Thirsty Alarmism

28Oct07

Over the past few weeks, there has been widespread (for an environmental issue) news coverage of the progressing Georgia drought. The actual drought is spread over several states, but the tidbit that got national attention was the realization that Atlanta only has less than three months of water left, with little rain on the extended forecast. Over three million people are facing a severe water shortage, the kind that begins with browning lawns and ends with boiling pasta in bottled water because the faucets have run dry.

Extended droughts lead to cascading problems. The initial impacts will be isolated and economic, with agriculture and landscaping taking hits. Water dependent manufacturing will also wilt under what are likely to be tightening government restrictions. If supplies continue to dry up, short-term solutions such as shipping in water will be used. These methods are hugely expensive, whether the costs are passed directly to consumers or if the government picks up the tab and adds it to existing debt. A much bigger issue could be electricity. Power plants require large amounts of water for cooling, and under drought conditions may have to lower output or even shutdown, this is a region with little spare generating capacity. Much of our modern infrastructure is highly dependent on the surrounding infrastructure working as planned. The systems were designed to be robust, but persistent underinvestment over decades has significantly weakened them (as seen in the blackout of 2003).

There will also be some significant health and environmental problems. Beyond the people shunted into poverty and losing health insurance as businesses close, water shortages tend to result in reduced water quality, resulting in negative health consequences. As a growing portion of the available water is siphoned off for consumption, river flows decline and becomes increasing saline, which in the extreme leads to severe environmental consequences. A great example of this can be seen in the likewise drought-ridden West, where the Colorado River rarely reaches the Gulf of California. Georgia is calling for the Army Corp of Engineers to cut reservoir outflows, water legally required to be sent downstream to preserve several endangered species.

Two things stand out to me about this situation: how long the problem has been developing and the number of people shrugging off the warnings as alarmist. Decades of population growth in the south, rising per capita water consumption, a lack of planning and leadership ignoring the warnings and ignoring the solutions all contributed to the problem. Such overconfidence is bred from ludicrous but widely believed fallacy that markets can overcome shortages of natural resources, with solutions flowing in abundance from a modest increase in prices. That belief in the market is also one of the driving forces beyond those quick to shout accusations of alarmism.

It’s easy to reject the alarmist sentiment, particularly when the events foretold seem far removed from the current status quo and so many alarms have proven false in the past. What gets forgotten is that the only reason many past disasters were only avoided because some people heeded the result of alarmists. Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb” in 1968, was widely panned for his predictions of mass starvations in the near future. What is rarely mentioned is that the only thing that prevented his vision of the 1970s was the Green Revolution.

Rejecting alarmist thinking is comforting. Comforting, but dangerous. It is worth remembering that many potential disasters have been prevented only by the efforts of those heeding the alarmists calls. Perhaps more important is realizing that when something inevitable, such as water shortages in a region undergoing a population boom while largely ignoring conservation, hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t negate the fact that it will happen in the future.

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Human Thought   |  Leave a Comment

Ignoring our history in Iraq

08Apr07

Seeing as how this is my first post of this blog, and that so much of the current political discourse is revolving around Iraq, I thought I’d write about something I first heard about back in 1999 but have been reading a little bit about lately. The recent execution of Saddam Hussein was over reprisal killings of civilians in Dujail in 1982 after an assassination attempt by a Shiite group, and a campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Among other crimes he was slated to be charged with (they never got around to it, given he was already executed) were the killings of many thousands of Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

During the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, then President Bush called for the people of Iraq to overthrow Saddam, a message reinforced with radio broadcasts and leaflets dropped by the Air Force. Given the lack of support Saddam had from most Iraqis at that time (Baath party notwithstanding), it is not too surprising that the uprising was substantial, albiet concentrated among the Shiites and the Kurds. Things really started to get interesting when a few Iraqi Army units joined in as well.

The problem was that this uprising was creating the same sort of concerns we are seeing in Iraq today – Turkey nervous about a potentially independent Kurdish state, Iran gaining regional clout due to a strong Shiite neighbor, the necessity of a lengthy nation-building process and possibly even elements of a civil war. The last two would be especially unwelcome given that there was still massive public sentiment against anything that might resemble the Vietnam War. So the US stepped back from its earlier urgings, either in a change of strategy or as intended all along.

Despite having broken the Iraqi Army and pushed deep inside of Iraq, the US (and coalition) forces were told to stand down and not assist the rebellion. Despite pleas for arms from Shiites in the south, US troops destroyed any Iraqi weapons stockpiles they had captured. As a result the civilians were largely unarmed when what was left of the Iraqi Army moved to attempt to put down the uprising.

The rebellion was put down using the remnants of the Iraqi Army’s conventional weaponry, along with chemical weapons – mainly sarin(nerve gas), concentrated CS(tear gas) and some mustard gas. Huge numbers of atrocities were committed by the greatly weakened Iraqi Army, who were able to do all of this only because the coalition forces, which were still in Iraq for some of the reprisals, including those using of chemical weapons, were not permitted to defend the unarmed civilians. Rapes, beatings, torture and executions were commonplace, and some of the images were actually broadcast on television to ensure that the uprising was stopped. Helicopter gunships dropped chemical weapons, napalm and white phosphorus on towns. The continued campaigns against the Shiite rebels in the South and Kurds in the North was why the well known “no-fly zones” were established. Overall death estimates range as high as 100,000 to 180,000 civilians and deserted soldiers, per the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry, which was established after the more recent invasion. (The movie “Three Kings” takes place amidst some of these events, and is by far the best Persian Gulf War movie I’ve seen)

The reversal of US support for the rebellion is one of the reasons that US troops were not greeted with open arms, as predicted by some, after the 2003 liberation/invasion of Iraq. Not to mention providing yet another reason for sectarian violence, as the troops that put down the uprising were predominantly Sunni. Our past actions tarnished our more recent promises of peace and stability following the overthrowing of a dictator, as to the Iraqi people we have a history of not fulfilling those pledges. A decade earlier we had promised to help the people of Iraq throw off Saddam’s yoke and then failed to follow through, resulting in the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqi civilians who had rebelled at our prompting. When viewed with a somewhat ethnocentric viewpoint, the post-war actions in 1991 were indeed the result of Saddam’s brutality; but stepping back a bit, we were also guilty in what happened, for failing to stop the slaughter of those who tried to fight Saddam on the promise of our support. A greater willingness to accept the mistakes of our past might have better prepared us for the problems that we would face after the fall of Saddam and his government.

Filed under: International Politics, War   |  2 Comments