27 December 2009
Not the Noughties
By Gwynne Dyer
Decades don’t usually have the courtesy to begin and end on the right year. The social and cultural revolution that Western countries think of when they talk of the “Sixties” only got underway in 1962-63, and didn’t end until the Middle East war and oil embargo of 1973-74. But this one has been quite neat: the “Noughties” began with the Islamist terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, and they ended with a global financial melt-down in the past year.
The “Noughties” is just a recent journalistic invention to make it easier to write end-of-the-decade articles like this. The term was launched several times in the last ten years, but it never took off. Just as well, really, because it sounds a bit frivolous – whereas this was actually a decade when the tectonic plates moved into a new pattern.
Never mind the terrorism. About half a billion people died during the past decade, and fewer than fifty thousand of them were victims of terrorism – say, one in every ten thousand deaths. At least forty thousand of those fifty thousand victims of terrorism lived in India, Pakistan or Iraq, and fewer than four thousand lived in the West. You can hardly make that a defining quality of the decade.
The terrorist threat to the West was minor, but the West’s hugely disproportionate and ill-considered response was a key factor in the great shift that defines the decade. The “War on Terror,” the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and all the rest, did not deter a Muslim Nigerian student from trying to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Saturday. It motivated him to do so. But it also accelerated the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West.
That shift was happening anyway. When China and India, with forty percent of the world’s population between them, are growing economically three to four times as fast as the major Western countries, it’s only a matter of time until they catch up with the older industrial economies.
Back in 2003, however, the researchers at Goldman Sachs predicted that the Chinese economy would surpass that of the United States by the mid-2040s. By the middle of this year, they were predicting that it would happen in the mid-2020s – and this year, for the first time, China built more cars than the United States. That acceleration is in large part a consequence of the huge diversion of Western attention and resources that was caused by the “War on Terror.”
Prestige is a quality that cannot be measured or quantified, but a reputation for competence in the use of power is a great asset in international affairs. After the centuries-old European empires wasted their wealth and the lives of tens of millions of their citizens in two “world wars” in only thirty years, their empires just melted away. Nobody was in awe of them any more, and they lacked the resources to hold onto their overseas possessions by force.
Something similar has happened over the past decade to the United States. Unwinnable wars fought for the wrong reasons always hurt a great power’s reputation, and wars fought amidst needless tax cuts, burgeoning deficits and financial anarchy are even more damaging if the country’s power depends heavily on a global financial empire.
The United States spent the past decade cutting its own throat financially, ending with the near-death experience of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown. The Europeans made all the same mistakes, only more timidly, and the Japanese sat the decade out on the sidelines, mired in a seemingly endless recession. The old order is passing, the US dollar is on its way out as the only global currency, and the real power is shifting to mainland Asia.
Or is it? There are two trends that could slow or even stop this shift. They seemed quite distant at the start of the decade, but now they look very big and frightening. One is peak oil; the other is global warming.
In Europe, North America and Japan, energy consumption is growing slowly or not at all, and it is relatively cheap and easy to reduce dependence on imported oil. Just the fuel efficiency standards already mandated by the Obama administration could reduce American oil imports by half by 2020. Whereas Chinese and Indian dependence on imported oil is soaring. So is their use of coal.
That’s unfortunate, because for purely geographical reasons these countries are far more vulnerable to high temperatures than the older industrial nations. At even two degrees C (3.6 degrees F) higher average global temperature, they face floods, droughts and storms on a massive scale, probably accompanied by a steep fall in food production. That sort of thing could abort even the Chinese and Indian economic miracles.
So we’re back in the old world where the future is uncertain. Of course. What else did you expect? We can only observe the trends, and try to remember that they are always contingent. But at the moment, it looks like the decade when the West finally lost its domination over the world’s economy.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 3. (“The Noughties…decade”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
5 December 2009
Lifeboat Japan
By Gwynne Dyer
Japan is a lucky country. When the global average temperature has gone up by 2 degrees Celsius
and most of mainland Asia is ravaged by famines, when civil wars and failed states and waves of climate
refugees are the norm from Tehran to Hanoi and from Madras to Beijing, Japan will still be at peace
and eating regularly.
