Climbing the Climate Hurdles

The U.S. and China got over their first joint climate hurdle by signing their first bilateral memorandum of understanding between Beijing and Washington on climate change in early 2009 in preparation for the Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009. Hopefully, their agreement will become the template for the other nations attending in the hope of reaching an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Accord to which the U.S. is not a signatory. The U.S. and China are responsible for 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and can lead their respective developed and developing world constituencies to the dotted signature lines.

Twenty percent across-the-board cuts in emissions is an excellent starting point. The target was first set by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, an average of 6.2 liters per 100 kilometers for all cars and light trucks by 2016, has now been adopted by President Obama for the entire country. That will eventually cut U.S. vehicle emissions by 40 percent. It also means that U.S. oil imports may fall up to half by 2019.

By the time the U.S. reaches its 6.62 liters per 100 kilometers target in 2016, most other countries will have moved on to an average of 5.2 liters per 100 kilometers or better. China’s current requirement is 5.5 liters per 100 kilometers. The U.S. is playing catch-up. But at least its back in a game it can easily win and lead with China that has clearly demonstrated it’s willingness to partner to make sure the rest of the world follows.

With the sun missing its spots, the solar cycle is speaking volumes of the impact of climate change. Ever since Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, a German astronomer, first noted in 1843 that sunspots grow and wane over a roughly 11-year cycle, scientists have carefully watched the sun’s activity. In the latest lull, the sun reached its calmest whitest, least pockmarked state in the autumn of 2008.

For operators of satellites and power grids, that is good news. The same magnetic fields that generate sunspot blotches also accelerate a devastating rain of particles that can overload and wreck electronic equipment in irbit or on earth. A panel of 12 scientists assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now only predict only 90 sunspots during the peak month of May 2013. That would make it the weakest solar maximum since 1928, when there were 78 sunspots. During an average solar maximum, the sun is covered with 120 sunspots.

Some global warming skeptics speculate that the sun may be on the verge of falling into an extended slumber similar to the so-called Maunder-Minimum ─ a period of several sunspot-scarce decades during the 17th and 18th centuries that concided with an extended chilly period. Another ice-age? C’mon, if anything it will be the Ice Age in reverse. More like the “Roaster Age,” “Hell’s Age,” “Fossil Age,” or destructive “Human Age.”

The U.S. House of Representatives in Washington unveiled four bills in 2009 to foster closer relations with China on climate change, trade, energy and boost teaching of Chinese in the U.S. The 55 member congressional U.S.-China Working Group is finally tackling climate change as seriously as China. It is about time America acknowledge reality and stopped blaming China and its requests for an industrial development break as it is developing and weathering the current financial and economic meltdown, not to mention the nuclear one with Iran and North Korea.

America and China have to get their scientists to not only address all the ramifications of climate change the last century and next, but how they compromise their respective radical extremes on getting there, primarily because of Big Oil. It is about time science and the corporate world, regardless of whether they followed the capitalist or Confucian model, start thinking about the various ways and means their scientists can start helping the majority of the world’s citizens, as well as themselves and their shareholders. Otherwise they will lose it all.

Global Tidal Waves

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists, says that by 2080 as many as 3.2 billion people ─ one-third of the planet’s population ─ will be short of water, up to 600 million will be short of food and as many as 7 million will face coastal flooding.

Security experts fear that the tidal wave of forced migration will not only fuel existing conflicts but create new ones in some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the world. “A world of many more Darfurs is the increasingly likely nightmare scenario,” claims the report.

Since 1965, a volume of water equivalent to the Great Lakes has melted in polar regions and flowed into the world’s oceans, making them less salty. China is at risk from global warming as the Tibetan glaciers that feed and regulate many of China’s rivers begin to melt, and the country’s agriculture becomes vulnerable to even small changes in temperature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that sea levels will rise up about 0.91 meters by 2100.

The U.N. estimates that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s people will be living with water stress, with North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia hit the worst. Regions that get more rainfall may get it in the form of fierce rainstorms that cause flash floods rather than a useful drizzle that soaks into the ground.

