© REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

When Greta Thunberg made her speech at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit last September she concentrated on governments and corporations. Interestingly enough, she did not point her finger at the military. The armed forces are not an environmentally-friendly organization and frankly they are not designed to be one. They focus on the most effective means to dominate and defeat the enemy. But a culture of environmental oblivion cannot be sustained, especially when climate change impacts the military’s operational capabilities. NATO, whilst not the first responder to climate change, can help to collectively address this challenge.

A “Greener” NATO—Why Now?

Climate change will be increasingly present on NATO’s agenda for three reasons. First, by acting as a threat multiplier it will inevitably affect NATO’s core business and its deterrence and defense posture. Thus, in the course of its broader adaptation, the alliance will have to embrace issues related to climate change in all strategic directions.

In the south, the war in Syria proved that climate change could cause or fuel conflicts. Between 2005 and 2011 Syria experienced severe consecutive droughts. Hoping to find employment, farmers migrated to cities. Competition over resources and jobs, already scarce following decades of poor governance, was one of the factors that pushed people in Syria to rebel.

In the north, the melting of the polar ice cap is starting to ease the access to vast deposits of oil, gas, and metals. The changing climate will open a transpolar passage across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. This will attract interest from a broad range of actors and increase the maritime traffic through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap and nearby waters. From Moscow’s point of view, this will facilitate the movements of vessels between the Pacific and the Atlantic, thus putting additional stress on the strategically important GIUK gap. Another interested party will doubtless be China, which will likely lead to a commensurately increased presence of the People’s Liberation Army Navy in the Euro-Atlantic area.

Second, motivated by political and economic factors, individual allies will try to strengthen NATO’s response to climate challenges. Allies are already implementing the “Green Defense” framework that was adopted in 2014. It seeks to make NATO more operationally effective through changes in the use of energy, while also meeting the environmental objectives of using fewer resources. “Greening” NATO’s militaries allows some allies to rally public support and promote their domestic technologies whist providing tangible military benefits. This trend will intensify in the near future.

In the years to come, investments in green energy will form one of the pillars of the EU growth strategy. As Europe prepares itself to face the economic recession that will follow the COVID-19 pandemic, many argue that public investments in sustainable energy sources can act as a lifeline. In this context, a broad coalition of European nations (including Greece, Poland, and Spain)have called on the European Commission to forge an industrial policy for renewables. At the same time, France and Germany tabled the idea of creating “green recovery roadmaps” for every economic sector to overcome the shock. Inevitably, these views will spill over to NATO through European allies.

Third, the COVID-19 pandemic will reinforce existing vicissitudes, with the public demanding a more coordinated response to global challenges such as climate change. Social mobilization around climate change will have winners and losers. On the winning side will be organizations that provide pro-active responses to climate change. Entities that undermine environmental stability will lose out.

NATO’s Three Core “Green” Tasks

NATO will have to address the challenges posed by the climate emergency in a holistic manner and sink in the climate change factor in its policies. NATO’s approach to climate change should follow the logic of its three core tasks: collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security.

Collective defense is NATO’s bread and butter task. Including insights from climate projection and modelling in NATO’s intelligence products and processes is definitely not enough. In fact, NATO should not be afraid to act strategically by expanding the NATO Pipeline System (NPS) to its eastern flank. The NPS is a network of fuel pipelines and storage sites, with the Central Europe Pipeline System (CEPS) as its chief element. It spans from ports in France and the Benelux countries to Germany, ending on the former border between East and West Germany. Today, the CEPS mostly serves commercial clients (such as airports in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt), whilst maintaining the readiness to supply the military in times of crisis. According to official data, the pipeline transports the equivalent of roughly 1,110 diesel-powered military trucks, running round the clock, day in, day out. In other words, the CEPS helps safeguard the environment, while providing the military with a reliable logistic system for their fuel supplies.

Despite those benefits, the NPS has not been expanded to NATO’s eastern flank. Instead, the military has to rely on road and rail transports toppled by pre-positioned storage sites. Academic research proves that pipelines shipments are substantially less energy-consuming than rail, road, and water transport. In turn, pipelines reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 61 and 77 percent compared with rail for transporting oil over long distances. Expanding the NPS to the eastern flank would help NATO to significantly “green” its fuel supply logistics, while enhancing the fuel supply of its military forces and plugging the alliance in a broader effort to stimulate the post-pandemic economies. In fact, an expanded NPS could be used to supply the soon-to-be-opened Berlin-Brandenburg airport and the future Solidarity Transport Hub in Poland.

Taking on Disasters

Crisis management is another of NATO’s core tasks. Allies and partners are not immune to droughts, floods, mudflows, wildfires, hurricanes, storms, and earthquakes. Climate change exacerbates hazards and amplifies the risk of extreme weather disasters. NATO was not designed to tackle these challenges, but over the last couple of years was able to develop relevant instruments and mechanisms. There are at least two vehicles that could help NATO to better streamline climate change into its crisis management tasks.

First, the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre (EADRCC), which is NATO’s principal civil emergency response mechanism. In recent months, the EADRCC became famous for coordinating allied responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it has a long-standing record of coordinating both requests and offers of assistance mainly in case of natural and man-made disasters. The EADRCC regularly conducts field exercises based on scenarios encompassing environmental challenges. Allies should consider strengthening the EADRCC’s role, including via potential cooperation with private sector.

