Overcooked Insects

The Lancet medical journal declared in a May 2009 commentary that “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st-century.” As someone who has eaten more than my fair share of insects in China where they are treated and considered delicacies, I was fascinated to read how they actually are the carriers that spread human diseases because of climate change. Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. As it becomes hotter, the air can hold more moisture, helping certain disease-carriers, such as ticks that spread Lyme disease spread.

Pine bark beetles, which devour trees in western North America will be able to produce more generations each year, instead of subsiding during winter months. They leave standing dead timber, ideal fuel for wildfires from Arizona to Alaska, said Paul Epstein of the Center for health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. Having personally fought a forest wildfire when I lived in the former Will Rogers guest house near Will Rogers Park in the 1980s ─and being the father of a former U.S. Forest Firefighter who fought forest fires across the Western United States in the 1990s ─ I shudder at the thought.

History offers many lessons that we ignore and unfortunately, as a result, repeat in updated modern variations. One of my favorite, as a photographer and agricultural high school graduate ─ and of course English born writer ─ is what happened in England during the industrial revolution. Compare modern day photographs of colleges in the English university city of Oxford, with those taken as recently as 50 years ago, and one can’t help but notice the remarkable difference. Today the picturesque sandstone buildings are a near pristine golden yellow in colour. However, before the passage of the Clean Air Act in the United Kingdom in 1956, they were more or less uniformly black.

Years of chocking fumes from open fireplaces and filthy emissions from cars in a country that was the cradle of the industrial revolution using coal as the primary source of energy, came consequent damage, not only to buildings, but the environment and human health.

One of those consequences for a particular life form can be found in the history of the peppery moth, as taught in biology classes to children learning about Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Before the industrial revolution began in earnest, in the 18th century, most of these moths in Britain were a light color. However, some possessed mutated genes that made them much darker. These latter were fewer in number, it has been suggested, because it was easy for birds to spot and eat them. Then the environment changed and soot blackened the trees so that the lighter moths were more easily spotted and eaten while the darker moths blended better with the soot. The latter soon outnumbered the former.

This story illustrates the dilemma humanity faces with climate change, but especially China. No country has managed to boost its economic growth substantially without a consequential effect on the environment. America, like Britain before it and China today, have paid the same price and caused the same damage to the environment. Fortunately, today the world is aware of the price the planet and human health has paid and is prepared to tackle the issue to make sure there are no more innocent victims.

As the global mean temperature rises, expect more heat waves. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 25 percent more heat waves in Chicago by the year 2100; Los Angeles will likely have a four-to-eightfold increase in the number of heat-wave days by century’s end. These “direct temperature effects” will hit the most vulnerable people hardest, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, especially those with heart problems and asthma, the elderly, the very young and the homeless.

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.

More Sanctions? Fugetaboutit

Forget about the stalled six-party talks or the five working groups aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program. Forget about more useless sanctions. Forget about bipartisan recriminations. Forget about the blame game ─ especially picking on China and Russia. Forget about a nuclear East Asia.

The universal opposition and condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear tests ─ the first in October 2006 and the second on May 25 of this year ─ demands an urgent alternative solution to the rehashed and recycled proposals that have been tossed around since the 1953 Korean armistice took effect.

China and Russia, which like America opposed the North Korean tests, have been humiliated and desperately want a solution they can jointly embrace with America. Kim Jong Il’s nuclear bluff must be called. The Dear Leader crows that he is ready for war. Bring it on and let’s end the Korean War once and for all.

The Korean armistice signed on July 27, 1953, between North Korea and the U.N. Korean forces led by the U.S. remains in force. No formal peace treaty was ever concluded. People have forgotten that more than 84,000 soldiers from 16 countries serving under the U.N. flag died during the conflict. More than a million Korean civilians also died, as well as an estimated 900,000 Chinese troops fighting with the North Koreans. A peace treaty is long overdue.

Why should China and Russia go along? Because the U.S. will agree that Taiwan is a province of China and that America will not defend Taiwan should it declare independence. The U.S. settles two thorny issues simultaneously. China and America have a lot to offer Russia to come along.

America, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea must initiate five- party talks without pre-conditions or sanctions, which only hurt and subject the majority of North Koreans to more misery and suffering because of their self-centered sycophant authoritarian military leadership.

The five-party talks should explore how best to find an honorable face-saving exit for Kim and Co. This is a negotiating tactic America has perfected with several Haitian dictators over the years, allowing them to live comfortably in exile.

North Korea borders economic powers China, Russia and South Korea. Japan is nearby, across the Sea of Japan. These four economic superpowers could set up cooperative cross-border economic zones on their mutual borders, the kind Kim has visited and admired in China, and is hopelessly and helplessly trying to emulate.

These special economic zones would transform Pyongyang’s central planned Stalinist communist economy into neutral economic buffer zones in the potentially explosive area and stop the accelerating destabilization rippling through the region and beyond. It is the only feasible way to bring stability to East Asia.

