Over the past decade, Africa’s status in U.S. national security policy has risen dramatically, for three main reasons: America’s growing dependence on Africa’s oil exports, Africa’s importance as a major battlefield in America’s “Global War on Terrorism,” and Africa’s central position in the global competition between America and China for economic and political power.
Since his inauguration in January, President Barack Obama has promised to take the problem of climate change seriously and step into a leadership role in the global negotiations. Congressional leadership on climate has also swelled to deliver domestic climate change legislation. But a "blind spot" seems to be emerging that may make it more difficult for the United States to play the leadership role it wishes — and the world needs it — to play.
Many think tanks and NGOs in the United States and Europe — Sierra Club, Earthwatch, 1Sky — wield multimillion-dollar budgets with the aim of reducing environmental degradation and climate change on a global scale.
Being a futurologist means never having to say you’re sorry. Our predictions always come true eventually — or, if they don’t, well, how quickly people forget. Look at Newsweek’s George Will. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would endure, and in an article published on the very day in 1989 that the Germans were tearing it down. That should have been enough to revoke his futurology license and demote him to sports writing. But no, almost three decades later he’s still peering into his crystal ball.
There’s something surreal about the ongoing World Trade Organization talks in Geneva, which aim at coming up with a new agreement to bring down tariffs in order to expand world trade and resuscitate global growth. In the face of the looming specter of climate change, these negotiations amount to arguing over the arrangement of deck chairs while the Titanic is sinking.
Over the past few years, attention to the recycling of nuclear power spent fuel has grown. Fears of global warming due to fossil fuel burning have given nuclear energy a boost; over the next 15 years dozens of new power reactors are planned world-wide. To promote nuclear energy, the Bush administration is seeking to establish international spent nuclear fuel recycling centers that are supposed to reduce wastes, recycle uranium, and convert nuclear explosive materials, such as plutonium to less troublesome elements in advanced power reactors.
Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you’re shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse. Just ask the North Koreans.
The American people have expressed themselves clearly on the Iraq War itself for quite a while now. By large majorities hovering around 70 percent, they want it to end. Fulfilling this expressed will of the people is our most urgent foreign policy priority, one that can’t be forgotten, ignored or deferred. But there is other, related, unfinished business to which we as a people need to attend. The worst foreign policy disaster in U. S. history may actually have an upside of sorts: that the war has served as a tryout for a number of policy innovations. “Thanks” to the war, we know enough now to cross them permanently off our list.
A new looming threat has caught the military’s attention, namely the security implications of climate change. As early as 1997, the CIA set up an Environmental Center that examined the degradation of land and water as a major source of armed conflict around the world. Such niche efforts within the U.S. security establishment have now gone mainstream.
First the biotech industry promised that its genetically engineered seeds would clean up the environment. Then they told us biotech crops would feed the world. Neither came to pass. Soon we’ll hear that genetically engineered climate-hardy seeds are the essential adaptation strategy for crops to withstand drought, heat, cold, saline soils and more.