Second, there are the seven baseline requirements for civil preparedness which help allies to enhance resilience as agreed at the 2016 NATO Warsaw Summit. Those requirements are being regularly updated in order to reflect recent developments such as 5G networks or lessons learned so far from the COVID-19 crisis. Future updates should consider how climate change impacts civil preparedness and resilience, especially energy supplies, food and water resources, critical infrastructure in disaster-prone areas, and allies’ ability to deal with the uncontrolled movement of people.

Cooperative security will be an important element of NATO’s approach to tackle climate change, too. Sharing lessons learned with partners and introducing concrete solutions to help their armed forces to become more climate change-cognizant could create a more predictable and secure neighborhood. The NATO Science for Peace and Security Program (SPS) should play a leading role in this regard. The SPS should become a prime vehicle for developing and promoting cooperation on the smart and energy efficient technologies between allies and partners, including from the Middle East and North Africa, but also from Eastern Europe. Equipping the militaries with sustainable energy sources, such as deployable camps that typically rely on fuel-consuming and polluting diesel generators for power production, could be a case in point.

The Way Ahead

Climate change will affect the central business of NATO, including its three core tasks. The alliance can help to address this challenge by creating a culture of environmental consciousness. At the same time, NATO should not become obsessed with climate change and thus measure its policy decisions primarily through the environmental lens. Other simultaneous challenges will continue to exist. Therefore, NATO cannot afford to be a world leader in combating climate change. But it definitely can be at the forefront of environmental stewardship, especially in the context of the upcoming NATO Summit in 2021.

N.B. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institution they represent.

The post Op-Ed: Toward a “Greener” NATO appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

On April 21, the US filmmaker Michael Moore released his latest documentary, Planet of the Humans, on YouTube. The film accuses environmental activists of corruption and contends that renewable energy technologies are often worse for the planet than fossil fuels: producing solar panels, it points out, requires consuming energy and mining metals.

A month later, in Moore’s home state of Michigan, two hydroelectric dams burst after heavy rains, forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes and destroying properties across the nearby city of Midland. It was lucky that no one was killed.

The Michigan dam disaster offers a chance to test Moore’s hypothesis about the dark side of renewable energy. Whereas solar power is a relatively new part of the electricity mix, humans have been using water, a renewable resource, to generate electricity at scale for over a century. Looking at the history of hydropower reveals that renewable technologies have always had flaws—and that’s just fine.

Not so Modern

The first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operating in Wisconsin in 1882, the same year that Thomas Edison opened the world’s first central coal-fired power plant. Small-scale hydropower spread quickly around the world, and by the 1930s engineers were building massive hydroelectric projects like the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. The “white coal” cascading down the Alps provided almost all of Italy’s electricity at the outbreak of World War II.

In the post-war decades, people added hydropower almost everywhere financial and natural resources allowed it. The Soviet Union began construction of the giant Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam in 1963; it remains the biggest power plant in Russia today. In the 1970s Brazil and Paraguay built the even larger Itaipu Dam, now the second-largest power plant in the world, behind China’s gargantuan Three Gorges Dam. European countries kept expanding hydropower too, and today Norway, Switzerland, and Austria generate more than half of their electricity in this way. By 1975 humans were generating over 20 percent of their electricity from this renewable resource.

Hitting a Water Wall

However, hydropower faced mounting problems in subsequent years, even as people woke up to the dangers of oil spills and coal-related air pollution. One issue was that the dam-building spree of the long boom years meant “most of the good sites in rich countries had been taken” by 1980, as environmental historian J.R. McNeill has written.

Just as relevant was the realization that building hydroelectric dams could have some nasty social and environmental side effects.

Living near dams can be deadly. In 1975 a typhoon in China’s Henan province caused the Banqiao Dam to collapse, inundating a highly populated area. Tens of thousands drowned, and over 100,000 people died during ensuing epidemics and famines. Chernobyl may be more infamous, but Banqiao was vastly more lethal. (Like the Michigan dams, Banqiao provided not only hydropower but also vital flood control and irrigation; of the 57,000 large dams in the world, around 6,000 exist solely to produce electricity and another 4,000 both produce electricity and perform other services.)

Dams can do major environmental damage even when they don’t break, preventing fish migration and altering the ecology of the surrounding area. Take the well-known Aswan High Dam in Egypt, whose ecological impacts will endure longer than the memory of Gamal Abdel Nasser playing the US and USSR off each other in his quest for funding. Its turbines produced around a third of Egypt’s electricity in the 1980s, and it protected Egyptians and their cotton crops from heavy Nile floods. Unfortunately, the dam also prevented fertile silt from flowing from Ethiopia to Egypt, and Egypt had to use much of that new electricity to produce chemical fertilizers. Without the Nile floods, the Egyptian soil accumulated more salt, and without the Nile water that had once reached the Mediterranean, shrimp and sardines in that sea were deprived of nutrients and died.

Dam-building can have other direct impacts on humans. When serving as his country’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru dubbed hydroelectric dams the “temples of modern India,” though they also displaced tens of millions of his compatriots in the 20^th century. In tropical areas, creating reservoirs can lead to increases in waterborne diseases such as malaria.

The backlash against such impacts began to slow the growth of hydropower in the 1980s. People had seen too many of the negative impacts, seen too many post-colonial governments empty state coffers and risk angering their affected neighbors for the chance to cut the ribbon on a massive infrastructure project. In the early 1990s local critics, backed by Western NGOs, forced the World Bank to withdraw its support for a dam-building project on the Narmada River in India, and World Bank financing for hydroelectricity dried up around the turn of the century.

