Earth, Climate, Poverty

(reposting earlier version)

Since the creation of earth, there have been several mass extinctions of living species. Human beings, which came to exist in the very late stage of earth’s evolution, have undergone numerous crises. Among them, an old article of Time magazine asserted that, “Climate Change” is the most dire crisis of human existence since the beginning of human civilization. Climate change is believed to be more dangerous than any wars, natural disasters, and/or epidemics throughout history

Since the late 2008, we have undergone the most severe economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s: crisis with health care system and the meltdowns of housing and financial sector. These are tragic social, political problems that we have encountered cyclically but can be solved depending on what kind of politicians voters chose to put in power. But none of these problems are as fundamental as the current challenge posed by “the Crisis of Climate Change.”

Sadly, poor people always seem to be the targets of natural or man-made disasters or any kind of misfortunes. For example, recent political history showed that health care crisis, housing market meltdown, recession and unemployment hit the less privileged, poor people hardest while the rich always seem to find ways to avoid any kind misfortunes. Even “Global Warming” is expected to hit the poorest people in poor or developing countries or those in the United States of America instead of rich people, rich countries.

The future victims of climate change will include not only those poor people in Asia or Africa but also the American poors who live in poor rural areas or disindustrializing US cities and towns. Now they are suffering from job losses and fewer jobs available due to their declining home town industrial bases and growing poverty. Their problems are not only increasing poverty, hunger, and homelessness but also their inability to cope with drastic weather changes including heat waves, droughts, flooding, water shortage, spread of diseases and so on that will drive them to near or actual death.

There have been severe criticism that rich developed and developing countries have caused “Global Warming” in the chorological order of industrial revolutions; the phases of industrialization ofWestern Europe, the United States, China, and India have been directly related to their amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, causing extreme weather changes and general warming of global climate. However, it is most poor people in the most poor countries in the world who have suffered and will suffer from the direst consequences of “Global Warming” without their part of contribution to or awareness of the phenomenon. These people have endured, will endure their small countries to disappear under rising sea levels, their farmlands or pastures to dry out or flooded due to severe frequent droughts or floods, and/or loss of their properties or lives or starvation due to more frequent tornadoes, droughts, floods, hurricanes. In the meantime, the responsible countries of these warming disasters have not taken their share of cleaning up these messes to curb, reverse “the speed of climate warming.”

International, multilateral negotiations of political issues, no matter whether it is about trade or climate issues, have always been slow-moving, often dissolving into endless arguments with few effective agreements. It’s countries’ national policies that can be quickly agreed upon within shorter time into smaller scale action plans while waiting for the progress of multilateral talks. In this regard, I respect people who relentlessly tackle on “Climate Issues” or any kinds of efforts to curb and reverse Climate Change. And it is important to raise future generation that are environmentally smart and natural problem-solvers of environmental problems, unlike their parents’ generations.

Thoughts of Connecting Energy, Climate Issues with the Commercial, Trade Rules of WTO as Fair Conditions for Global Trade and Industrial Competitiveness

-This blog was posted on mybarackobama.com website on Apr 26th, 2009.-

There has been news about Republicans and some Democrats’ skepticism about current Energy Proposal that emphasizes the increasing supply of renewable energy and “cap-and-trade” measure to control CO2 emission. Their claim of opposition is that these measures “increase costs for consumers, send jobs overseas, and hurt businesses.”

I also read, the administration reportedly intends that the energy bill does not conflict with international trade rules to prevent any disruption on US exports. And there has been the suggestion of negotiating a new “international climate change agreement” to obtain nations’ long term commitment to control emission. As President is scheduled to meet the world leaders of major economies to discuss the energy crisis, “EU calls on US to help lead global fight for climate change”, and small nations ask for more drastic measure from industrialized economies to control extreme weather changes including flood, rising sea levels, and extreme weather changes, there seems to be a increasingly better chance to get international agreements and support on energy and climate issues.

As I observe the changing international and domestic politics, and as the current opposition to the energy legislation is labeling this bill as a potential source of increasing energy costs and taxes, and weakening US industrial and trade competitiveness of, I would say, “tradable goods” in both world and domestic markets along with domestic jobs, I would like to discuss the alternative ways of dealing with these problems.

I am not certain about the practicability of this suggestion, and I don’t have specific information on how costly or cheap these new energy sources from wind, sun, waves or other renewable sources can be, especially in the beginning stages of their industrial or commercial applications. Common knowledge has been that new technologies, inventions, developments, and prototypes of newly developed products usually tend to be relatively expensive in their initial stages of development and introduction to market / commercial usages. It usually takes time for industries and markets to get accustomed to new types of technologies and products and refine / reshape their production methods / technologies into commercially cheaper and cost efficient mass production system.

Assuming that these renewable energy sources and technologies may need a bit of transitional period to mature and become mass, standardized, cost-effective energy sources to consumers and industries, and to reduce the possible disadvantage of US manufacturing of tradable goods in the initial stages of switching to these new energy sources if the administration governmental consumption of renewable energy sources, the administration may continues to pursue US consumer, industries, and government to switch to renewable energy sources, I would like to suggest the followings:

1.      In the beginning stage of pushing the consumption of renewable energy to consumer, industrial, and federal and state governments, it may be useful to differentiate and wisely choose the proper target groups with different time schedule of adopting renewable energy sources. In the beginning stage of implementing this energy legislation, the administration may choose individual consumer, industries of non-tradable-goods (such as retailing, medical industry, tourism, other service industries), and federate and state governments as the primary target groups to switch from traditional energy sources to renewable energies. And it would be less hurtful for US manufacturing if the administration provides longer, gradual, flexible time schedules for US industries of tradable goods to switch to renewable energy sources so that they gradually adapt to new energy sources. This flexible adjustment period will reduce the chance that the shift to renewable energy sources partially contributes to deteriorating weakening the global and domestic competitiveness of industries of tradable goods.

