Peak Resources: war

Showing posts with label war. Show all posts

Source: FAO Aquastat, Oxford Analytica

When people from the West and its mainstream media try to analyse what's happening in the Middle East all they talk about is armed conflict and war. But never do they mention the deep fundamental drivers of energy, water scarcity and climate change.

Many countries in the Middle East are extremely vulnerable and on the verge of break down because they cannot deal with mounting economic/energy and environmental costs. Only a little disturbance is needed to make these states fall apart and then all hell can break loose. It has nothing to do with what type of people they are, its simply a matter of survival that brings out the worst in people. When water resources dry up, agriculture collapse, there's no way to make and income and food becomes unaffordable people tend to riot no matter which country. Thats what happened during the French revolution, after 1 million died from famine and peasants turned on the ruling elite.

Displaying a complete lack of understanding of the situation, and utter lack of morality, the imperial powers decided to try and grab the regions oil resources by getting rid of Saddam Hussein but instead created a power vacuum that was filled by al-Qaeda extremists who rapidly transformed into the Islamic State. Then followed by a proxy war over resources and power between many different actors in the region. Never ending fighting with no real benefits for anyone involved. The US "divide and rule" strategy is an utter failure.

Intensifying the fight against extremists doesn't deal with the fundamental drivers of why they exist in the first place. Instead its producing more extremists as the conditions that laid the groundwork for the rise of IS are worsening. The long-term ecological crisis of especially water stress is worsening in the region. Severe drought conditions intensified by water mismanagement and climate change have led to failed crops and lack of clean drinking water. Leading to increasing food import reliance and pushing people to move into the cities where there are no job opportunities, creating tensions. Then government subsidies for food and fuel get slashed as state revenues from falling oil exports decline. This at a time when oil and food prices have steadily risen and have had major spikes on the international market. That's the perfect storm.

Absolutely nothing have been done to build local capacity to cope with extreme weather or manage ecosystems more sustainably. The conditions of deepening water scarcity are projected to intensify in coming years and decades. Meanwhile population keeps growing. And that's why the future in the region looks bleak. The US idea of turning Iraq into a booming oil economy is simply nonsense. Even if there is still more oil left in Iraq, compared to Syria, Yemen or Egypt, they too will face peak oil within a decade or so. Hedging your entire future on oil is utterly idiotic and as we witness very destructive.

Yemen reached a production peak in oil in 2001 and has now practically collapsed. Acute water scarcity and lack of food is reaching levels of mass famine. Nationwide fuel shortages are routine and economic activities have come to a halt. Livelihoods are destroyed, people starve and live in misery, and yet the US and UK support Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign of the country.

The Conflict Shoreline by Eyal Weizman. Shows the aridity line, areas of about 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation, and western drone strikes in red dots

Egypt has become a net importer of oil and food and is struggling to pay its bills for a growing population. Poor water management (irrigation, pollution, dumping of waste) and growing demand has led to water scarcity in the country. Cairo residents don't have access to water for large portions of the day. The U.N. World Water Development report for 2018 warns that Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty and dramatically heading towards absolute water scarcity (500 m3 per capita).

Even if we are able to limit global warming to 2 degrees the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will become unbearably hot and many parts unlivable in the coming future. Prolonged heat waves and dust storms will plague the already arid region. Destroying much of the region's agricultural potential. Researcher are expecting a climate exodus from the region. Of which we have seen only the beginning.

Two destroyed tanks in front of a mosque in Azaz, Syria. Credit: Christiaan Triebert (CC-BY-2.0)

History is full of empires which in the process of their decline refused to go down peacefully. How will the American Empire end it’s days?

I hope no one is stupid enough to launch World War III. However, many states are fragile now (due to for example: overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, bankruptcy, inequality and corruption) so very little is required in terms of external force to trigger conflict. This is clear in the context of the Middle East. Already fragile states, for example Yemen and Syria, turned into complete war zones after civil unrest and aggressive foreign military involvement. Now there are millions of refugees trying to escape the region and people wonder why.