Between a River and a Hard Place

Today hydropower exists in a sort of purgatory between the polluting energy sources of the past and the safer renewable sources of the future. Its uncertain position is reflected in the language used by energy experts to describe it. For the International Energy Agency, it is one of the “modern renewables” along with wind and solar. The World Bank offers data from “renewable sources excluding hydropower,” while BP actually lumps hydropower in with nuclear energy, another low-carbon energy source that was providing almost a fifth of global electricity when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986 and has become slightly less important in relevant terms since.

In any case, hydropower is still the most important source of low-carbon electricity: hydropower generated 16 percent of global electricity in 2018, more than nuclear (10 percent) and other renewables (9 percent). With demand for low-carbon electricity increasing, the World Bank has stepped up its financing of hydropower since 2008, and private companies and regional development banks facing less scrutiny have backed new dam construction in developing countries. China has stepped in as a funder in recent years in the framework of its Belt and Road Initiative, providing loans for big hydroelectric projects with few strings attached.

Yet concerns about new construction remain, which is why the European hydropower industry is focused on renovating old hydropower plants, adding turbines to existing dams, or backing smaller “run-of-river” projects that do not involve the construction of large dams. It also sees promise in “pumped storage” hydropower, which uses excess wind or solar power to pump water upwards and store energy for later.

Only a few countries are ploughing ahead with landscape-altering mega projects, costs be damned. China is building two huge dams on the Jinsha River, raising tensions with downstream neighbors who fear for their farmland. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on its part of the Blue Nile has brought it and Egypt to the brink of a “water war.” Rather than finance this contentious dam, the World Bank is now mediating between Egypt and Ethiopia.

Those three controversial projects will be a responsible for a quarter of hydropower’s modest projected growth over the next five years—IEA analysts expect hydropower generation to increase by 2.5 percent per year in the 2020s, compared with 16 percent per year for solar.

Renewable If Not Necessarily Sustainable

Hydropower, then, is an old source of renewable energy that can do major environmental damage. It is also a crucial component of the current low-carbon energy mix at a time when carbon dioxide emissions are a serious threat: China would have had to build about 20 coal-fired power stations to generate as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam. Dams can be a useful climate change adaptation tool as well, irrigating fields to help farmers keep farming in the face of climate change-related rainfall variability and drought. Responsible policymakers know that they have to balance climate and environmental concerns, reducing the impact of hydroelectric dams and generating low-carbon electricity in other ways where possible.

And yet renewable skeptics like filmmaker Moore present the drawbacks of wind, solar, and hydropower as if they are some new issue whose discovery undermines the rationale behind the energy transition. This is uninformed nihilism. As climate policy expert Leah Stokes put it in her review of Planet of the Humans, “Renewables have downsides. As do biomass, nuclear, hydropower, batteries, and transmission. There is no perfect solution to our energy challenges.”

In short, Moore’s film misunderstands both the past and present of renewables. Renewable energy was creating problems for humans well before anyone worried about greenhouse gases: muscle power is renewable, though the horses that powered 19^th-century urban transport also coated city streets in a layer of manure and forced farmers to dedicate vast tracts of farmland to growing oats. What’s more, every energy transition is necessarily powered by existing sources: early coal miners used horses; the bulldozers that built the first nuclear power plants ran on oil.

On the flip side, utilizing fossil fuels instead of renewable resources has had incidental benefits for the environment in some cases. The advent of kerosene lighting, for example, reduced the incentive to kill whales for their oil, while the switch from wood to coal spared countless acres of forests. And if the billions of people in poor countries who burn renewable wood, charcoal, or dung in open fires had gas- or electric-powered cookstoves instead, they would live longer, healthier lives.

No, renewables are not perfect. Solar panels rely on energy-intensive mining, and wind turbines can kill birds. Yet they are the best option we have. Renewable critics lean too hard on the adage that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” when the proverb they need to reach for is “take the lesser of two evils.”

The post Carbon Critical: Hydropower, the Old Renewable appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero is such a daunting task that one is disinclined to think about the side effects of success. But these have to be considered. Ditching fossil fuels will have a dramatic impact on world trade and geopolitics.

In order for the world to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, global greenhouse gas emissions should reach net zero by around 2085, and emissions should already start declining this year, in 2020. (In the 2010s, they rose at a rate of 1.5 percent annually.)

In the process, oil and gas, the source of most emissions, will become less important as tools of foreign policy. In the past, both importers and exporters have used energy as a foreign policy lever, implementing embargoes or sanctions (OPEC against Western states in 1970s, many states against apartheid South Africa, the P5+1 against Iran), playing pipeline politics (Nord Stream 2), and offering benefits to friends (Russia’s discounted oil deliveries to Belarus).

The New Map of World Power

Alliances built on fossil fuels, e.g. that between the United States and Saudi Arabia, will weaken in a decarbonizing world, according to a major new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In the eyes of the major powers, smaller petro-states like Azerbaijian will lose relevance. Oil and gas will cease to be at the center of quite so much conflict and disagreement in places like Libya and Iraq, to name just two currently in the headlines.

With the scrambling of alliances come new geographies of trade―electricity is a regionally traded commodity, whereas oil is shipped all around the world. Sources of renewable power are also less geographically concentrated than oil and gas fields, so energy production will become less concentrated in states blessed (or cursed) with hydrocarbon deposits, and strategic oil choke points like the Strait of Hormuz will become less crucial to world trade.

