The Environment: “Well, the sun is going to explode anyway”

This week we looked at the environment and the different ways states and activists NGOs have tried to address what is arguably the most transnational issue on the course.

Yet “the Environment” is always that chapter at the back of the textbook the Prof may or may not get to in week 14 of any standard IR course. It’s the “oh yeah, this” or the quintessential case study – not normally a topic or a subject or IR theory in and of itself.

And yet, there are indications that show this may no longer be the case. For example, the recent Worldwide Threat Assessment released bythe Director of National Intelligence is, quite frankly, full of the environment. For example:

Destruction can be invisible, latent, and progressive. We now monitor shifts in human geography, climate, disease, and competition for natural resources because they fuel tensions and conflicts. Local events that might seem irrelevant  are more likely to affect US national security in accelerated time frames.
 

And

Risks to freshwater supplies—due to shortages, poor quality, floods, and climate change—are growing. These forces will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate energy, potentially undermining global food markets and hobbling economic growth. As a result of demographic  and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia face particular difficulty coping with water problems.

In fact there is a whole section on “Climate Change and Demographics”:

Food security has been aggravated partly because the world’s land masses are being affected by weather conditions outside of historical norms, including more frequent and extreme floods, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, coastal high water, and heat waves. Rising temperature, for example, although enhanced in the Arctic, is not solely a high-latitude phenomenon. Recent scientific work shows that  temperature anomalies during growing seasons and persistent droughts have hampered agricultural productivity and extended wildfire seasons. Persistent droughts during the past decade have also diminished flows in the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Niger, Amazon, and Mekong river basins.

Congress may not be into climate change, but it seems clear the US national security community is. 

Nothing quite like being able to shovel your air.

So how to regulate? I put forward the question of what was the best way to get China to do something about climate change and burning carbon. Students seemed to be torn over how to do it. Some suggested more rules in trade regulations – but the WTO is not so keen on that (see: Sea Turtles). Others thought it would be best to frame the issue (<-framing! Remember week 5?!) as in China’s own interest? NGOs and states could and should emphasize the toll that poor air quality can have on a nation’s health. Or the impact of climate change on farming and flooding, etc.  But in the end, I’m not sure there was a preferred method as to how this could really happen.

There was a mix of different attitudes towards the environment, with one student implying that it wasn’t necessarily worth worrying about, given that “the sun is going to explode anyway”. Another suggested that given a choice between $1000 off tuition for the deaths of 500 baby seals in a woodchipper, that most students would take the former (a vote on the matter saw that the seals would be spared, 5/9).

However, we had some passionate environmentalists in the class and an interesting discussion as to whether Canada really had any moral clout to discuss climate change while it is doing everything it can to developthe Oil Sands in Alberta. (Think of us the next Saudi Arabia, only with more flannel).