People who live within 97 kilometers of a shoreline, or about one-third of the world’s population, could be affected if sea levels rise as expected over the coming decades, possibly more than 1 meter by 2100. Flooded homes and crops could make environmental refugees of a billion people. Living on a bay that floods my street whenever there is a direct typhoon hit that brings with it high tides and ferocious winds that turn the street into a kayaking paradise beach for the neighborhood kids as the winds subside, I have personally experienced the growing peril on a small scale personally and am naturally very concerned.

“The culprit responsible for warming has been identified. As far as I am concerned, the debate’s over. What we need to be debating is what we’re going to do about it,” said Tim Barnett, an oceanographer at the Scripps Oceanographic Institution in San Diego. The Pentagon agrees.

A study commissioned and suppressed in 2005 by the Pentagon warns that major European cities will sink beneath rising seas and Britain will be plunged into a “Siberian” climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. This threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to the report. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” concludes the Pentagon analysis. “Once again, warfare would define human life.”

The major threat of mayhem comes from large populations simply upping the stakes and moving into other people’s territories. I don’t know which way global warming will run, but won’t it be interesting if the zones that suffer most are Europe and North America and the ones that remain or indeed become more habitable are in Africa and the southerly Asian lands. Colonialist imperialists on the move again ─ firing as they go.

Politically Hungry America

America’s hunger and appetite is metaphorically exemplified by the public’s obsession of where foodie President Obama and his wife Michele eat out. How’s this for a healthy political appetite: pizza in Saint Louis, pancakes in Pittsburg, soul food in Chicago, and chili dogs and cheese fries in Washington? But, hey, that’s America and that’s what it takes to get elected and hold onto high popularity ratings while America is starving. Any wonder Gourmet magazine, long considered the Grande Dame and dean of culinary publishing went out of business? What is more amazing, is that P.F. Chang’s simple Chinese recipe for profits, actually features ingredients that wouldn’t be found in Chinese restaurants, like chocolate, cheese, melon balls and that the “P.F.” stands for company founder Paul Fleming. A smart Yankee that others should take note of, especially career politicians in Washington.

China certainly offers America ─ and the world it leads ─ the most diversified, phenomenal and constantly changing cutting edge nourishing and delicious cuisine. The same holds true on the political front. China is again moving to center stage as it returns to the historical norm in which it is the world’s largest economy as it was for 1,800 years. The New World Disorder created by America needs to be reorganize with a fused Chinese recipe.

Chinese recipes are very healthy ─ yes I know about MSG, but having been raised on the Mediterranean diet, I also know and appreciate the pure organic taste of exotic Chinese dishes. I am constantly disappointed and angered when I dine in Chinese restaurants in America and experience America’s food fusion movement’s Americanizing Chinese food in an unhealthy way. As more Americans go Chinese with their dietary appetites, my hope is their hunger to better understand China is also satisfied and that China’s rich history, culture, capitalist and political development is correctly digested.

The time for a new eating and political order in America is long overdue.

Let’s start with food for now. Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has no kudos for mass-produced American cuisine. He is highly critical for its nutritional imperialism. Americans steal Asian cuisines, import them with fanfare, and then absolutely destroy them with harmful additions and additives. He trashes Americans’ penchant for large quantities of mayonnaise-topped tempura shrimp wrapped evilly in rice as a faux sushi roll. He says Americans imperialize so many world cuisines that they should be ashamed of themselves. “American Chinese food is not Chinese,” he complains. I agree wholeheartedly. The classic dish General Tso’s chicken, after mass-Americanization, is poisoned with sugar: “Hunan cuisine is not sweet,” Kessler rails. The same applies to Chinese politics which is misrepresented in America.

Fast-Chinese-food chains like Panda Express, corrupt otherwise healthy Chinese dishes with piles of sugar and fat. Across America, trendy fused pan-Chinese restaurants, well marketed and much ballyhooed by the media systematically slaughter every cuisine they touch.

Fusion cuisine, like fusion geopolitics, can be good for everyone’s health, but only depending on how skillfully and carefully it is all put together. The trick is to take the best of China and combine it with the best of America. Continue going the other way around ─ with the worst of America ─ and you have a major mishmash and nutritional meltdown. Much like the economic and financial meltdown-tsunami the world has been force-fed by Washington politicians and their bankers.

