Sunday Cutdown XL (1 September 2024)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) An inevitable-if-brittle peace
SCMP: China, India agree to turn the page on border conflict ‘at early date’
The subtitle indicates both the banality and the seriousness of this situation, as well as the response so far mounted by each side:
31st round of diplomatic talks on border dispute closes with mutual pledge to strengthen dialogue and de-escalate border tensions
The 31st round! And all they can gin up is a mutual pledge?
Sounds like the Middle East, right?
As I have noted, this whole drill is performative for both sides: they’re acting out roles with one another and the world and this dispute allows for all that posturing to unfold without any serious danger. It’s like two bulls (pick your species) fighting it out in front of the females. Nobody supposed to get hurt.
At some point, however, both sides need to grow past this dispute, which is minor … unless Xi is actually serious about a Mao-like land grab over long-claimed this and that pieces of land.
For now it still feels like bully China versus riser India, but Beijing’s bullying days are numbered, whether Xi realizes it or not.
Eventually, when Beijing senses that shift in power, it’ll settle. Til then, the show must go on.
Meanwhile, there are 46,000 square miles of disputed lands … so plenty of fun to be had by all.
The border region is said to have lithium, but as we’re seeing more and more, as nations look for it, there’s plenty of lithium to go around (or reclaim from fracking waste water). The idea that China and India go to the mattresses over lithium is nutty. Far bigger nuts to crack on river flows alone.
For now, both sides see enough value in this struggle but not enough opportunity cost — namely, the stunting and delaying of what should become a powerful trade and investment relationship. That will change because the economics of it all will grow more clear and more pressing.
And then maybe some diplomats on both sides get a nice Nobel out of it and the world moves on.
2) It doesn’t get much more stark than this
NYT: Namibia, Facing Drought, Plans to Kill Elephants for Meat
Literally, on the chopping block: 700 wild animals, including 83 elephants and 300 zebras.
The proximate excuse: reducing “dangerous cross-species encounters.” You know, like nature simply existing and humans occasionally bumping into it.
The real reason seems to be acquiring protein for people amidst a stunning drought that’s has left half of the nation’s 2.8m people without sufficient food.
That part I get: when half your population is starving, you start killing whatever it takes to feed them.
Culling a wild population that’s strong is one thing (like deer in the US), but the animals cited here (zebras and elephants are currently labeled on the endangered scale at some point (threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, etc.), so there’s no good overpopulation argument to be had (at least as presented here).
Here’s the scarier underlying rationale:
Droughts are common in Southern Africa, and the region has experienced several in the past decade, including from 2018 to 2021, Benjamin Suarato, a spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in an email. But this one has been especially devastating and widespread across the region, said Juliane Zeidler, the country director of the World Wildlife Fund in Namibia.
“There is no food,” Dr. Zeidler said on Thursday. “There is no food for people and there is no food for animals.”
Both sides of the equation are, in effect, endangered by climate change, so then you find yourself talking about NOT eating animals that are going to starve anyway?
Stark.
Get used to it.
The drought in Namibia is SO widespread that the animals cannot migrate enough to escape it.
Pull your lens back a bit: should we expect depopulation in Namibia as climate change unfolds?
Sure seems like it’s happening already … on both sides of the equation.
3) A symptom that makes the disease worse
NYT: Canada’s Wildfires Were a Top Global Emitter Last Year, Study Says
Canada’s wild fires sent more carbon into the atmosphere last year than just about every country in the world. Only the big three outperformed the fires: China, US, and India.
Still got it!
So, in effect, it’s like adding another one of those to the mix, and that accelerates calculations. Yes it does.
Boreal forests, the kind you find in the planet’s northern quartile along a vast circumpolar biome, are historically carbon sinks — not emitters. So, if that is going to change dramatically, then EVERYTHING might just change dramatically.
Not much poor Canada can do: its average temp is rising twice as fast as the rest of the world’s. Ditto for Russia and Greenland and Iceland and the Nordics.
With these fires, Canada is burning off the equivalent of the Netherlands’ landmass each year.
We are going to keep discovering these piling-on secondary effects. And it will only get fuglier.