However, the desperate people of the rest of Asia will all know that Japan is among the industrialised
countries that created the disaster with their greenhouse gas emissions, and that it has nevertheless
largely escaped the consequences of its actions. Maybe they will be in a forgiving mood, but maybe not.
This is an extreme scenario, and it may never happen. If the climate summit that opened in
Copenhagen on Monday agrees on early, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide,
global warming may never reach plus two degrees.
Few people believe that the Copenhagen conference will produce a treaty that adequately addresses
the reality of climate change, but more serious measures will doubtless follow a few years later, so
let’s be optimistic. Let us suppose that global heating is halted before we reach the two-degree level,
and that the warming never goes runaway.
Even then, the average global temperature will still rise by at least one-and-a-half degrees. The
greenhouse gases to produce that effect are already in the atmosphere or will be put there in the
next ten years, before we can hope to cut our emissions radically enough. They won’t produce
their full heating effect right away, but it will arrive in due course.
No matter what we do from now on, the amount of greenhouse gases that we have put into the
atmosphere will eventually raise average global temperature by 1.5 degrees, and average temperatures
over land by more like 2.5 degrees. The main impact of that will be on the food supply.
In the tropics, the heat itself will be the main problem: rice yields fall drastically, for example, if the
temperature is above 35 degrees during the critical fertilization period. In the sub-tropics, drought
will be the crop-killer, as the rainfall shifts further away from the equator. Even the rain that does
fall is likely to evaporate again from the hot soil rather than soaking in.
The closer a country is to the equator, the worse will be its plight. A few countries in the high
latitudes like Russia and Canada will still be exporting grain, but most of today’s major grain exporters
will be out of the business (Australia is already on the way out).
The world grain supply is already tight. Assume a 15 percent loss of global food production and
a billion more people by 2030, and we can expect recurring famines in the tropics and the
sub-tropics – famines that cannot be averted by importing grain, because there is not enough left on
the international market. South and South-East Asian countries would suffer greatly, but China would not
escape either, even though most of it lies in the temperate zone.
Once the glaciers up on the Tibetan plateau have melted, the great glacier-fed rivers of south and
central China will be half-empty in the summer. The north-eastern monsoon that waters the wheat
crop of northern China is already failing. And the low-lying river deltas along the east coast where
so much of China’s food is grown face repeated inundation by storm tides as the sea level rises.
Hungry people move, across borders if necessary, and people in less afflicted countries may use
force to stop them. Regimes that cannot feed their people tend to collapse: failed states and civil wars
will multiply. There may even be regional wars between countries that share the same river system,
as access to water becomes a life-or-death matter.
Amidst this pan-Asian chaos and misery, Japan would be an island of order and prosperity. Not
only is it well within the temperate zone, but the seas that surround it would keep the average temperature
down. With a maximum effort, it could probably just about feed the 100 million people who live in Japan
in 2030 from its own resources. Lucky Japan.
Britain is lucky in much the same way as Japan. It has a geographical position that will keep the heat
down and the rain reliable; it has enough land to feed its own people, if only just; and it is an island,
which makes it easy to keep the refugees out. In strategic circles in Britain, one now sometimes hears
the phrase “Lifeboat Britain.” The same phrase applies to Japan – and lifeboats often cannot afford to
take everybody aboard.
But the rest of Asia will know that Japan, the first industrialised country in the continent, bears
a heavy responsibility for the disasters they are currently suffering because of its past emissions.
They will see Japan itself escaping the consequences, and find it unfair. As they watch their own
hopes for the future disappear, they may become very angry about it.
Some of this future may be avoided if there is early and effective action to reduce and eventually
eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. But it would have to be very radical action, very soon – and
some of disasters would still happen. For Japan, climate change will become a security issue.
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Gwynne Dyer is currently in Japan promoting the Japanese version of his new book, “Climate Wars,”
published by Shinchosha.