2.       During the process of implementing (1) as mentioned above, it would be productive to seek international agreements on harmonizing, equalizing global industrial and trade competitive conditions. This effort may include the phased time schedule of incorporating renewable energy sources and emission control worldwide. Requiring these conditions as the prerequisites or fair conditions for global industrial and trade competitions, negotiating memberships, rules, or terms of World Trade Organization (WTO), regional / multilateral trade agreements, foreign market access / investments / bidding for foreign government contracts or procurements, and serving global common cause of fighting climate crisis could prevent from penalizing the manufacturing competitiveness of countries, who actively pursue the fight for global climate crises, because they adopt these measures to protect environments. It is critical to make nations face the same sets of underlying rules and conditions of international industrial and trade competition including energy and pollution issues, and to prevent from disadvantaging, penalizing specific nations’ manufacturing that adopt climate-friendly production methods are critical.

According to political history of negating regional and/or multilateral trade agreements, dealing with labor or environmental standards have proven to be difficult issues as imposing these standards to economies of different GDP sizes have been tough challenges. And multilateral negotiations have been inefficient, time consuming, and often difficult to reach resolutions / agreements. However, recent international political scenes have shown some positive signs regarding climate issues. For example, there have been news reports such as

“European Union environment ministers called on the United States to help the EU lead and finance the battle against climate change.”

“The EU has been the leader of the international debate. We want to keep on and to offer a co-leadership to the US.”

“We need to build a coalition. It cannot be done unilaterally on the EU side,” “It is not only an obligation of the EU to come with fundings and figures… the United States, Japan and all the developed countries should contribute.”

Although EU showed passive attitude toward the “Global Fight with Terrorism” at NATO meeting, the bloc is showing a positive attitude toward dealing with Global Climate Crisis. When both the US and EU, the largest world markets and have strong leverages in world politics and commerce, are so enthusiastic on working together on climate issues, and many small nations are anxious about taking drastic measures to tame climate crisis as natural disasters such as flood, rising sea level, and drought are threatening their nations’ survival, I believe there is better than ever favorable chance of getting international cooperation on adopting renewable energies and emission issues, along with other environmental issues, to their economies and manufacturing.

I also believe, it would be more effective to get international agreements on climate issues if these issues are negotiated along with commercial / trade issues, later of which have been regulated by WTO and regional trade negotiations and have been major economic concerns to both developed and developing countries. I expect that this combination of issues is more likely to motivate both developed and developing countries whose economies are keenly related to exports. Although current global economic downturn may have negative effects on this endeavor and consensus is often tough to reach, the timing and international political environments for negotiating energy / climate issue are more favorable than before.

Climate: No Arctic Ice in 30 yrs. – My love, you are disappearing so fast

This blog was posted on mybarackobama website on Apr 3rd, 2009 . Because this issue is unchangeably important, I post it again.

This morning, I read that Arctic sea ice is melting so fast that they wouldn’t be around in the Earth in next 30 years. And the disappearing Arctic ice means that the sunlight-reflecting, Earth-cooling effect of its white surface will disappear and sunlight will be all absorbed through the newly exposed dark ocean, increasing the temperature of Earth further. Disappearing Arctic ice, along with fossil fuels, are the major causes of global warming, according to the report.

All of us, all societies, and all nations have our, their own individual universes with different orders of priorities, what’s the most or least important. In mothers’ universes, what their kids ate this morning, whether they are sick or play with which toys or books, that kind of things are the most important things above anything elses. Anybody who don’t agree with them are strangers. For teenage girls, makeup, clothes, boys, parties, drinking, and going wild come first before anything else in their universes. For business men, drug dealers, or any kind of entrepreneurs, money, profits, promotion come first before anything else at any costs. For hungry people, food comes first. For sick people, medical service comes first. For artists, art comes first. During good times, whether we are richer, thinner, have bigger cars or houses, have more fun and entertainment of life than others come first. During recession, economy comes first. To terrorists’ world, attacking their enemy nations comes before their own lives and peace. For nations, which countries have the strongest military or economic power, or how to put pressure or threaten other countries to get what they want come first before anything else, etc.

While all of our universes are colliding with each other without finding common grounds, consensus, and concessions, the world have become a chaotic, uncontrollable place. In the process, our only common home, the Earth, have taken the backseat all the way, while we have been consciously and/or unconsciously trashing it close to the point of no-return, it increasingly becoming inhabitable for us anymore. But still it doesn’t seem to be important enough to get proper amount of our attention and to do something about it. We are in life-threatening crisis. Just we don’t think so.

Planet Earth: Are We Deserting You?

We live in a crazy world.

Politics has gone mad. People’s lives have gotten out of control. Now, climate is getting out of control.

Many people don’t believe this if they could not see it right now, at this moment. They believe, if it did not happen now, it could not have existed. They take every trivial matters serious, which actresses lost how much weight and wear what kind of dresses at Oscar Award, which athlet got how many mistresses, who gets expensive NY apartment, which vain couple pursued the ultimate vanity of crashing into White House Dinner. But they can not seriously take the fact that this planet is increasinly plunging into becoming an inhabitable place for human race if serious actions are not taken soon. Please read the below quotes from an article  ”56 Papers in 45 Countries Publish Joint Editorial” by Editor & Publisher. How stupid, ignorant are we, or the entire civilization is if we have been the source of our own destruction.

“The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.“

Full Text: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004051277