Max Ajl's Climate Chronicles

Discussions of climate change keep running head-long into a barrier: China, India, Brazil and the other countries of the global South need to develop.

No leader of an underdeveloped country will ever agree to a climate change proposal that will take away that country’s right to develop. This isn’t so odd. Try explaining to the Chinese government that because the United States and Western Europe flooded the atmosphere with CO2 by burning readily accessible cheap fossil fuel for 150 years, their citizens will have to live without a decent standard of living, while we imperiously assert that we won’t divert more than a smidgen of our government budget to clean energy development and will keep occupying the country’s freeways and streets with gas-guzzlers.

We often think — wrongly — of ecological systems as linear. Adding a certain amount of CO2 to the atmosphere means a certain amount of warming. Twice that amount, twice the warming. Losing 10 percent of a forest means 10 percent less forest. Twice that amount of deforestation means twenty percent less forest. Stuff like that.

But that’s not how ecological systems operate. They’re integrated. Their components rely on one another to function properly.

In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan professor, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her Greenbelt Campaign. The forestry project has planted more than 30 million trees in its 32 years, stemming deforestation across swaths of Africa and helping 900,000 African women to have decent livelihoods tending to tree nurseries and planting trees.

Trees are undeniably good things. They draw CO2 from the atmosphere and store it physically as carbon in their structure. They improve water and air quality, and protect soil from erosion and, in turn, desertification. Particularly in tropical zones, continuous vegetative cover is the only way to prevent the destruction of the soil, since, as environmental historian Colin Duncan explains,

"In many tropical places, the meager soils also have some unfortunate geological characteristics. High laterite content renders some tropical soils into concrete-like surfaces in the event that the vegetation cover is removed and they are exposed to drier conditions. Such eventualities are practically irreversible."

Still, we should be absolutely clear that greenery is not a panacea for excess atmospheric CO2.

Sometimes tree-planting can ultimately have negative effects on net CO2 emissions. One example occurs when natural or old-growth forests are destroyed and commercial monoculture tree plantations replace them.

Agriculture is increasingly recognized as central to the issue of stopping and reversing anthropogenic global warming. Report after report confirms that food production and bio-fuel production, deforestation, land-use change and the conversion of savannah to pasture land contribute significantly to the world’s CO2 emissions.

But with all due respect to the Bjorn Lomborgs of the world, the “world’s” CO2 emissions aren’t the major impasse at global climate summits. Individual countries’ emissions are, meaning, which country gets to emit how much carbon.

Apportioning emissions rights means coming up with a fair, reasonable measurement system for assessing how much carbon each country emits. This isn’t so straightforward.

The epic blow-up at Copenhagen was ultimately about something very simple. It was about economic growth — about who gets to grow, how fast, under what terms, using which energy supplies.

Within this purportedly zero-sum framework, if China grows quickly, burning cheap coal for fuel, with a slowly increasing amount of renewables added to the mix, the West will have to cut growth too sharply. Meanwhile most of the global South worries that the Copenhagen proposals could have permanently put a stop to their plans for growth.

But what if there’s an escape from this cul-de-sac? What if development — entailing, but not the same as, economic growth — could co-exist harmoniously with sharp emissions reductions? What would that imply for development planning?

America produces a lot of food. So much food, in fact, that it is one of the world’s major food exporters, and so much grain and soy that we turn much of it into ethanol to power our cars.

Even excluding the calories that we export or turn into agro-fuels, per-capita caloric availability was 2,700 calories per person in 2007. That’s plenty of food. [Excel link]. No one should be hungry in a country that produces that much food.

But that doesn’t mean that many aren’t going hungry. The latest USDA survey results show that 14.6 percent of the American population — 17 million households — was food-insecure at some point in 2008. “Food insecure” means that the food consumption of one member of the household, or more, was reduced because they lacked for money or other ways to access food. That number shot up from 13 million households in 2007, 11.1 percent of the population.

When the most traditional consultancies in the world note that the world's economies are emitting far more carbon dioxide than even the most optimistic models suggest is safe, that the trajectories we’re on have a terminus marked “oven,” it’s a real alarm.

Brazil is the fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of current global GHG emissions.

Maybe this isn’t shocking. It’s a huge country. Its south is speckled with major population centers, and it has a southern industrial belt. Yet most of its emissions don’t come from its cities or its factories. At least not directly. They come from its land.

The Amazon jungle is metaphorically referred to as the lungs of the world: CO2 in, O2 out, transformed through a dense emerald mass. It's an irreplaceable treasure, in many spots still unmapped, and a biological preserve filled with species that we likely haven’t even seen.

So it’s quite welcome that author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is paying attention to what happens to the Amazon.

What’s not welcome are the misdirections Friedman takes while discussing how to protect the remaining 80 percent of the Amazon that has not yet been clear-cut and transformed into cattle ranches and soy plantations.

As anthropogenic climate change gets more serious and more harmful, something happens to the earth’s fresh-water: there’s quite a lot less of it available for human consumption.

Climate change leads to higher temperatures. Higher temperatures lead to melting glaciers, so snow-melt-based water supplies decrease. Climate change also leads to more irregular rainfalls. Under most climate models, rainfall is predicted to occur more frequently in brief, furious bursts rather than the more sustained and regularized patterns that make it easy to store and irrigate crops.

A recently-released World Bank study notes that there is now strong reason to believe that rainfall variability will increase substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, reducing GDP and heightening poverty. Previous evidence from Ethiopia, for example, showed that just one season of sharply reduced rainfall “depressed consumption” up to five years later.

And in the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-stressed region, per capita water supplies were expected to halve by 2050 even in the absence of global climate change, the effects of a swelling population. The effects on agriculture will be unpredictable but unpleasant—agriculture amounts to 85 percent of the region’s water use.

Water is basic. When there’s not enough of it, people die. When there’s not enough to keep crops properly irrigated, there’s famine. So it’s not a big shock that when water decreases, conflict over it increases. Or to put it more simply, a lack of water leads to war.