4) When the future sues you
NYT: Court Orders South Korea to Take Stronger Action on Climate Change
Gotta like this:
A top South Korean court on Thursday ruled the nation’s measures for fighting climate change insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, and ordered the government to set firm carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond. It is the first climate litigation ruling of its kind in Asia.
Since 2020, the Constitutional Court has been reviewing a series of complaints filed by more than 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers at the time of the filing — who said that the government’s greenhouse gas reduction targets and its implementation plans were partly unconstitutional and too weak to safeguard the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations.
Cross-generational thinking is crucial.
First-ever such court ruling in Asia, with the Koreans leading the way:
“Future generations will be more exposed to the impact of climate change, but their participation in today’s democratic political process is limited,” the court said. “So the legislators have the duty and responsibility to make concrete laws for mid- and long-term greenhouse gas reduction plans.”
This is a good sign.
5) The logic of dragon-tiger … uh … I mean dragon-elephant … no, elephant-panda cooperation
SCMP: As Western-led order crumbles, can China and India fulfil their destinies?
A subject clearly I never tire of, although my strong preference remains casting India as a Bengal tiger and China as the dragon. Me no like the cuddly versions, but rather the sharp teeth versions.
Plenty of good logic in this piece (despite the hyperbole of the title):
As two champions of the Global South, and currently the world’s second- and fifth-largest economies measured by nominal gross domestic product, their rapprochement and close cooperation in world affairs may become an indispensable anchor of stability in the face of a fragmenting Western-led global order.
Okay, I’ll bite.
The ties build up slowly but financially:
Both countries are also involved in a number of major regional multilateral lending institutions. For instance, India became one of the first co-founding members of the China-launched Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015.
India is also the AIIB’s second-largest shareholder, behind China, having a single member constituency on the board of directors. In 2018, India also hosted the bank’s third annual general meeting in Mumbai. As members of the Brics grouping, China and India were also among the co-founders of the New Development Bank.
The two need each other:
… multiple interdependent linkages, especially India’s need for Chinese capitalto finance the country’s increasing infrastructure deficit as its economy has grown at breakneck speed over the past few years. India could also use Chinese know-how to build manufacturing and technology clusters throughout the country as part of Modi’s “Make in India” campaign.
The rest of the story is a recitation of all the talks they have, to include their 31 rounds on the border.
It’s this kind of boring stuff, once the undeniable economic logic is highlighted and brought to the fore, that drives what is necessarily a profound rapprochement of two giants that pretend to be friendly but really aren’t anywhere near that status yet.
But yeah, more good news.
6) The War on Drugs comes to Yellow Springs
YSNEWS: Yellow Springs home raided for marijuana
Your tax dollars going to waste:
Tuesday, Aug. 13, began like any other day for the Lewis family — until the sound of a helicopter grew louder and louder, its shadow widening over their Wright Street home.
When Mijanou Lewis and her stepson went outside, their house was surrounded by more than 20 law enforcement officials from several counties and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Officers — some in plain clothes wearing masks, others in camouflage — held semi-automatic rifles as Lewis stood bewildered in her pajamas.
They were looking for marijuana plants, and the helicopter spotted some in the Lewises’ backyard.
These people live close enough to my house that I noticed the helo sounds.
Turns out the guy is a horticulturalist who, yeah, is growing some weed but a whole mess of other things easily mistaken for weed. This is hippie Yellow Springs. Every yard here is a crazy clash of plants. Deer roam everywhere (a quartet spent sunset every day in my backyard, munching). It’s kind of our thing here and helps bring in the tourists. That and the regular Sunday street peace protest by that clutch of nice old ladies.
The complete absurdity: the cops were guessing, based on their bad overhead intelligence, that this house was somewhat over the limit for how many pot plants you can grow in one yard for personal use.
The number is 12, if you must know.
The cops counted 40, but were wrong on 28 of them.
Still, everybody got to point guns, citizens were appropriately scared, and the government probably spent many times over what the fine would have been.
Good stuff all around!
I’ll be complaining to Dave Chappelle next time I see him on the street.
Shit getting crazy.
But these are our priorities, ja?
7) Energy sin, energy penance
VISUAL CAPITALIST: Global Coal Consumption by Region
VISUAL CAPITALIST: The 15 Countries With the Most Solar Power Installed
Not hard to spot the coincidence: you burn a lot of coal, you put in a lot of solar. It is a replacement process and it takes time.