Cooking With Biogas and Planting Trees

Farmers in China are turning to biogas for their home cooking and lighting needs because of government initiatives and incentives that encourage farmers and rural dwellers to switch from coal. According to national statistics, 26 million households in China were using methane from biogas sources for cooking and heating by the end of 2007. That number rose to 31 million by 2008. China has invested more than 10.5 billion yuan from 2004 to 2009 for construction of biogas projects in rural areas, including 98,600 villages.

Animal and crop wastes are processed in biogas digester pools into clean methane that can be used for cooking, heating and lighting and replace carbon emitting coal. After five years of research, the Ministry of Finance and the Asian Development Bank initiated its Efficient Utilization of Agricultural Waste Project in 2003. The ADB offered $33 million in loans targeting rural Shanxi, Hubei, Henan and Jiangxi provinces. The provinces put up matching funds that trained thousands of farmers, biogas facility experts, construction workers and managers in the construction and operation of communal and home biogas facilities.

China encouraged the development of biogas as part of the Renewable Energy Law, which became effective last year, and also as part of the country’s Mid-and-Long-Term Development Program for Renewable Energy.

In America, the government has decided to plant 18 million acres of new trees ─ roughly the size of West Virginia ─ by 2020, replacing both pastures and farm fields under a bill passed by the House of Representatives in June 2009. The bill gives financial incentives to farmers and ranchers to plant trees, which suck in large amounts of carbon dioxide. The trees not only lower carbon dioxide levels, but they would improve the water quality because they need lower levels of fertilizer and pesticides.

Cooking With Explosive Gas

Both the United States and China are actively seeking solutions to curb emissions of carbon dioxide generated by burning fossil fuels. Some are more fanciful than others and frankly non-starters. The carbon capture and storage initiative being explored by the Obama administration tops that list ,in my book. The idea is to siphon off the carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and pump it into deep underground storage tanks before it enters the environment and warms the atmosphere. The government is spending $2.4 billion from the U.S. stimulus package on carbon capture and storage projects.

“A mere down payment…the administration may be digging a very expensive dry hole. I mean it literally,” wrote Washington columnist Eugene Robinson in a June 2009 column. I agree, but I would add that it is not only expensive, but explosive.

Scientists and engineers will have to prove that the possibility of a sudden catastrophic carbon dioxide release from a storage site is impossible. “Catastrophic” because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and a ground-hugging cloud would suffocate anyone it enveloped. That is what happened in Cameroon in 1986, when naturally occurring carbon dioxide trapped at the bottom of Lake Nyos erupted and killed 1,746 people in nearby villages.

China, unlike the U.S., is looking at building more nuclear power plants to meet future energy needs as it struggles with what to do to minimize carbon dioxide emissions generated by power plants that are dependent on fossil fuels. Now that it has become the top greenhouse gas polluter, China is trying to grapple with U.S. and international pressure to curb its rising CO emissions. The dilemma Beijing faces is that its leadership does not want to be distracted from building its economy by accepting a ceiling on greenhouse gas output, which even optimistic mainland experts expect to keep rising until around 2030.

Now that there is new evidence that the planet itself has begun to contribute to global warming through fallout from human activity, time is of the essence. Huge amounts of gases such as methane ─ an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide ─ trapped for millennia in the Arctic permafrost may be starting to leak into the atmosphere, speeding up the warming process. The March 2009 IPCC report calls on policymakers to take urgent steps to keep average global temperatures from increasing more than two degrees Centigrade, compared to pre-industrial levels. The time for action is upon us.

“Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation is required to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’ regardless of how it is defined,” the report says. Achieving this goal, the report concludes, would require industrialized nations to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 percent from 1990 levels. Deep emission cuts are essential.

By 2030, annual emissions of carbon dioxide could reach 8 to 10 billion tons a year, unless tough action is taken, said He Jiankun, a professor at Tsinghua University who advises the government on emissions. “Ultimately, there will have to be compromise in Copenhagen, because these negotiations can’t be allowed to collapse,” He said. “If they do fall apart, that will be devastating, and nobody will be spared the repercussions.”

Why don’t the Chinese and U.S. governments spend their money and energy on solar, wind and other renewable energy sources instead of trying to deal with pollutants from nuclear and fossil fuels?