There is a risk that hugely over-armed United States, constantly spreading war propaganda, turn a trivial incident into a major conflict or war. Especially if the domestic population really believe that “America is exceptional” as president Obama declared at the UN General Assembly in 2013, where he listed Russia, ISIS and Ebola as major threats to national security. In 2015, Obama also added Venezuela to that list of threats. Talk about crazy. Of course we all know there is oil in the Middle East, in Russia and Venezuela. Coincidence?

According to historian and author William Blum, since the end of World War II, the United States has:
- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments

- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
- Attempted to suppress populist or nationalist movements in 20 countries
- Dropped bombs on peoples of more than 30 countries
- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries
- And have been more involved in the practice of torture than any other country in the world

Even if these numbers are incorrect its no secret that the rest of the world view the United States as the major threat to peace. While war mongering people in Washington utter crazy statements like “Assad must go even if Syria goes with him” - State Department spokesperson Mark Toner. Since the 80s, the US has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, including: Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan and now Syria. So, I can kind of understand if there are some pissed off muslims.

Not only has the US threatened Russia but also China by surrounding it with military forces. In a report on US-China relations published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015 it is stated that “there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, ‘peaceful coexistence,’ ‘mutual understanding,’ a strategic partnership, or a ‘new type of major country relations’ between the United States and China.” And thus, the report declares that, the US must develop “the political will” and military capabilities “to deal with China to protect vital U.S. interests.” What interests? South China sea oil? Global dominance?

I hope the US runs smack into hard physical limits that cannot be solved by borrowing or printing money, finally forcing them to cut military spending or totally bankrupt the population to the point of domestic revolution. I'm sorry my american friends but your “leaders” are not just nuts they also have way too much destructive power at their disposal.

“Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh, etc.” – Johan Galtung, founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky" ‒ Albert Camus, The Plague, 1948

The only top predator left to infect

When humans start putting extreme pressure on local ecosystems, through for example overpopulation and deforestation, communities become more susceptible to emerging or novel zoonotic diseases as natural habitats disappear and exposure to pathogens increases. Several of today’s most pervasive diseases originally stemmed from domestication of livestock some 10,000 years ago. For example, tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox emerged following the domestication of wild cattle. Many pathogens that are currently passed from person to person, including influenza, Ebola and HIV, were formerly zoonotic but have mutated and adapted to human hosts. Today, wild animals are significantly more likely to be a source for animal-to-human spillover of viruses than domesticated species. According to one recent study, wild rodents are the most common source (58%) of spillover of zoonotic viruses, followed by primates and bats. Wildlife habitat destruction or encroachment, changes in surface waters, industrial monocultures, chemical pollution, uncontrolled urbanization, migration, international travel and trade have all increased the risk of disease spread in humans and the potential for a pandemic.

Toxic Cocktail

We know that our highly interconnected global society is very vulnerable to disruptions in food, water and energy supply. Another threat to the continuation of our civilization is global toxification. The 30 million tonnes a year global output in synthetic chemicals has left no living creature on Earth without these chemicals in its organs. The full impact of the chemical soup we are all living in whether we are a whale or a human are yet unknown. However, we know that the emergence of widespread antibiotic resistance is likely to cross paths with our exhausted immune systems compromised by chemical contamination, and the fact that with such high population density in many urban areas we are increasingly vulnerable to pandemics.

Exposure of fish and wildlife in urban regions due to continuous release of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in oceans and to the atmosphere.Source: WHO, 2012

Antibiotic Resistance

The fact that some antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections is now a major threat to public health, according to WHO. Over the last 30 years, no major new types of antibiotics have been developed.

According to a recent study published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists in China have discovered significantly increased levels of bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin in pigs. The drug is a last line of defense against a host of bacterial infections, many of which are common in people. Researchers have linked the growing prevalence of “super-germs” to the overuse of antibiotics in food animals. The drugs, used predominantly in the Chinese livestock industry, can keep animals healthy in an industrialized food process, but their use over time can embolden the very bacteria they were designed to fight against. In 2005, the European Union banned the use of antibiotics in livestock for non-medicinal purposes, but the drugs are still widely used across the continent, and are rampant in the agricultural industry in the United States. As people in wealthier regions run out of effective antibiotics, they come to share the lot of people in poorer regions who can’t afford them to begin with. In April 2014, the WHO declared that the problem “threatens the achievements of modern medicine. A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — is a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