All-of-the-above is okay so long as you’re slimming the bad and expanding the less bad/better.
I think that Kamala’s take as well.
8) So G.D. hot, the corn is sweating!
FORBES: ‘Corn Sweat’ Worsening Midwest Heat Wave: Here’s What To Know
No kidding. Sweating corn making us hotter!
Karma is a bitch.
A heat dome is bringing high temperatures to much of the Midwest this week and they’re being worsened by humidity that is, at least in part, caused by moisture being released from crops—or “corn sweat.”
Derechos … corn sweat … it’s like a whole new vocabulary.
Turns out both corn and soybeans — pretty all of what the Midwest plants — both perspire like humans in the heat.
We’re talking dew points in the low 80s!
That is nuts, which may or may not sweat.
9) The American Climate Corps
NYT: Climate Workers Wanted: A group of federal programs is aimed at helping America’s work force adapt to climate change.
New $60m USG program that provides grants to “help train workers to combat the growing challenges of climate change.”
The logic is simple enough, and the approach suitably non-disruptive:
The climate jobs of the future, experts told me, may mean adjusting how we think of the jobs of the past: Electricians may need to learn to install solar panels, construction workers may need to deal with new engineering requirements and bankers may need to manage climate risk.
“This is a model of us adapting our jobs in real time to the reality and need of the moment,” said Ned Gardiner, a program manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, which is coordinating technical assistance for the grantees.
Add appropriate skills to the current work force: makes sense to me.
Great quote:
“If you don’t have water, you don’t have a future,” said Kelley Tagarino, an American Samoa resident and a community adviser at the Hawaii Sea Grant program, which is run through the University of Hawaii.
The analogies abound:
There are more than a dozen large projects being funded and studied by the Army Corps of Engineers to elevate and flood-proof thousands of structures across the country, said Rod Scott, the flood mitigation group’s board chairman.
“It’s like the space program,” Scott said. “We’re going to build the work force to match up to very large projects in different regions of the country. This is about adapting and surviving.”
Adapt, move, or die.
Say it with me.
Put it on a T-shirt.
10) What happens to Iceland if its ice melts?
WAPO: Time is running out to see these frozen sites
Photo I took in May of an Alaskan glacier from our cruise ship room balcony.
They are amazing things to behold, especially all the colors of ice.
The story:
Gideon Brosowsky was excited to see his first glacier, dreaming of massive ice like he saw in the movie “Titanic.” But when the incoming high school junior arrived at Alaska’s Juneau Icefield on a family cruise in August, his expectations sank.
“Okay, where’s the glacier?” he asked. His mom pointed to a “small, dinky piece of ice” on a mountain. He barely recognized the glacier compared with historical pictures in local museums. Even just 20 years ago, the landscape was more impressive.
“I was in disbelief,” Brosowsky said. “I was assuming global warming is starting to eat away at these glaciers little by little, [but the pace was] a lot faster than I expected.”
If this is underwhelming now, he said, imagine what people are going to think in a few decades. It might be gone.
One story among many, which is why I felt grateful to have the chance of seeing one up close in a state undergoing incredible climatic change.
This, however, is a worldwide phenom:
Venezuela is now glacier-free, losing its last one this year. New Zealand has lost at least 264 glaciers. The western United States has lost about 400 glaciers since the middle of the 20th century. Swiss researchers tallied more than 1,000 small ones lost. East Africa has less than 2 square kilometers of total glacial ice remaining.
Mountainous glaciers have vanished here and there throughout history, but the number of disappearances has skyrocketed in recent decades.
Climate-concerned types have been holding funerals for glaciers, like this one in Iceland:
The year 1986 on the left, today on the right.
One-thousand gone in Switzerland alone. China says 8,000 disappeared there.
The little ones are mostly gone, the bigger ones heading in that direction gradually … and then suddenly.
This is humans remaking the planet and its climate.
Deny it at your own risk.
11) A ‘Free North’ strategy
ATLANTIC COUNCIL: How a ‘Free North’ strategy can ensure Arctic and Baltic security
More and more policy papers on the North appearing.
This is good.
For all the effort and bloviation spent on America’s strategic pivot to Asia, the real one we face is to the North.