Come Together on Climate Change

It was heart-warming to hear former China-human-rights-basher, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, express in Beijing in June 2009, high hopes of co-operation between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, ahead of President Obama’s visit to China in November and of the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009. “We believe China and the United States can and must confront the challenge of climate change together…We have a responsibility to ourselves, to our country, to our people and to the world to work together on this.” Her change of tone exemplified how the two chefs can cook together instead of throwing boiling water at each other. Hopefully, the U.S. and China can lead their respective global constituencies to cook up a cooling climate recipe to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

In her meeting with China’s President Hu Jintao, he told her the differences between the two countries could be handled through dialogue and consultation, and that mutual efforts should be based “on equality and mutual respect.”

“I think this climate crisis is game changing for the U.S.-China relationship. It is an opportunity we cannot miss,” Speaker Pelosi said at the U.S.-China Clean Energy Forum. “I am very optimistic about the cooperation…as a great deal of work between us has been done,” Pelosi added.

Her optimism in Beijing was shared by Congressman Ed Markey, who co-sponsored the draft U.S. Waxman-Markey climate bill and chairs the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He was “encouraged because of movement that was being made in a significant way in China on energy intensity, energy efficiency and fuel economy standards.” Hopefully the U.S. and China will sign that treaty that will propel the U.S. and China to explore new green recipes to create and cook clean green energy together.

“We are in the process of working on a deal the U.S. president will sign when he visits China in November,” Stan Barer, co-chair of the forum said.

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, who was in Beijing at the same time as Pelosi and Markey to attend the forum, after high level meetings in Beijing on energy co-operation, including scientific research, investment and technology transfer said: “I have been involved in this issue for 20 years… This has been the most constructive and productive discussions I’ve ever had with Chinese officials.”

Todd Stern, U.S. climate change chief negotiator, confirmed Kerry’s opinion at the conclusion of the U.N. climate conference in Bonn: “I think what China has already done ─ the 20 percent energy efficiency target for the current five-year plan, renewable energy and nuclear power targets ─ is all very impressive.”

The U.S. bill aims to cut green house gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, falling short of a European Union pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an average of 20 percent from their 1990 levels by 2020 and boost renewable energy sources by 20 percent. In a position paper on the Copenhagen Conference, China urged developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. Let’s hope America and China can come together to lead the world through the pending global abyss.

Dying Fossil Fuel

The end of oil reserves is a lot nearer than expected according to the International Energy Agency in Paris. The day we will see the end of the oil era can best be described as an oil-bomb implosion ─ more powerful than anything humanity has seen, and less than a few decades away. That is why it is imperative to pursue alternative energy options, something China recognizes and is addressing. It is a country shifting from a society built on oil looking at development beyond the “age of oil.” That is why it is so heavily invested in renewable energy.

On the other hand, Big Oil renewable divisions are being scaled back as the oil companies retreat to their core business in oil and gas. The sad reality is that Big Oil is not going to be in the forefront of new technologies. Their dinosaur fossilized corporate culture space that has evolved in spacious over-sized energy wasting venues is much too comfortable and familiar for them to seriously explore alternative renewable energy. Just thinking of the headaches they get about hearing the difficulties trucks carrying parts for wind turbines are confronted with because of government bureaucratic rules, regulations and inertia brings a smile to my face that quickly turns to anger when I think of the global taxpayer subsidized pipelines, refineries, tankers and politicians that their Big Oil Exec idiotic apathetic attitude and irresponsible dereliction of duties to their shareholders and public if they really had any sense of corporate responsibility and didn’t just think their expensive advertisement media spins will continue to blindside public citizens anywhere.

It doesn’t make sense to allow oil companies to make record profits from the public’s dependence on oil and then allow them to use those profits to find more oil with polluting technologies to continue the public’s oil-addiction as they are now doing with tar sand, coal to liquid and carbon capture and storage. That is why I renewed my 1979 horseback ride ─ protesting oil profits and urging alternatives to oil be developed ─ in 2006 and 2008.