Historical Pandemics

The Plague

The bacterium Yersinia pestis carried by fleas on rodents has caused at least three human plague pandemics, the Justinian Plague (6–8th centuries), the Black Death (14–17th centuries) and third Plague (19–20th centuries). In 541 A.D., the Justinian Plague caused 5,000 deaths per day in Constantinople, killing an estimated 25 million people globally. It spread from central Asia or Africa across the Mediterranean into Europe and may have contributed to the end of the Roman empire, marking the transition from the classical to the Medieval period. The Black Death arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1347 and struck Italy, southern France with vehemence in 1348, came to England at the end of that year and spread northwards reaching Scandinavia in 1350.

Larger cities were the worst off, as population densities and close living quarters made disease transmission easier. Cities were filthy with poor sanitation, infested with lice, fleas, and rats, and subject to diseases related to malnutrition and poor hygiene. Where the plague raged, it raged for a couple of months and then spent itself. The Black Death killed an estimated 100 million people over 7 years. Religious fanaticism in the wake of the Black Death lead to the persecution of groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, lepers and Romani, as Europeans thought that they were to blame for the crisis. Subsequent outbreaks of this disease occurred in 8–12 year cycles for two centuries after the initial epidemic, with estimated mortality of 15–40%. The emergence of these plague pandemics might be tightly linked to climatic instability as all were preceded by periods of exceptional rainfall and ended during periods of climatic stability.

Hypothetical scenario for the geographic spread of Yersinia pestis. Source: Wagner et al. (2014)

The Spanish Flu

In 1918-19, the Spanish flu (H1N1) killed roughly 100 million people and infected 500 million people while affecting working age people (15–54 year olds) most severely. WWI was raging at the time and governments tried to control the public by limiting free speech. The pandemic was known as Spanish flu because Spain was not at war, had a more free press, and could report on the illness. Most of Europe had a censored press. In the U.S. the Sedition Act 1918 was passed, extending the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic swept across countries during a time when patriotism was more important than truth. Thus, intimidation and propaganda were part of the communication culture. People heard from authorities and newspapers that everything was going fine, but at the same time, bodies were piling up.

Emergency hospital during 1918 influenza pandemic, Camp Funston, Kansas.
Source: Otis Historical Archives Nat'l Museum of Health & Medicine (CC-BY 2.0)

War and disease

According to the WHO, previous to the conflict in Syria, more than 90% of Syrian children were vaccinated against disease like measles and polio. Since the fighting in Syria began almost 5 years ago, half of all health workers have left the country, medical supplies are scarce and most facilities are in decay. Some 20 million people have fled their homes in the MENA region. Countries like Jordan and Lebanon are under immense pressure as demand on services for health, water and sanitation have increased exponentially. The low immunization rates among those living in and fleeing from conflict zones, endangers the lives of people across the entire region. The recent outbreak of polio in Syria led to its resurgence in Iraq, which had been free of the disease for 14 years, and in 2013, Jordan experienced a new outbreak of measles. In Yemen there has been an upsurge in cases of measles and dengue fever due to lack of basic health care and collapsed water and sanitation facilities. WHO estimates show that 2.6 million children under 15 years of age in Yemen are at risk of measles; 2.5 million under 5 are at risk of diarrhoeal disease and another 1.3 at risk of acute respiratory infections.

Second order effects

Limiting the disruption of critical infrastructures during a pandemic is important for the survival and health of society (i.e., electricity, water, and food) as most medical and public health responses to a pandemic depend on these infrastructures. The food system’s dependence on the transportation system creates a major vulnerability. On average, food travels 2092 km (1,300 miles) from farm to fork. The global food system functions in a just-in-time economy where food inventories are intentionally kept at such low levels that food arrives just in time for consumption. Since inventories are kept very low, there is vulnerability to unanticipated variations in flow. Increasing stocks of food costs money and decreases profits, therefore, agricultural businesses are reluctant to build food security resilience via stockpiling. The Ebola epidemic that began in 2014 has caused severe food shortages in West Africa. As of November 2014, the World Food Program estimated that 460,000 additional individuals became food insecure in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea as a result of production and trade reductions. According to a recent study, a severe pandemic with <25% reduction in labor availability could create widespread food shortages in the US. This likely applies to other countries as well, especially those with insufficient resources and food production at home.

