The Coming American Anarchy?

Robert Kaplan's classic "The Coming Anarchy" depicts an international environment where disease, resource scarcity and poverty shape geo-political trends and national interests.

Two recent articles have me thinking about this on a more personal (American) level.

The first is from the New York Times Magazine, "The Future is Drying Up." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin It provides an excellent review of water scarcity in the American West, and questions how long growth rates in that area can persist.

The second is the broader coverage of the current drought in Georgia. There is a fair amount of coverage at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/drought.html

The broader concern is, just how fragile is the system? What sort of ripple effect could we see throughout the southeast if Georgia runs out of water? Would we seem a stream of refugees fleeing, as in Katrina? How long could a major metropolitan area like Atlanta survive on bottled water and delivery trucks?

The developing world lives with scarce water supplies daily. A first world nation could be in for a very rude awakening in 2008. And faced with such a potentially persisent crisis, what would be the ripple effect on to America's standing in the world?

A Strategy of "Energy Dominance"?

The control of oil and energy resources seems a recurring theme in recent Russian international relations and security strategy. Russia's Navy has announced plans to reestablish a Naval presence in the eastern Mediterranian Sea. The article linked above mentions the establishment of a military base on the Black Sea at Novorossiysk when Russia's lease on the Ukrainian port of Sevastapol runs out in 2017. Novorossiysk is already a major terminus for Caspian Sea oil. The moves in the Med are also tied to oil, as Latakia is close to Ceyhan, the Turkish terminus for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan main export pipeline.Russia seems to be matching its ends to means and pursuing a strategy that is within its capabilities and accounts for "hard" factors such as natural resources and geography. Its singular focus on having a hand in the production and deliver of oil will help it to guarantee delivery to whomever it wishes (and for whatever political reasons it desires).

21st Century or the 15th?

Russia is claiming an undersea ridge that runs beneath the North Pole. Today, a Russian expedition dispatched a submursible to the seafloor there and placed a titanium-clad russian flag there. The Canadians have responded to these activites with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. As the search for oil and gas resources intensifies, global commons will become areas of focus for those wishing to exploit potential resources there. Furthermore, the Arctic may be an newly-opened frontier as sea lanes open and habitable areas expand with warming seas and a shrinking ice cap. With resources and access come questions of ownership and control. Will the Arctic emerge as an area of contention as its littoral countries (the U.S., Canada, Denmark, and Russia, and Norway) position themselves for a piece of the potential oil resources there? The Canadian foreign minister responded that "this isn't the 15th century...you cant go around the world and plant flags...claiming territory." His analysis is correct on its face and this indeed is not the 15th century. But in the 21st century nations do indeed "plant flags and claim territory" both on land, in the seas, and in the mind. Canada is in for a sharp shock as its holiday from history comes to a close. Does Canada have the power and, perhaps more importantly, the will to engage in a world where legal nicities and communiques matter not?

Biofuels and U.S. Agriculture

The U.S. Department of Agricuture had published a report on the increasing use of ethanol as a fuel additive and the effects of this trend on U.S. agricultural production. Corn is currently used ni ethanol productionand in 2006 some 20% of U.S. corn production was used for this purpose. Increased corn acreage displaces soybean production, causing rising prices for both commodities. Furthermore, increased demand for corn causes higher feedstock prices which are transmitted in to higher pork, beef, poultry, and milk prices as well as the array of processed food products based on corn.The paper discusses the potential of "cellulosic ethanol" to displace corn-based ethanol production. Cellulosic ethanol uses plant waste -- plant stalks, leaves, tree trunks, and other materials that are currently biproducts of agricultural production. The study notes that if cellulosic ethanol technology can be made to work, the U.S. could produce as much as 11o billion gallons of ethanol -- using materials that are currently considered waste, and contributing no net gain to greenhouse emissions (burning the plants removed the same amount of carbon dioxide in the past growing year at was burned in combustion. This production technique may be competitive with conventional techniques by 2012, but significant investment in new production capacity will be required.

Safe (er) Nuclear Energy?

MIT has released a study by the Nuclear Science and Energy Department on a concept to build modular and relatively cheap nuclear reactors to generate electricity or hydrogen. The Pebble Bed reactor described in the study It relies on hundreds or thousands of self-contained, tennis-ball sized graphite "pebbles" encasing small uranium pellets. These pebbles when piled together within a reaction vessel undergo nuclear fission, heating gas to turn a turbine.Has a number of advantages over current nuclear reactor technology: It cannot undergo runaway nuclear fission, damaging or destroying the reactor. The cooling system is dramatically less complicated and more robust than that of current reactor technology, leading to lower construction costs. The design is modular, so components can be constructed in assembly-line fashion and transported into place, again reducing costs of building them. Because the reactor itself is small, multiple reactors can be built in high-demand areas. Disadvantages include the fact that depleted pellets may be difficult to contain over long periods of time. Interestingly, the authors notes that this technology may be small enough to power some vehicles (though likely airship, aircraft, or naval-vessel sized, as opposed to personal-vehicle side). Military implications can include reduced dependence on imported oil, and (with transportable, ship or airship-mounted designs), high-power generation in remote, expeditionary environments.