18 November 2007
Australia’s Climate Change Election
By Gwynne Dyer
John Howard has been prime minister of Australia for eleven years, and by normal political standards he has done almost everything right. The country is having an unprecedented economic boom thanks to China’s limitless demand for Australian natural resources. Unemployment is at a 33-year low, and Howard appeals to the underlying racism of many Australians by severely restricting asylum for refugees and subtly signalling that he will limit immigration from Asia. Yet he is probably going to lose the national election next Saturday (24 November).
The latest opinion polls give Labour a lead of eight percent over Howard’s Liberal (i.e. conservative) party, and Howard might even lose his own seat in suburban Sydney, which he has held for almost 34 years. It’s not over yet, because under Australia’s compulsory voting system a third of the electorate usually make their minds up only in the last few days before the election, but it looks like Howard has contrived to throw away a seemingly unbeatable hand. If so, the main reason will be global warming.
Like many climate change deniers in politics, Howard has been frantically re-adjusting his stance over the past couple of years in an effort to stay abreast of public opinion. (Even George W. Bush has been heard to utter the phrase “global warming.”) But he still refuses to sign the Kyoto accord, and he still insists that “technology” will solve the problem without any need for major changes in the lifestyle of countries like Australia.
It used to work, but one huge fact has turned politics around in Australia. The country is in the seventh year of the worst drought since European settlement began over two centuries ago, and very many Australians have begun to fear that it is permanent. Droughts are cyclical events and will eventually end. But if this is really an early example of what climate change will do to countries in the mid-latitudes, then it’s never going away again.
In that case, Australian agriculture as an export industry is doomed, and most of the country’s farmers are going to have to seek jobs elsewhere. Even the water supply for the big cities is becoming a problem. It is a very bad time in Australian politics to have John Howard’s record and reputation on climate change issues: in a recent poll in several marginal seats, 73 percent of voters said that climate issues would have a “strong influence” on the way they vote.
One suspects that it was Howard’s close relationship with President Bush that kept him shackled to climate change denial for so long, for conservative politicians elsewhere — Angela Merkel in Germany, David Cameron in Britain, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California — have been alert to the danger of letting the left occupy the high ground on the environment. After all, climate change is not intrinsically a left- or a right-wing issue, any more than earthquakes are, and the earliest conservationists were almost all on the right.
But John Howard, like Tony Blair in Britain, was seduced after 9/11 by the temptation to get close to what seemed the limitless power of the United States. Australia would be America’s “deputy sheriff” in Asia, and Howard volunteered Australian troops for service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush called him a “man of steel,” and he gloried in it. Climate change denial was just part of the package — and the normally adroit Howard forgot that he was an Australian politician, not an American one.
Howard is talking about climate change now, but he may have left it too late. Labour has fielded former diplomat Kevin Rudd against him, and at 50, Rudd is eighteen years younger than Howard. He’s not a very colourful character, but he’s learning fast: when he was accused of gong to a lap-dancing club in New York during a visit to the United Nations four years ago, he replied that he was too drunk to remember what had happened.
In most countries that would be the end of a political career, but in Australia it was the right answer.
By comparison Howard seems rattled, boring and worn out. His sole remaining function, in comedian Billy Connolly’s cruel formula, is “to let you know what Harry Potter’s going to look like when he’s old,” and his main election tactic is to bribe the voters with their own money. He launched his campaign by promising A$9.4 billion in tax cuts, and more goodies are offered every week: the most recent round included tax rebates for the parents of all school-age children and tax-free savings accounts for first-time home buyers.
Labour, by contrast, offered only A$2.3 billion in tax cuts, and Kevin Rudd bills himself as a fiscal conservative. It’s a familiar turn-about from other places, where the old pattern of tax-and-spend liberals and fiscally responsible conservatives has long been reversed — consider the United States, where Republican administrations have been running up huge deficits and Democratic administrations have been paying them down again for the past quarter-century — but it’s new in Australia.