An argument here to keep the Arctic much the way the Arctic Council has sought to up to now: as open and free to all as possible.
The gist:
The United States, consistent with its commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, should rally its NATO allies in the cause of a “Free North” to deter China’s and Russia’s “no limits” partnership from taking hold at the doorstep of United States and Europe. The Free North framework builds upon and goes beyond in substance and symbolism the “monitor and respond” approach articulated in the 2024 Department of Defense Arctic Strategy. The Free North broadly refers to the Arctic region beyond Russia’s territorial seas. It encompasses the territorial waters of the United States and its allies, as well as the high seas. The Free North’s core principles are respect for national sovereignty and a commitment to the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes through mutual agreement. With changing climate patterns, an expanding area of the Arctic is ice-free in the summer months. This allows for greater access and exploration of the region for both legitimate and illicit ends. It is therefore in the United States’ and its allies’ interest to ensure that the region remains free.
So, it’s like the Free World was during the Cold War, I guess, meaning everything not captured by the Eastern authoritarian bloc.
I get that.
Recall my definition from America’s New Map of how the Cold War was won:
An international system is made up of structure and norms. Organizations like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank constitute structure, as do military alliances. Norms are most easily identified in the rules propagated and sustained by those organizations. After World War II, America chose to simultaneously transform both elements with its vigorous, visionary leadership. We did not have to do this.
The Cold War obscured this stunning feat. That decades-long struggle featured various military wins, losses, and draws that—in the grand scheme of things—changed virtually nothing. America was simply waiting for the Soviet version of mini globalization to collapse in the face of our version’s immense success. When it did, our version of globalization went truly global, birthing the first majority global middle class—game, set, match alright, but not the “end of history.”
To me, this Free North notion mimics what America did with the global economy across the Cold War: by keeping our side free, and that freedom enabling economic growth and development and interdependency, we eventually forced the “losing” side to join our up-to-then-proposed-but-now-truly-global ruleset.
Can we do the same with the New North?
Definitely worth a try.
I like the plan:
To execute an effective Free North strategy, the United States needs to prioritize four reinforcing lines of effort. First, it should establish and lead a NATO sub-group of Arctic-Baltic allies, which may additionally include the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with a coordinated strategy delineating shared responsibilities. The United States should also convince the Arctic Council to adopt the Free North as an organizing framework for coordinated action.
Second, allies should enact an initiative among northern NATO members to adequately resource a Free North strategy with a requisite number of submarines, icebreakers, polar frigates, and air and space assets …
Third, the United States should engage the Free North nations to execute a responsible regional conservation and development strategy with particular attention to energy and mineral exploration, critical infrastructure development and security, and sustaining free shipping lanes …
Fourth, the United States should double down on the development of Alaska and Greenland as cornerstones of its Free North strategy.
I’ve said it time and again: Trump was not nuts to consider buying Greenland from Denmark. Truman tried it. We should do it.
Overall, some solid thinking from the Atlantic Council.
Impressive.
Re-run a winning strategy. Makes sense.
12) It burns! The pain! (OG version)
SLATE: You’re Not Imagining It—It’s Hotter Now. The Consequences Are Becoming Clearer and Clearer.
An interesting list, annotated:
SUMMER CAMP LOOKS A LITTLE DIFFERENT (danger of heat stroke with kids)
PERSONAL FANS ARE NORMAL NOW (right?)
EXERCISING OUTDOORS IS A CHALLENGE (I feel this every bike ride, but fortunately, moving through the air at 20mph is cooling)
SOME PEOPLE ARE MODIFYING THEIR SWEAT GLANDS (rich people problems)
WE’RE DOING MORE LAUNDRY (I do wear more outfits per day just because it can smell bad)
WE’RE STICKY—SO IS THE INFRASTRUCTURE (freaky when encountered)
WE’RE RETHINKING FOOD SAFETY (JUST A LITTLE BIT) (I got a White Paper on that!)
THE GROUND CAN CAUSE BURNS (but not a fumble, remember that)
OUTDOOR WORK GETS DANGEROUS (having spent time in the sun at the equator, I used to think that was the only place in the world like that, but that reality is migrating poleward alright)
PEOPLE ARE DYING (this year’s Hajj was a preview of coming disasters).