Trucks carrying silvery blades nearly 150 feet, or 45 meters, long have been trucking through mellow New England in the summers, backing up traffic as they slowly leave the main roadways. Huge, tubular chunks of tower also pass through. Tall pieces of machinery looking something like jet engines travel at night because they require special routing to avoid overpasses. As demand for clean energy grows, towns across America are finding their traffic patterns disrupted by convoys carrying pieces of tower that will reach more than 250 feet in height, as well as motors, blades and other parts. Escorted by police, patrol cars and gawked at by clueless citizens, the equipment must travel long distances from ports or factories to the remote, wind destinations where the turbines are erected. The reality is this fossilized thinking must be disposed for remade socially responsible attitude and approach that is relevant to all interlocal citizens. Even though Big Oil doesn’t get it, it’s a good thing other politically-connected U.S. corporate iconic cowboy-pioneers sort of do, but at least go with the flow. General Electric being is one such example in the “scandalous” corporate and personal culture of its corporate capitalist guru Jack Welch. It has decided to develop its water purification business, from a drop in the corporate bucket of earnings to a major growth driver within years, just as its wind unit did. “What GE tries to do is to align the company with some of the mega trends, the mega challenges of the world. Energy is one, healthcare is the other, and the third one is water,” said Heiner Markhoff president and chief executive of GE Water & Process Technologies.

Let’s not forget that GE corporate executives for the most part, granted not all, are made out of the same cookie cutter that their counterparts in Big Oil are. This is best exemplified by what GE Executive Jeff Immelt said in 2001 when wind turbine executives pitched him to get GE into the business. He dismissed the technology as a “hula hoop.” Immelt later changed his mind when Enron’s bankruptcy provided a cheaper way into the business, and wind turbines in 2008 generated almost $6.5 billion in revenue.

Pacific Plastic Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a marine plastic soup that may be twice the size of France, is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its ecosystem. It is an environmental catastrophe that has received limited political or media attention because of the billions of dollars the plastic industry ─ and its petroleum based oil producing supporters ─ have spent in the form of political campaign contributions and media advertising.

The Pacific Plastic patch was first discovered in 1997 by California sailor, surfer and volunteer environmentalist Charles Moore who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii on his catamaran. For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take the short-cut across the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a region seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense, slowly spiraling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coast of Southeast Asia and North America. In the 1950s, nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. Today it is 90 percent plastic.

Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 meters, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, swirling like snow-flakes or fish food. The world’s navies and commercial fishing fleets make a significant contribution, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day. Eighty percent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land according to a variety of studies. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and dumps, trucks and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Beaches are also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade. In other words, no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous Pacific Plastic Patch and most beaches and seashores. On most beaches today, even Hawaii’s pristine beaches, there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until one digs at least a foot down. I experienced this first hand on the pristine beaches of Palau when a chemical engineer, working for a Taiwanese businessman trying to set up a plastic factory there, who was drunk and heartbroken and couldn’t bear the thought of how polluted Palau would become ─ and at the risk of getting fired ─ educated me in the basics of plastics and their long term devastation of the environment. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans according to a U.N. report.

Worldwide, plastic is killing one million seabirds a year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles according to the United Nations Environment Program. Many chicks die every year from eating pieces of plastic their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.

China Bubble

The China stimulus package has forced banks to force-feed the economy with liquidity. The purpose of the so-called “quantitative easing” was to generate domestic demand while exports slumped. But much of the liquidity has flowed into property and stock markets instead ─ and has partly become government fiscal revenue.

Stocks and properties in China may be 100 percent overvalued. Only two decades of relatively high inflation can justify their prices. However, persistently high inflation leads to currency devaluation, which triggers capital flight and, eventually, an asset market collapse.

The stories coming out of China of millionaires losing their deposits in financial institutions, corrupt, fast and loose lending by rural credit cooperatives and bankrupt consumer lending institutions hollowed out by employees and borrowers make me shudder at the thought of the lending bubble being blown by Beijing. Kickbacks to officials who review and approve loans regardless of the borrowers credit worthiness is a replay of what happened in America.