As a report from the Belfer Center at Harvard University points out, there is a risk of political instability for fossil fuel exporters that are unable to maintain government spending and standards of living. Look at Venezuela, where falling oil prices have contributed to the country’s recent economic and social collapse. Or Nigeria, where fossil fuel reserves make up 40 percent of the country’s total assets.

The flip side of this is that today’s energy importers will save money. The EU, for example, expects to significantly reduce the €266 billion it spends annually on importing fossil fuels.

To Zero, To Hero

The EU will likely be the first of the major powers to achieve carbon neutrality, making it an interesting test case. It hopes to decarbonize by 2050.

2050 is 30 years away, not a long time compared to previous energy transitions. These are, as the great energy historian Vaclav Smil has written, “gradual, prolonged affairs”; it tends to take 50 to 75 years for a new resource to capture a large share of the global energy market. Humans used traditional biofuels (mostly wood) and animate energy (horses, oxen, biceps and hamstrings) from the discovery of fire until about 1800, when coal power started to become significant and humans began to enjoy the modern industrial world.

It took coal until 1900 to become the dominant energy source, a position it retained until the 1960s, when oil overtook it. Since then, the major trend has been not the takeover of solar and wind power but rather the rise of natural gas, which is now about as important to world energy as oil and coal. In 2017, low-carbon sources, including all types of renewables and controversial nuclear power, provided only 28 percent of primary energy consumption in the EU. That leaves a lot of fossil fuels to transition away from.

Nevertheless, 30 years is long enough that EU fossil fuel demand will decline gradually. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that, if the world undertook a “major transformation” of the energy system to tackle climate change, European oil demand would decline by 61 percent from 2018 to 2040. Even though the IEA tends to underestimate the growth of renewable energy, it appears that Europeans will still be buying loads of oil in 20 years.

Meanwhile, European gas demand is expected to decline by 38 percent from 2018 to 2040, though analysts expect gas imports to actually increase in the short term as domestic production declines and coal power plants are shut down. A great deal of the previous progress towards decarbonization is thanks to the switch from coal to natural gas, which emits about half as much carbon dioxide per unit of released energy as does coal.

The (Slow) Death of the Salesmen

One country’s savings are another’s lost business. What will happen to the EU’s fossil-fuel salesmen?

Russia and Norway sell more hydrocarbons to EU customers than any other countries, and thus have the most to fear from EU decarbonization. It’s a real problem for both; no country could simply shrug off the loss of its biggest customer in its biggest industry. Most Russian gas and oil is sold to the EU, and fossil fuel sales provide about 40 percent of Russian federal budget revenues. Fossil fuels are also the backbone of the Norwegian economy.

Norway is “highly resilient” against decarbonization, according to the IRENA report. Being rich helps: Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has about $200,000 for every person in the country. But Norway is also shoring up its defenses. Bård Lahn, a researcher at the Norwegian climate think tank CICERO, says there is “an increasing awareness that Norway needs to prepare for a decarbonized Europe and reduce its exposure to oil and gas market fluctuations.” A government-appointed commission recently recommended stress-testing the economy against declining fossil fuel demand. But so far, “oil and gas policy focuses on maximizing production and exports. In particular, the Norwegian government and oil industry association has made considerable efforts to persuade Brussels about the advantages of natural gas as a ‘bridge fuel.’”

Russia is less resilient. Tatiana Mitrova, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, says the country is “not well prepared for decarbonization, especially EU decarbonization.” In fact, most stakeholders regard it as an “existential threat” to Russian hydrocarbon export revenues.

However, Russia is still less exposed than some other petrostates. Andreas Goldthau, a professor at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt and Associate Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), says that this is in part because Russia’s fossil fuels are comparatively cheap to exploit. “Russia has relatively low lifting costs for oil, so it is likely to stay competitive even in a market that is set to turn softer against the backdrop of decreasing demand for hydrocarbons.” Russia is also expanding petrochemical production and diversifying its gas exports, in particular by betting big on China. It recently began shipping gas to its mega-neighbor through the Power of Siberia pipeline, the largest gas project in Russian history.

Can I Interest You in Some Hydrogen?

Even if energy exporters can’t sell as much oil and natural gas to the EU in the future, they won’t just give up on the energy trade. At present, the EU imports 55 percent of its energy. In its 2018 long term climate strategy, the Commission projects that this “energy dependency” figure will fall to 20 percent by 2050. Those 20 percent will still represent a lucrative market.

What will future EU energy trade look like? “Member states decide on their own energy mix,” a Commission spokesperson said, while also pointing out that official EU documents give a pretty good idea of what the remaining imports might be. (The usual caveats about predicting anything 30 years from now apply.)

The 2018 EU strategy assumes some residual imports of fossil fuels in 2050. Much of these fuels will be for industrial use, like the natural gas used as a feedstock by the chemical industry. Some fossil fuels will be imported to power long-distance ships and planes, which are hard to decarbonize. The EU will try to offset these emissions with negative emissions elsewhere.

Some share of future energy imports will be low-carbon. A decarbonizing EU will continue to import biofuels, like wood, or diesel derived from plants, though these will be a small part of overall consumption. More significant is the possibility of importing electricity from countries than can produce cheap renewable power, like the sunny nations of North Africa. With EU support, member states are laying power lines across the Mediterranean to the Maghreb.

