99 Luftballons

In honor of the new START agreement:

Climate Security, Continued

I highly recommend Geoffrey Dabelko's op-ed on the use and abuse of the concept of climate security. His first recommendation is particularly worth reading:

Don't oversell the link between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism. Climate change is expected to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intra-state conflict, serving as a so-called "threat multiplier." But characterizing climate change as producing a new type of conflict is both wrong and counterproductive. For example, simply labeling the genocide in Darfur a "climate war" ignores political and economic motivations for the fighting--and unintentionally could let the criminal regime in Khartoum off the hook.

This reminds me of an excellent paper a while back that argued that we need to flip around our thinking of the causality of climate change: Instead of saying, "Climate change will lead to x," we should say, "y is happening, and the impacts of climate change could induce y to become x." That way of thinking makes climate change more comprehensible to people in various areas of expertise, and will help make adapting to climate change, to the extent that we need to do so, an easier task.

The fourth recommendation is also illuminating:

Don't forget that climate mitigation efforts can introduce social conflict. Since confronting climate change can have unanticipated consequences, mitigation efforts must be "conflict-proofed" to avoid unwittingly creating new inequities and instigating new conflict. For example, demand for biofuels has increased the use of U.S. agricultural land for "growing energy." But it has also helped spur rising food prices and, subsequently, riots in Mexico. On the other side of the world, accelerated deforestation in Indonesia for palm oil plantations has fueled social conflict over forest resources by exacerbating existing tensions between companies and local people.

I would probably also include any potential carbon trade wars in that framework.

Climate Security

I've often joked that in Washington, if you attach the word "security" to anything, it automatically becomes important. Thus we have our climate change and energy bills given names like the Energy Independence and Security Act or the American Clean Energy and Security Act. But in fact, framing the climate crisis as a security issue is both substantively grounded and appears to have some promise as a way to persuade fence-sitters in Congress on climate legislation, as this NYT editorial argues.

In one sense, this should be intuitive: If you subject the earth's climate to unprecedented levels of stress, the results (e.g., drought, flooding, infectious disease) will be bad for governments around the world, and especially bad for governments that are weak, unstable, or corrupt, and thus ill-equipped to handle these problems. For example, on top of all the other problems Pakistan is facing, it's also dealing with a growing water crisis -- one that will likely intensify as the glaciers in the Himalayas disappear. Even stable governments could fall apart if the scale of the calamity is big enough: If the ocean rises over the dikes of the Netherlands, the country could go from a modern industrialized democracy to a failed state in the blink of an eye.

The main point of contention, I think, has less to do with the strength of the link between climate change and national security, and more with defining what constitutes "national security," regardless of what connection it has to climate change. We just lived through an era in which the term was defined almost exclusively in terms of what could be accomplished in terms of men with guns and bombs, and needless to say, it was a disaster.* Even if we define national security in broader terms, however -- promoting stable governance, respect for human rights, etc. -- we must still recognize that for all of our wealth, we're not omnipotent: if there's one thing we've learned since 9/11, it's that we have much less leverage over other countries, even very poor countries, than we think we do. There seems to be very little the US can do about failed states like Somalia or repressive states like Burma, short of armed force -- which, as I just mentioned, often creates more problems than it solves.

Why focus on this? Because I think this points to the need to have the question of "climate security" embedded in the larger ethical framework that has grown up around climate change (e.g., that old standby, common but differentiated responsibility). It's well established, at least for many, that the developed world should take primary responsibility for dealing with the effects of climate change, especially in the developing world. Usually this means some kind of technology transfer or financial assistance, but I think it also should mean helping governments in vulnerable parts of the world become more resilient in the face of climate-related upheavals. This is where the recommendations in Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, for example, could be useful. And of course, it also means the developed countries should make reducing carbon emissions a top priority.

* The Obama administration is turning this mindset around, of course, yet it still persists: The Obama policy on Afghanistan, for example, seems to emphasize putting more troops on the ground, but not on defining realistic, achievable goals for what can accomplished in terms of a US occupation. See Matt Yglesias for more on this.

Would Torture Investigations Backfire?

Tyler Cowen gives a depressingly plausible explanation of why investigations of Bush administration officials who authorized torture, much less prosecutions, are unlikely:

I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors. That's why we can't proceed and Obama probably understands that. If another attack happened this would be all the more true.

On top of everything else, major Democrats in Congress are likely complicit and the Democrats as a whole hardly made this a campaign issue in 2004; in 2008 the economy was their winning issue, not torture.

[...]

The American public, now having affiliated itself with torture, will be reluctant to condemn torture for some time to come. The "endowment effect" here seems to be strong.

An acquittal or mistrial would lose the chunk of world opinion that Obama has been winning back. And a trial might prompt another terrorist attack, if only to force acquittal and make America look bad once again.

Pushing for prosecution would more likely endanger rule of law than preserve it, which is a sorry state of affairs.

I don't share Cowen's pessimism about Americans, but I see his point: The coalition to make the United States do a full accounting for torture and indefinite detention since 9/11 doesn't yet have enough numbers to override the apparent desires of President Obama and the Congressional leadership to move on, to say nothing of the Republican Party's eagerness to declare waterboarding as American as apple pie. At the same time, that isn't to say that the coalition that does exist couldn't go after some low-hanging fruit; e.g., the impeachment of Jay Bybee or the firing of John Yoo.

But, while nailing Bybee, Yoo, et al (I assume an investigation of Bush and Cheney is highly unlikely) would be desirable, I ultimately think preventing torture from happening again is more important than pursuing investigations, especially if the latter come to nothing.* And that means discrediting the use of torture as an instrument of national security: The disturbing thing about the torture debate is how many people (and not only conservatives) seem willing to set aside morality in the hopes that torturing prisoners will keep them safe, given that torture has historically been used to extract false confessions, as Matt Yglesias and others have said ad nauseam. How you prove to the larger public not only the immorality of torture, but its uselessness, is a question I can't answer now. Certainly an improved security situation under the Obama administration would go a long way toward demonstrating that a humane foreign policy is a strong foreign policy. But I welcome reaction on this from those who know more about national security policy than I do.

* Of course, prohibiting torture and investigating the perpetrators of torture aren't mutually exclusive. But the danger of a full-scale investigation, as in Cowen's example, is that we as a country will not thus come to the consensus that torture is wrong and we shouldn't do it anymore. That consensus can possibly be achieved with the help of prosecutions, but prosecutions, by themselves, are not sufficient to achieve it.