Beijing’s decision in 2008 to embark on a monetary easing policy in tandem with its stimulus package, encouraged financial institutions to grant loans to fund infrastructure projects ─ Confucian capitalism at its worst because most of the money was spent on personal businesses, stock market and real estate. Worries are mounting that the lending spree will lead to a mountain of bad assets in the banks as well as the misuse of funds. Mainland financial institutions extended a record 7.37 trillion yuan of loans in the first six months of 2009, nearly three times the amount a year earlier.

Official statistics show that rural credit co-operatives had piled up about 590 billion yuan in non-performing loans by the end of 2008. Bad loans at rural commercial banks stood at 19.28 billion yuan at the end of the first half of 2009.

Having started a few thrift and loans, savings and loans, federal and state banks in California in the 1980s go-go years both as a lawyer and a principal, I can relate to how financial institutions get hollowed out by owners, shareholders, employees and borrowers.

John Greenwood, an adviser to the former Hong Kong monetary authorities and who still advises the HKMA, also known as the “father of the peg” in Hong Kong, was back in July 2009 and warned that China’s massive stimulus package could cause serious trouble for the mainland economy within two years. “If China continues with the current rate of money and credit growth, there is an inflationary danger,” warned Greenwood. When something seems to good to be true, it is. World trade ─ the engine of global growth ─ has collapsed. Employment is still contracting throughout the world. There are no realistic scenarios for the global economy to regain high and sustainable growth, which means the China stock market and property bubble inflated by the government’s massive stimulus plan will burst.

Water Wars

Water is becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water intensive industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a severe struggle for more water. Bhopal, India’s “City of Lakes,” where water was always plentiful, has become a parched wasteland of high and dry lakes where water shortage has turned deadly as residents fight to the last drop. Both countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal in terms of per capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle East.

Tibet and Xinjiang, China’s two westernmost regions, are not only in the forefront of China’s ethnic conflict, but climate change. While Tibet is getting mired in a deepening drought and declining water resources in future years, the water table in Xinjiang is on the rise and the dry climate is gradually becoming more humid. While Tibet is drying up, Xinjiang’s water reserves are growing at a rate equivalent to a rise in rainfall of 10mm per year.

Glaciers in Tibet have been melting for decades. From 1971 to 2002 they shrank by 5.3 percent, and between 2003 and 2008 they shrank a further 10 percent. Between 2002 and 2007 Tibet had suffered a drop in total water resources ─ ice, snow, surface and underground water ─ equivalent to a 30mm reduction in rainfall. Tibet experienced a drought in 2009 with some monitoring stations not recording rainfall for more than 200 days, and temperatures up to 2.3 degrees Celsius higher. The Tibetan plateau is the source of China’s major waterways, the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang (Mekong) rivers.

Tibet is the source of most major Indian rivers. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Indeed, all of Asia’s major rivers, except the Ganges, originate in the Tibetan plateau. Even the Ganges’ two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river-water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau that threaten to reduce international river flows into India and other riparian states. The seeds of a potential water conflict have been sown. Water is now a political tool, not only on the Tibetan plateau, but globally.

It’s the same story in the Middle East. After a five-year drought, the region is headed toward a water calamity that could overwhelm all peace efforts. The Jordan River now has large sections reduced to a trickle. The Sea of Galilee is at its lowest point ever. The surface area of the Dead Sea has shrunk by a third. Iraq’s ancient marshes are now marked by large swaths of stalks and caked mud. In northern Syria, more than 160 villages in two years from 2007 to 2009 have run dry and been deserted by residents. In Gaza, 150,000 Palestinians have no access to tap water. In Israel, the pumps at the Sea of Galilee, its largest reservoir, are exposed above the water level rendering pumping impossible.

Sino-U.S. Century

America and China have elevated the bi-annual Strategic Economic Dialogue meetings to bi-annual S&ED meetings. The inaugural meeting took place in Washington DC on July 27-28, 2009. The meetings are no longer limited to financial and economic matters discussed between the U.S. Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart, but now include the U.S. Secretary of State and her Chinese counterpart to also address global geopolitical issues.

“The relationship between the United States and China will shape the 21st century, which makes it as important as any bilateral relationship in the world,” president Obama said in his opening remarks that kicked of the S&ED. Serious words to digest, but the perfect antacid to unnecessary repeated burning economic, financial, ethnic, terrorist and military indigestion attacks. China’s Hu Jintao sent a message to the meeting in which he said China sought a “positive, constructive and comprehensive relationship.” He went on to add: “As two countries with significant influence in the world, China and the United States shoulder important responsibilities on a host of major issues concerning peace and development of mankind.”