It is in the world’s long-term strategic interest to neutralize North Korea’s nuclear capability, create a North-South confederation and eventually a unified Korea that enjoys prosperous cooperative economic zones with its neighbors.

Economic prosperity also would prevent a massive refugee exodus and ensuing crisis that China and Russia are concerned about, especially if American and European corporate citizens embrace the economic zones the same way they did in China. This would allow North Korea to finally sign a peace agreement that allows it to be gradually reunited with the South. The cost of reunification, unlike the case in postwar Germany, would be shared by the five parties looking out for what’s best for all humanity.

The five-party effort could transform the secretive and isolated Hermit Kingdom and its crippled economy into open, vital, sunlit renaissance model for basket cases like Zimbabwe and other failed states.

What is the alternative? More crippling sanctions, nuclear one-upmanship and political threats that can only lead to conflict, and potentially, Armageddon?

GM’s Future Is In China

With America’s automobile industry fighting for survival as it depends on government lifelines, China’s automobile industry is thriving. It wasn’t long ago that China produced only 5000 cars a year. Today it is the world’s largest car market. No one expected China to be in first place in the global auto market race until 2020. The pundits and experts were wrong again. China’s stimulus package with more than $733 million in tax breaks for rural buyers of small cars drove sales through the Middle Kingdom’s sky. Let’s not forget China also allocated $220 million to fund and upgrade new green automotive technologies, especially in alternative-energy vehicles that are the wave of the future. To help offset the high cost of buying clean-energy vehicles, subsidies of nearly $8,800 are being offered to local government agencies and taxi fleets in 13 cities for each hybrid vehicle purchased.

Beijing’s 2009 car sales target is 10 million units, an increase of 10 percent from 2008, and a figure that will cement its position as number one with an estimated 1 million more unit sales than America. China’s dominant role will allow it, rather than Detroit and Washington to dictate world fuel consumption and emission standards, including fuel efficient Hummers. The deal needs to be approved by both Washington and Beijing. The U.S. Department of the Treasury must give their nod to the deal, as must the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and Beijing’s policy for a “green and environment-friendly vehicle industry” poses a hurdle for the buyer Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery.

The five top-selling brands in China are Volkswagen, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda and Nissan, in that order. No American car there.

The two Chinese joint ventures of bankrupt General Motors reported record monthly sales for May 2009, the month before GM filed for bankruptcy. Shanghai GM, said vehicle sales jumped more than 50 percent from a year earlier to 56,011 cars, buoyed by the top selling Buick brands. GM’s minivan joint venture sold 100, 258 cars, the first time that a Chinese automaker sold more than 100,000 cars in one month. GM’s total vehicle sales in China surged 75 percent from a year earlier to more than 156,000 in a month. This was in stark contrast to its performance at home where sales plunged 50 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

The carmaker, which sold its first car in China in 1920, sold 1.09 million vehicles in China in 2008, and said it expected to double annual sales in the country to more than 2 million cars over the next five years.

Hummer and Sickle

For someone who started their working career in America in machine shops in Detroit and Pontiac, Michigan in the 1960s, and legal career in the secured lending arena representing corporate America in the 1970s, who for several years worked his way through the bankruptcy court system representing secured lenders, creditors committees, trustees and receivers, including Detroit’s giants and America’s leading financial institutions, watching General Motors seek refuge in bankruptcy court is not only a sad epitaph of an era, but a double dose of nostalgic memory lanes. First as an auto parts worker in who made parts for what became America’s automobile dinosaurs, and then as a lawyer representing the corporate-financial institutions whose shenanigans lead America to be technically bankrupt.

Living in China and reading that GM’s gas guzzling Hummer brand is being sold to a Chinese company for an estimated cool $500 million, even though the purchaser has assured it plans to keep production in America, so that 3,000 workers and 100 dealers can retain their super-sized burger diets, was a symbolic reminder of how China’s Confucian capitalism is devouring America. After all, the Hummer is different from other American car brands because it invokes a sense of American pride. A Hummer is readily associated with American soldiers dashing around in Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hummer is symbolic of Americanism.

With America’s automobile industry fighting for survival as it depends on government lifelines, China’s automobile industry is thriving. It wasn’t long ago that China produced only 5000 cars a year. Today it is the world’s largest car market. No one expected China to be in first place in the global auto market race until 2020. The pundits and experts were wrong again. China’s stimulus package with more than $733 million in tax breaks for rural buyers of small cars drove sales through the Middle Kingdom’s sky. Let’s not forget China also allocated $220 million to fund and upgrade new green automotive technologies, especially in alternative-energy vehicles that are the wave of the future. To help offset the high cost of buying clean-energy vehicles, subsidies of nearly $8,800 are being offered to local government agencies and taxi fleets in 13 cities for each hybrid vehicle purchased.

Beijing’s 2009 car sales target is 10 million units, an increase of 10 percent from 2008, and a figure that will cement its position as number one with an estimated 1 million more unit sales than America. China’s dominant role will allow it, rather than Detroit and Washington to dictate world fuel consumption and emission standards, including fuel efficient Hummers.