Hydrogen is the most promising low-carbon energy source for Norway and Russia to pivot to. According to Goldthau, even a decarbonizing EU will likely keep importing energy from Russia. At first, it would be “blue” hydrogen made from natural gas, where the carbon emissions are stored underground or reused. Eventually it should be “green” hydrogen, made by using renewable electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

Lahn says that some Norwegian industry actors are getting more interested in hydrogen exports, though it remains “an experimental idea.” One advantage here is that hydrogen could be delivered through existing natural gas infrastructure, and Norway and Russia would have a climate-friendly use case for their large natural gas reserves.

Full of Energy

Humans will still need enormous amounts of energy to get through the day in a decarbonized world. But they will no longer be able to take advantage of all the energy stored in plants and animals that died hundreds of millions of years ago and became oil, coal, or gas through exposure to heat and pressure. (In the end, almost all energy is solar energy.)

Decarbonization will reshape foreign affairs; and yet in some ways the new geopolitics of energy will resemble the old one. There will continue to be major trade in energy, whether hydrogen or electricity or biofuels. There could be new resource curses, not with fossil fuels but with rare earth metals essential for clean energy technologies. New inequities will arise as major powers hoover up clean energy patents. Countries will still have balance-of-payments problems with regard to energy imports.

Of course, this will only happen if humans are able to break the mold of previous energy transitions, not merely adding new fuel sources but breaking their addiction to the old ones, thus avoiding catastrophic climate change. These geopolitical developments would be the side effects of success.

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© REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

California is the fifth largest economy in the world and in recent years it has been pioneering a new brand of diplomacy, first on climate change and now increasingly on tech policy. With its relative political cohesiveness, policy philosophy, tech-industrial base, and soft power, the Golden State is moving into a unique league in the international system: a sub-national great power.

The role of US states globally has traditionally been relegated to trade delegations with governors occasionally travelling to foreign financial centers in search of investment. California’s first significant entrée as a diplomatic actor was over the issue of climate change.

California’s role at the 2017 UN Climate Conference marked a watershed. Then governor Jerry Brown led a coalition of states and cities dedicated to meeting the Paris Accord’s emissions targets despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement. Speaking to a rapturous plenary session in the European Parliament afterward, Brown included California and Texas in a list of powers—along with the United States, Russia and India—that need to tackle climate change more earnestly. The scene had the trappings of an address by a head of state. The governor met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and California signed an agreement to cooperate on climate tech and withstand the headwinds of the US-China trade war.

Skipping Sacramento

When it comes to tech, California is a superpower. European policy-makers know this. Well, kind of. Streams of ministers and political delegations from Berlin and Brussels regularly shuttle to Silicon Valley hoping to learn from the world’s most dynamic innovation ecosystem, attract investment from its oceans of venture capital, and take selfies with tech founders. But rarely—if ever—do they bother to travel 140 kilometers inland from the Bay Area to the Californian state capital of Sacramento. In fact, not a single European Commissioner has visited California’s State Legislature in recent years.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier likes to frame the tech race in starkly geopolitical terms as a clash of values, in which Europe must become a co-equal pole. But when it came to his high-profile US trip in July, where he was on a fact-finding mission into American frontier tech, the German minister visited Silicon Valley and Washington but skipped Sacramento, where he could have found natural allies.

As California resets the regulatory philosophy for tech, Brussels—and others—could be working with the state. Take for instance, California’s sweeping new Data Protection Law. Signed into law in June 2018 with little notice, it has been called an American GDPR because its provisions mirror the EU’s data directive so closely. The law’s effect will be significant. It provides similar protections to all classes of personal data, with fines reaching $7,500 per user and possible amendments that would allow for class action lawsuits against companies that systematically violate California’s data law.

More revolutionary, Sacramento is considering forcing data brokers to disclose the value of personal data. This would bring a whole new reality to personal data, allowing for lawsuits for damages, forms of taxation, transparency and other modes of commercial compensation. California tech laws are often replicated across the United States. Its data breach law became the gold standard for US cybersecurity and was copied by 48 other states. California’s data privacy law goes into effect in 2020 but other states are already beginning to copy it.

The Power of the Techies

As the development cycle for general purpose technologies like AI, 3D printing, and quantum computing accelerates, California’s move to set rules could have global implications. Sacramento was ground zero for Uber and Lyft drivers working to secure rights such as minimum wage, overtime, and health and retirement benefits. They have been joined by traditional unions in the attempt to redefine gig worker rights in a way that could revamp the 21st century labor movement. California is considering a blanket ban on arming police body cams with facial recognition AI. The state is also drawing on moratoria on facial recognition technology in San Francisco and similar measures in Berkeley and Oakland.

The implications could go beyond California’s borders with implications for global law enforcement, democracy, and open society. For instance, China has been recently caught using massive pools of facial data hoovered up in public spaces in the US to train surveillance AI meant to track and monitor the country’s mostly Muslim Uighur minority. And as recently as October 2019, California’s governor Gavin Newsom signed a law banning candidate use of deep fakes 60 day before an election.

Perhaps equally important, a large share of the world’s top programmers are based in California. They are increasingly mobilizing, when they feel their companies are betraying their values-based missions. Google programmers successfully rose up against the company’s cooperation with the Pentagon on Maven Project—an AI-face recognition project for military drones. More and more, California’s techies, too, will be looking to state politics as a check on companies, which could have significant implications for the US military’s tech edge. The Pentagon has taken note.

Championing Human Rights

Sacramento is creating new institutional infrastructures to engage with the world. Newsom’s number two, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis—formerly President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Hungary–has been appointed the state’s chief representative on International Affairs and Trade, a kind of Californian foreign minister. After the appointment, she called Trump’s trade policy “erratic” but went further, stating California’s ambition to help “set the standards for democratic values” around the world. The state already has an office in China and plans to open another in Mexico. Other states are doing so as well. For instance New Jersey has opened an office in Germany.