The S&ED should be elevated to include at least one annual presidential level meeting. Why not make them even stronger? America and China must step up their dialogue and cooperation in areas of trade, energy, environmental protection, food safety and military cooperation and sign a mutually beneficial bilateral treaty governing their relationship in these areas.

A comprehensive bilateral treaty that brings the two countries closer together would be just as miraculous as Obama’s election victory was. The China challenge is, first and foremost, really about money and military might. Energy and the other geopolitical issues are secondary. The other side benefits of a bilateral treaty are that it would allow U.S. firms to invest in China’s industrial sector and allow U.S. firms in China to settle disputes by international arbitration rather than subject them to the arbitrary rule of law that currently exists in domestic Chinese courts. In turn, China would have an incentive to improve its legal system and to better protect private property rights and intellectual property.

Presidents Hu and Obama agreed in April 2009 at the London G20 to combine the unheard of Strategic Dialogue with the SED into one S&ED. A naturally challenging dialogue in the interlocal global web both countries have spun themselves and each other into in the last 30 years. Nothing of significance came out of the meeting except for the very significant memorandum of understanding between the two regarding global warming, energy and environment that they are both pushing each other from radical extremes. That is one issue they really have to duke out honestly and harmoniously as the cornerstone pillars of their future continuously bonding relationship depends on it. If they can’t solve this one, then humanity is doomed.

Smoked Meat

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco. It is a country that sees about a million tobacco-related deaths a year, a quarter of all such deaths worldwide.

China is a signatory to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which aims to reduce global demand for tobacco products by encouraging developing nations to adopt anti-smoking measures that are now commonplace in developed countries. China signed the convention in 2003, ratified it in 2005 and became a full member in 2006.

The mainland is home to about 350 smokers, with about 3 million people taking up the habit annually. Nearly 60 percent of males aged 15 or above are smokers. More than one million Chinese die each year ─ one every two seconds ─ from smoking related diseases. And 540 million people suffer from passive smoking. China’s culture of cigarette smoking runs very deep and is very pervasive. Most of the founders of the People’s Republic, including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, were chain smokers.

One of the biggest difficulties the country faces in banning smoking is the fact that 56.8 percent of male doctors are smokers ─ the highest ratio in the world. The government only plans to ban smoking in all hospitals in 2011, when the convention’s timetable kicks in. According to the convention, China is required to ban smoking in all indoor public venues, office buildings and public transport from 2011.

The central government did not ban smoking in public entertainment venues, including movie-theatres, stadiums and bookshops until 1991, nor in airport terminals until 1997.

The nation grows a third of the world’s tobacco crops and manufactures a third of its cigarettes according to WHO. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration has more than 500,000 employees in more than 1,000 companies across 33 provinces. China’s massive tobacco industry employs more than 20 million farmers and more than 10 million retailers. Pre-tax revenues from the tobacco industry amounted to 388 billion yuan in 2008 and accounted for about 8 percent of the country’s fiscal revenues. Any wonder Chinese are smoked meat?

I agree with professor Zou Fangbin, an economics professor at the Guangdong University of Business Studies who has proposed the scrapping of the state monopoly and allow companies in the private sector to compete in this lucrative deadly sector. How can the government regulate an industry it owns and controls? It can’t. The commercial and regulatory arms of the industry have to be separate. China is the only one of the 164 signatories to the WHO convention to have a monopoly.

China’s Ethnic Violence

Tibetans and Uygurs chose the 2008 Olympics as the event to highlight their plight and heat up Beijing’s political kitchen.

Uygur militants gained international attention in August 2008 after an attack on a police station in the Silk Road city of Kashgar killed 17 police on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.

The Muslim Uygurs, who like many Tibetans are seeking independence, opted to also heat up Beijing’s political kitchen on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic to publicize their grievances against China’s rule. The massive parade and pageantry planned for the commemoration in Tiananmen Square is set to eclipse the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. On such occasions Beijing likes to make a point of celebrating its ethnic minorities, who it says have benefited greatly from the economic and social progress that has been brought to China by the ruling Communist Party.