And the biggest change if Labour forms the next Australian government? So far as the rest of the world is concerned, it will be that Australia, the world’s largest per-capita producer of carbon dioxide, signs the Kyoto accord. That could make a great deal of difference in the negotiations over the next year about will happen after the Kyoto accord expires in 2012.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 7. (“One…one”)
3 July 2007
The United States of Africa
By Gwynne Dyer
“Before you put a roof on a house, you need to build the foundations,” South African President Thabo Mbeki reportedly told diplomats at the summit meeting of the African Union in Ghana last weekend. Others were just as quick to ridicule the summit’s declared goal of creating a unified African government by 2015, and it certainly isn’t going to happen fast. It may never happen at all — but it might, and it would be a very good idea.
“The emergence of such a mighty stabilising force in this strife-torn world should be regarded…not as a shadowy dream of a visionary,” declared Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, almost half a century ago, “but as a practical proposition which the peoples of Africa can and should translate into reality….We must act now. Tomorrow may be too late.”
Nkrumah was pleading for a pan-African government instead of the jigsaw-puzzle of ex-colonies that came into existence as the European imperial powers left Africa. He was asking for the Moon: the independence struggle was waged within the borders of each colony, and the leaders who emerged had their power bases within those borders. Wider unity would have dethroned most of those leaders, so it did not happen. But now the unity project is back.
The African Union was created five years ago out of the wreckage of the discredited Organisation of African Unity with the goal of making Africa’s rulers accountable. Now it is trying to revive the project for real African unity, and there is no shortage of Africans who argue that it is merely a distraction from urgent and concrete problems like Darfur and Zimbabwe. Maybe they are right, but what if those crises are just symptoms of a deeper African problem?
At the time most African countries gained their independence in the 1960s, they had higher average incomes and better public services than most Asian countries. Kenyans lived better than Malaysians; people in the Ivory Coast were richer than South Koreans; Zimbabweans were healthier, longer-lived and better-educated than Chinese. And there were more and worse wars in Asia than in Africa.
Now it’s all dramatically the other way round, but why? Individual Africans are no less intelligent, hard-working or ambitious than individual Asians, so the answer must lie in the system. And the most striking characteristic of that system is the sheer number of independent states within Africa: fifty-three of them, in a continent that has fewer people than either India or China.
This is where the discussion usually veers off into a condemnation of the arbitrary borders drawn by the old colonial powers, which paid little heed to the ethnic ties of the people within them, but that is not the point at all. The point is that at least half of the fifty-three African countries have greater ethnic diversity within their borders than all of China. A few, like Nigeria, approach India in the sheer range and diversity of their languages, religions and ethnic identities.
You CANNOT draw rational borders for Africa that give each ethnic group its own homeland. Even if you refused that privilege to groups of less than half a million people, you’d end up with over 200 countries. So the old Organisation of African Unity decreed that the colonial borders must remain untouchable, because the only alternative seemed to be several generations of separatist ethnic wars.
The problem is that quite a few of the separatist ethnic wars happened anyway, and many other African countries, to avoid that fate, became tyrannies where a “big man” from one of the dominant ethnic groups ruled over the rest by a combination of patronage and violence. Time was wasted, lives were lost, and things went backwards. It was nobody’s fault, but Africa needs to change this system.
There are over two hundred ethnic groups in Africa that have over half a million people, and NONE (except the Arabs of North Africa) that amount to even five percent of the continent’s population. Only three languages — Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Japanese — account for half the population of Asia. Even in Europe, eight languages account for 75 percent of the continent’s population. Africa is different, and maybe the national state (or, rather, the pseudo-national state) is not the answer there.
The African federalists imagine a solution that jumps right over that problem: a single African Union modelled on the European Union, but where no ethnic group is even five percent of the population. Then politics stops being a zero-sum ethnic competition (at least in theory) and starts being about the general welfare. And also, in theory, the continent starts to fulfil its potential.
We will all be a good deal older before the African Union, or whatever it will eventually be called, becomes more than a dream, but in the end it may. As Alpha Oumar Konare, former president of Mali and head of the African Union, said at the start of the summit: “The battle for the United States of Africa is the only one worth fighting for this generation — the only one that can provide the answers to the thousand-and-one problems faced by the populations of Africa.”
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 3. (“The emergence…back”)