California is becoming a more confident global actor in other areas, too. Even as China and California have already started to build an asymmetric alliance on climate change, the state is increasingly taking strong positions on China’s human rights record, democracy and tensions with Taiwan and Hong Kong. California State Speaker Anthony Rendon stated, “all of us, here in California and elsewhere, have a duty to stand in solidarity with those who stand for freedom…I want the people of Hong Kong to know that California stands with them.”

The state’s massive procurement budget and even greater public pension system, CaLPERS, are increasingly being leveraged to advance human rights, democracy, and rule of law and to combat corruption. As a border state reflecting America’s changing face, it is leading the resistance on Trump’s immigration and relations with Latin America.

No Army, No Currency

There are, however, limits to California’s neo-Hanseatic bid to redefine statecraft. For one, the international system is still nation-state centric. California lacks some of the capabilities traditionally associated with Great Power status. First and foremost, it has no military. California is thus not a player in the exercise of war. It also lacks some of the geo-economic attributes that allow the European Union to project power internationally—namely control over tariffs and its own currency.

And there are the practical challenges. First, the primacy of Washington. California attempted to undercut the Trump administration by negotiating a deal directly with Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, and Honda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The deal effectively would have set emissions rates for the entire US, and in doing so, would have helped establish California as a regulatory hegemon within the US by setting American policy—in direct opposition to Trump’s Washington. But the Trump administration has been ruthless in its attempt to block California’s right to regulate emissions and has punished car companies for having worked with the state.

So Goes the World

Then, there’s Big Tech. As the state enters a great tech political awakening, it remains to be seen if California can resist capture by the state’s uniquely powerful tech juggernauts that are seeking to pacify the state’s policy ambition.

Like the world’s diplomats, Big Tech’s political Svengalis had long ignored Sacramento and concentrated their rule-shaping efforts on Washington, Brussels and London. For instance, they lobbied Congress for federal privacy regulations that would either supersede the Sacramento law or at least water down its privacy provisions. This has hit problems given the political polarization, dysfunction, and lack of bandwidth in Congress. Now, Big Tech is concentrating their efforts on Sacramento itself. After all, California is one of only two states—the other is Alabama—that are pushing ahead with a massive antitrust case against Google.

But even with these limiting factors, the rise of California heralds a criteria shift as to what makes a foreign policy actor—and a power—as geo-economic issues like climate change, and connectivity take on greater importance in global politics. As a direct result, the clean lines of the Westphalian system continue to break down. A neo-Hanseatic system of subnational actors is emerging with California at the forefront—joining a tapestry of other powers that include Big Tech companies, multi-stakeholder organizations, and political movements like FridaysForFuture.
New European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has argued that her top two priorities for the EU’s next five years are tech policy and climate change, both areas where California is an undisputed global leader.

One measure of her seriousness could be whether or not she seeks an asymmetric alliance with like-minded leaders in Sacramento. After all, Sacramento politicians are fond of saying: “As California goes, so goes the nation.” If trends continue, perhaps it should be: as California goes, so goes the world.

The post California Calling appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Pictures © REUTERS

The global climate debate is entering a new phase. Whereas it was previously between “environmentalists” and climate deniers, with a large section of society watching on indifferently, in the new phase the issue is how to handle climate change, rather than whether it is worth discussing or doing something about. There are two main drivers of this shift.

The Death of Denial

First, climate denial is on its last legs. This might seem premature given that US President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in 2017. The underlying trends, however, are not on the deniers’ side.

In a July 2019 global YouGov poll, just 15 percent of Americans agreed either that the climate was changing but “human activity is not responsible at all” (9 percent) or that the climate was not in fact changing (6 percent). Yet that was the highest number of all polled countries, and even Trump’s Republican party appears to be moving away from the president on this issue. In a September 2019 US Public Views on Climate and Energy poll, 52 percent of millennial Republicans agreed that the US “federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change.” These young conservatives might well describe the current US president as a boomer.

Indeed, in recent years the more intellectually honest climate deniers have simply run out of ammunition. Natural variability kept temperatures quite stable in the 2000s, but the last five years have been the warmest on record as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to reach new highs.

Second, the climate crisis is becoming a more salient political issue, and the public at large is becoming more passionate about it. The forests of California are aflame; Venice is underwater; the Victoria Falls have run dry. Youth activist groups such as Fridays for Future are real political forces, especially in Europe and the US. Just as importantly, typical voters truly care about their elected officials’ climate policy.

That was not the case previously. Although, compared to the US, deniers never played an especially large role in the European debate. Still, centrist leaders were able to treat climate issues as just another policy field. Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Jacques Chirac all urged the US to back the Kyoto Protocol, but when election time came, not many voters were talking about emission reduction targets, whereas the 2019 European Parliamentary elections demonstrated that climate was a key issue for all parties. In the 2020s, leaders of major political parties will no longer be able to brush the issue under the rug.

No Dodging of the Issue

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison makes a good case study. Morrison, a Liberal who won a close election having promised to protect coal and cut taxes, is the type of man who might have denied or ignored climate change in previous times. These days, he can’t, not when there are major climate conferences the public actually cares about—Morrison claimed at the September UN climate conference in New York that Australia is “doing its bit” on climate change—and not when there are frequent major climatic events, like the bush fires that devastated the country in November 2019.