The riots in Urumqi and other cities across Xinjiang were triggered by the sexual molestation of Chinese Han women by Uyger workers in a Hong Kong-owned factory in Shaoguan, northern Guangdong that ended with two Uyger workers being killed.

The resulting explosive ethnic violence in Urumqi, that killed at least 156 and left more than 800 injured, the worst known bloodshed in China since June 4, 1989, was another reminder of the widespread social vulnerabilities and concern confronting the Communist Party ─ shared with the world when China’s Hu Jintao left the G8 summit in Italy before it started ─ an unprecedented move by a Chinese leader. Never before has a Chinese leader shortened an overseas trip because of domestic concerns.

China cannot afford a restless Xinjiang because the resource rich region makes a significant contribution to the mainland’s energy security. The province sits atop as much as 20 percent of domestic oil reserves and is expected to account for one-fifth of the mainland’s coal output. Xinjiang’s long borders with oil-producing Central Asian countries is what differentiates it from Tibet.

Beijing’s aggressive and ambitious plans to construct refineries, pipelines and power grids across the region could backfire if these facilities became terrorist targets. In addition, much of the oil and gas extracted in Kazakhstan is transported inland via a 3,000 kilometer pipeline that passes through Xinjiang.

Such has been the scale of the influx that Han, who accounted for just six percent of Xinjiang’s population in 1949, now make up more than 40 percent of the total population. Uygur resentment has grown increasingly nationalistic and separatist, emboldened by the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the independence granted to three neighboring Islamic soviet republics.

Uygurs seeking independence used the Guangdong factory incident as the spark for the unrest in restive Xinjiang, an energy and resource rich province which accounts for one-sixth of the country’s territory, where the majority Uygurs feel exploited because the Han Chinese dominate economic and political life ─ a good reason for Chinese president Hu Jintao to leave the G8 summit in Italy before it started ─ to tend to the melting tip of the explosive ethnic iceberg in Beijing’s kitchen.

The G8 Wake

The annual G8 summit meeting started out in France in 1975 as a “fireside chat” with French delicacies and wines known as the G7 for the leaders of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, UK, Italy and Japan and became the G8 when Russia joined in 1997. The “G” stands for group. The July 8-10, 2009 G8-plus-5 that took place in L’Aquila, Italy ─ the five being Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa ─ plus Australia, Indonesia and South Korea who belong to the Major Economies Forum, Egypt and another 22 from Africa, Asia and the Middle East for a “Grand” total of 39 proved its outdated desperate efforts to remain relevant.

The so-called cordial chat around a fire turned into a talkfest around a bonfire in military barracks in the worst performer country in the G8 that failed to meet its commitment made in 2005 at the UK-chaired summit in Gleneagles to double aid to Africa by 2010, in an earthquake shattered city hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, embroiled in a very public divorce and lurid sex scandals ─ all very appropriate metaphoric backdrops of the rubble of the G whatever outdated irrelevant numbered structure it is for the 21st century ─ just as the irrelevant dated definitional classifications of so called “developed” and “developing” countries are today.

C’mon, how can a three day “chat” with 39 ego-maniacs and their “sherpas” devote the time needed to address a daunting agenda that included the worst global economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression, climate change, energy security, food security, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, resuscitation of Doha, development and elimination of poverty ─ with special emphasis on Africa and world trade ─ not to mention Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea that surely had to be discussed, be properly addressed, especially when the host nation did not prepare an agenda that was hijacked by the U.S. in China’s absence?

I agree with Nick Deardon, director of the London based Jubilee Debt Campaign, who says the G8 “should by rights be dead and buried, [It] harks back to the days when a handful of countries could happily control the world economy without interference.” He accurately described the summit in L’Aquila as just an “annual photo shoot.” Commitments made at the last few G8 meetings didn’t last the time it took the leaders to make it to the airport to leave. Their rapid ascent and departure from L’Aquila in helicopters means the 2009 promises will be broken quicker.

The 2009 G8 in earthquake scarred L’Aquila should be remembered as the groups wake.