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?