After those fires, Morrison could not dodge the issue, nor argue that heat and drought are unrelated to fire. Instead he had to resort to a tangled defense that “Australia, accountable for 1.3 percent of the world’s emissions” could not be “impacting directly on specific fire events.” Even in the statement by US Secretary Mike Pompeo on the occasion of the US leaving the Paris Agreement there is no climate denial—Pompeo proudly cites America’s emissions-reduction record, lackluster as it is.

So climate denial as we knew it is passé, and the climate crisis is becoming impossible to ignore. Where does the debate go next? Like most conceptual categories, these are somewhat fluid—the same individual may move back and forth between camps, but here are the four main groups.

The Carbonists

First, there are the “Carbonists.” Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic invented the term to describe the successors to the climate deniers—the “carbon” is akin to the “nation” in nationalism. They are small in number, though they hold significant political and economic power. Carbonists do sometimes try to argue that climate science is incorrect, but they can quite easily make their point without doing so. Meyer writes: “Carbonism is a belief that fossil fuels … have inherent virtue. That they are better, in fact, than other energy sources.”

Carbonism is behind Donald Trump’s efforts not just to slow climate action but to roll it back, e.g. to reduce cars’ fuel efficiency against the will of large automakers and US states. At its core is a desire to pull up the drawbridge and protect the property of currently powerful groups, like those who control fossil fuel production or benefit most from the absence of taxes and regulation on carbon emissions, a group that in the West comprises mainly older white men. It frequently devolves into trolling—witness Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s accusation that actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio was responsible for fires in the Amazon.

This philosophy is not specific to the Americas. When Clemens Tönnies, meat magnate and chairman of the German football team Schalke 04, said that the real problem was not how wealthy Europeans live but the “Africans … producing children when it’s dark”, he was making a Carbonist argument.

A Far-Right Phenomenon

Some far-right parties in Europe still take the traditional route and deny the science, like Spain’s Vox, the Brexit party, and the Swedish Democrats. But others raise different objections to electric cars and vegan burgers. Former AfD party leader Alexander Gauland despises everything the Green party stands for. “Green ideology,” he has said, is “taking in strangers, saving the climate, helping others,” as opposed to standing up for “the people.” (Incidentally, the AfD also denies the science.)

The list goes on. The Danish People’s Party says wind power spoils landscapes, while Greece’s Golden Dawn argues that Greeks have a right to exploit their national fossil fuel resources. The leader of the True Finns says “climate change is a reality,” but warns that wind turbines are bad for human health.

Indeed, many Carbonists are obsessed with potential negative impacts of going green. For them, the cure is worse than the disease. How many of those writing op-eds about the water consumed in avocado production or the humans rights abuses often involved in cobalt mining (for lithium batteries) ever made a fuss about the water a cow drinks or the child labor that goes into Nestle chocolate?

The Lukewarmists

Next there are what British writer Matt Ridley has dubbed the “Lukewarmists.” These people accept the overwhelming evidence that the earth is warming and human activity is the primary cause. However, as self-described Lukewarmist and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explains, they “doubt … that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised.”

Lukewarmists, who include German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are a diverse bunch. Some believe the effects of climate change are more manageable than the doomsayers claim, as least manageable for the well-off in wealthy nations. After the bush fires, Prime Minister Morrison underlined how his government had given more resources to the fire chiefs to put out the fires once they started.

Douthat, meanwhile, is skeptical of the Green New Deal in general but has praised the elements of it that seek to adapt the United States’ defenses. Adaptation is rightfully on the agenda nearly everywhere, be it nature-based measures like mangrove restoration or high-tech air purification towers, such as those the Indian Supreme Court recently urged the Delhi government to build to reduce smog.

Back to the Stone Age?

Climate change is a collective action problem, and Lukewarmists are quick to point that any country acting first or alone will incur major economic costs for relatively little reward if other parties don’t also act to cut emissions. Lukewarmists are also eager to minimize their own in-group’s responsibility, perhaps because their country or sector is responsible for only X percent of emissions (for instance, Germany: 2 percent; aviation: 2 percent). Or perhaps because fossil fuels are simply indispensable: Saudi Arabia has ratified the Paris Agreement but does not appear committed to meaningfully reducing emissions; BP is being sued in the UK for its “greenwashing” advertisements. Or perhaps because Greta Thunberg’s journey across the Atlantic was not technically entirely carbon free.

Other Lukewarmists complain that it would be too expensive to solve the problem. They warn that change cannot come too fast without either destroying the economy or alienating the population, pushing people to vote for Carbonists. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in November 2019 that a complete switch to solar and wind power risked “humanity once again ending up in caves.” According to Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation, 40 percent of Russians believe nothing can be done to prevent climate change. Though the cost argument tends to come from the right, some leftist parties or hybrid left-right movements make it too: the French Gilets Jaunes took to the streets in part to oppose a fuel tax increase.

The Techno-Mitigators

The next group are the “Techno-Mitigators.” They have a lot in common with Lukewarmists, particularly in their reluctance to disincentivize, restrict, or ban planet-heating activities. Yet they tend to take climate change more seriously than Lukewarmists and want to mitigate it with technology and human ingenuity.

Think of how the Republican US Senator Marco Rubio and Czech PM Andrej Babis advocate nuclear power. Or how Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, pleads for “innovative approaches” such as synthetic fuels or carbon capture and storage. Or of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that is working with the oil giant Occidental to build a plant in Texas that will suck carbon out of the air… and use it to drill for more oil.

