easier for Islamists to recruit them. The Star notes that there is a name for these disaffected youths, the hayateen, "the men who lean against walls."

In a major report on the implications for US foreign policy, a Brookings Institution task force cautioned that it's not the youth boom alone that matters, but the specific conditions in which it is emerging. To wit: Tens of millions of young Muslim men are living under regimes that are politically oppressive, economically incompetent, virulently anti-American and awash in an "us vs. them" view of the world. Militant Islamism, said the report, serves as a "vehicle of protest" everywhere except where it is actually in power, as in Iran.

"In societies where justice is patently absent, the stimulus to radicalized action is high. Youth have far less to lose, are less patient, less cautious. They're more susceptible to overdrawn and simplistic analyses of existing social problems, their source and their solution."

The Star reports that Cheryl Benard, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation and director of its initiative on Middle Eastern youth, says that "after the [Iraq] war, the US dropped the ball. We should have been hiring and inspiring kids. The terrorist groups are doing that. We aren't."

One example of how Western policy may be contributing to this crisis can be seen in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Reuters reports how students who attend public schools in these areas are no longer in school because their teachers are on strike after not being paid for three months or longer. These schools were run on funds that came from Western donors, which have now halted their donations after the election of the Hamas government. But private schools run by Hamas are still running and crowded with students.

When the United States and other Western powers cut off direct aid to the government in March, Washington's goal was to undercut support for the Islamic militant group, not increase demand for its network of private schools and health clinics.

Then Middle East envoy James Wolfensohn warned at the time that the aid freeze might backfire. He called the threat of a school shutdown, which would turn youths onto the streets, "the worst-case scenario" that could fuel a new cycle of violence.

MSNBC reports on how Muslim youth in Britain hear many different voices. Many are trying to move away from extremist teachings.

White Chapel in East London – home to one of the city's most established Muslim communities. It's also home for 18-year-olds Eklima Begum and Navida Quadi. Both openly denounce terrorism.

"I'd use the example of our prophet to tell them that it's not the right way," Navida Quadi says. "It not going to be effective."

But others here see it differently. This area has the city's highest concentration of young Muslims, many of whom are the targets for radical recruiters. Yet some Muslim leaders are trying to make sure young people hear other voices, too. "If we can articulate their views in ways which are part of the mainstream, I don't think there would be as much problem as you see now," says Muslim youth leader Sheik Aliur Rahman.

But MSNBC notes that young Muslims often disagree with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East, and that can make it less likely to feel harmony with Western ideals.

"Those of us who have children try to educate and guide them," says Azzam Tamimi with the Institute for Islamic Thought. "But so long as there is this crisis in the world – a deep crisis in the world – nothing we do is sufficient on its own."

The InterPress Service (IPS) reports some moderate Muslims and Arabs, including youths, are avoiding travel or study in the US because of the treatment some have received from customs, border, or law enforcement authorities when they arrive to America. And it is leading to a belief in the Middle East and southeast Asia that the treatment is not just about a heightened sense of security after 9/11.

Prof. Ebtisam Al Kitbi of UAE University said in an IPS interview: "This is becoming a phobia and one wonders where this will all lead to. The colour of our skin or our religion determines which line we have to stand in at US airports and then they examine all our belongings wearing gloves as if we have some kind of disease – our dark skin and nationalities seem to give the westerners an excuse to subject us to all sorts of discrimination without giving any reason, and that is atrocious."

According to Ahmed Salah, a Dubai-based analyst, "There is no harm in increasing security at airports – after all, if the threats to passenger airlines prove true, then even our people could get killed. But these checks must be across the board and every passenger must be subjected to the same scrutiny and that, too, politely. But discriminatory treatment that makes headlines seems to be the order of the day. Don't humiliate us just because we are Muslims, or anyone else for that matter ... The US government is letting political propaganda influence its thinking and that is turning into an obsession."

The IPS report notes that some students are now going to Canada to pursue their studies, rather than to the US.

A recent survey by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed that a majority of Americans support racial profiling of "people who look Middle Eastern" at airports and other places.

Last week, The Times of India reported that Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, speaking at a ceremony in Istanbul, Turkey marking the inauguration of the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference's Youth Forum, called on Muslim youth to turn away from extremism.

"The Muslim youth must be prepared to serve humanity in the noble tradition of Islam," Aziz said at the ceremony on Sunday held at a former Ottoman palace by the Bosporus. "We want them to be proud and progressive Muslims."

"Extremism and terrorism which have maligned our noble faith must be curbed," he said.

The goal of the youth forum is to support the United Nations "alliance of civilizations" initiative. The UN project is being jointly sponsored by Turkey and Spain "to overcome misunderstandings between the West and the Arab and Muslim world."

csmonitor.com

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