Also in the Techno-Mitigators camp are those in favor of geo-engineering, e.g. solar radiation management. This is the practice of injecting reflective particles, such as sulfate aerosols, into the atmosphere, in order to reflect sunlight and thus reduce the amount of heat that reaches the earth, mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions that have reduced global temperatures in the past.

China led by President Xi Jinping is something of a Techno-Mitigator by inference. It talks the talk on climate and is the largest developer of renewable energy, but it is also building enough new coal power plants to match the entire current coal capacity of the EU. This coal expansion is incompatible with the Paris Agreement. How will Beijing square the circle? The superpower that is already planning to launch the world’s largest cloud-seeding operation in order to increase rainfall in the Tibetan plateau might well continue to bet on technology in the long term.

The Alarmists

Alarmists are those who respond to reports of species going extinct and ice sheets melting by saying it is time to, well, sound the alarm. Greta Thunberg has been doing this very effectively in 2019. Alarmists are horrified by the fact that many G20 nations are on track to miss their climate targets for 2030, and that even if current climate pledges were implemented, temperatures would still rise by about 3 degrees Celsius. Alarmists believe that climate change is a unique, existential threat and governments must drive rapid transformation.

This group includes radical organizations like Extinction Rebellion and authors like Naomi Klein, who see capitalism as it exists today and climate change as part of the same crisis. In January 2019, 626 environmental groups sent a letter to US lawmakers that opposed “corporate schemes … including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets.” But the Alarmist camp also includes most of the comparatively staid scientific community and many moderate Green or center-left politicians.

Sometimes people make Alarmist arguments for political advantage. The Guardian asked all major British parties the same set of questions about climate change ahead of the 2019 election. All agreed that “climate crisis” was the “biggest issue the UK faces as a nation.” Yet only the Conservatives opposed the youth climate strikes and said they would not stop the expansion of Heathrow airport.

Only those political parties that do not have a massive gap between their rhetoric and their proposals (if not results) can credibly argue the Alarmist point of view. Labour didn’t agree with the British Greens on everything in the survey, but its climate policies did get good marks on a Greenpeace test.

It will take a few years to tell how committed would-be Alarmists, including new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, are to their principles. The municipalities that recently declared climate emergency or pledged to go net-zero will have to demonstrate their seriousness in the 2020s. And many alarmist parties will face heavy friendly fire over their cooperation with other camps, on the grounds that, as Klein put it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, “the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.”

Mix and Match

Unsurprisingly, the author of a column called Carbon Critical has a lot of sympathy for mitigators. One suspects that if more people read the UN reports of impending disaster, there would be more people on the Alarmist bandwagon. Nevertheless, every group but the Carbonists has something to offer.

Techno-Mitigators have a clear-eyed view of how bleak the situation is. Flight shaming or buying secondhand clothes can make a difference at the margins. There is, however, no way to meet the Paris Agreement goals without relying heavily on technology. Must we retire the safest existing nuclear power plants for ideological reasons?

When Alarmists such as Bernie Sanders or Friends of the Earth Europe write off carbon capture as a “false solution,” they overrate the danger of moral hazard, i.e. the risk that people will stop reducing emissions because they think technology can save them. They should listen to the IPCC, which acknowledges that all pathways for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius require the use of “negative emissions technologies.” Instead of writing these off, Alarmists should encourage advocates to put their money where their mouth is: how can we possibly build the equipment and infrastructure for carbon storage without proper market incentives?

Geo-engineering is risky stuff, even as a temporary solution to buy us enough breathing space to cut emissions. For instance, while solar radiation management would slow global warming, it would do nothing to stop other climate problems like ocean acidification, and it might have dangerous side effects like changing rainfall patterns. Yet it is quite likely to occur on a meaningful scale because it costs less up front to dim the sun than to quickly reshape economies. Scientists are working intensely on such technologies, especially in the US and China. Therefore it makes sense for all countries to do research into geo-engineering and strengthen international regulatory frameworks, rather than hope the technology is never used.

Lukewarmists, meanwhile, provide a healthy skepticism and realism. We will inevitably spend large sums on adaptation that, from a global, generational perspective, would be better spent on mitigation. And some Alarmist demands are divorced from political considerations. The German branch of Fridays for Future advocates a carbon price of €180 per ton. This number is the result of a German Environmental Agency calculation of the burden today’s carbon emissions put on future generations. But it takes no account of what Germany’s competitors are doing, what German voters want, or whether low-income groups could afford the tax, as Lukewarmists eagerly point out.

Alarmists’ task is to press Lukewarmists to follow these criticisms to their logical conclusions. They should not accept the hollow claim that raising taxes on meat or gasoline is necessarily an unacceptable burden on low-income groups, as if governments do not have the power to compensate workers by reducing other taxes. They should ask Lukewarmist politicians to borrow from future generations so that we can actually afford to make synthetic fuels and low-carbon steel and cement today. And they should encourage their leaders to play hardball with laggard nations, for example by implementing a carbon border tax to level the playing field and stop Carbonists from gaining a temporary economic advantage.

A Power Struggle for the 2020s

It is a sign of progress that the debate has moved on and split into four camps. Just five years ago, the chairman of the environment committee in the US Senate threw a snowball on the senate floor in order to “disprove” global warming. Thankfully, that chapter of the climate debate is coming to a close.

The success of the Paris Agreement will depend on how political power is shared between the four new camps in the 2020s—in other words, whether Alarmists can take on the best of Lukewarmist and Techno-Mitigator thinking, convert more undecideds, and defeat the Carbonists.

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