"You cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest], against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy]" - F. Soddy (Cartesian Economics, p. 30).

Credit: Brocken Inaglory CC BY-SA 3.0

Currency war and deflation

The Swedish Central bank (Riksbank) have cut the repo rate to -0.35% and bought another 30 billion SEK in government bonds in the belief that this will stave off deflation (i.e. import inflation). Which it won’t, since the global economy has taken a downturn and it looks like most economies now are facing recession or depression due to the deflationary collapse of commodities, capital spending and global trade. Most intelligent people know that GDP growth is over, since we live on a finite planet, and the reason for this latest bubble had to do with private sector borrowing to inflate consumption rather than productivity increases in the real economy. What professor Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich calls “The illusion of the Perpetual Money Machine” (2012).

Original Meadows et al. (1972) modified by Ragnarsdóttir et al. (2015)

Housing bubble ponzi scheme

The Riksbanks policy will not win over deflation (there are no winners in a global currency war), however, it will fuel the already overheated housing market in Sweden, with a risk of popping this bubble. The ultra-loose monetary policy will encourage Swedish households to take on more debt, despite them being overburdened by debt already. Household debt to disposable income is currently at 172% (see diagram). One can compare this to the famously over leveraged American households before 2008 which topped out at 130% of disposable income.

Household debt to income for various countries in 2014. Source: Riksbank (2015)

There should be plenty of people around today that actually remember the devastating property crash of the early 1990s, but it seems like most people have a short memory. In the early 90s the government had to step in and nationalise the banks while increasing public spending to keep the economy alive in the midst of soaring unemployment. It took at least a decade for the economy to recover and the state to restock its finances after that.

Property price index in Sweden (1986-2014) adjusted for inflation. Country average (grey), Stockholm (black), Göteborg (red), Malmö (blue). Credit: Rika Tilsammans

Sweden’s present housing boom started right (2000) after the recovery from the crisis in the 1990s. The boom was set off by low interest rates and a massive expansion of the financial sector with increasingly lower standards for issuing credit/loans. This have driven up prices to extreme levels, mainly in Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö, effectively forcing more people to borrow to afford housing in the inner cities. Property prices have been rising 8-9% per year on average for almost 20 years. During the last 12 months, prices have risen by 12% (average price per m2 SEK 32,692).

Sankt Eriksområdet, Stockholm. New Urbanism. Credit: 199pema (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Even after 28 years of queueing it is impossible to get a rental flat in Stockholm. So plenty of people, or rather their parents, take on loans of SEK 1-3 million to buy a flat as small as 20-40 m2. Of course not everyone can afford to do that, so it's mostly the rich kids that stay in the city centre, in Södermalm, where all the other hipsters are. No integration there! Most of these youngster don’t have any savings. The only thing they have is their flat, speculating that asset prices will rise, seeing it as an “investment”. But of course it’s not real wealth, it doesn’t contribute to the real economy in any way, all it does is inflate property prices further.

Now, finally, mainstream media and Swedish authorities have started issue warnings about the housing bubble and a potential crash. Of course it’s too late to avoid it now. I guess everyone just love rising housing prices, no wonder since it's private and household debt that has driven GDP growth over the last decade in Sweden. So much for Anders Borgs famous “Swedish growth miracle”! Borrowing consumer demand from the future through credit creation is not equal to creating real wealth, it just implies we will be poorer (can consume less resources) in the future. After all, we live on a finite planet.

Seversky Donets River, Ukraine and Russian border in the Donbass Region. Source: Google Earth

It is not only humans that suffer in the ruins of a war-torn eastern Ukraine, entire ecosystems are about to collapse. The massive artillery fire that started this summer have burned down forests and poisoned the air.

Over 3000 forest fires have devastated the Donbass region. Two large nature reserves and 33 parks have been destroyed. More than 17% of the area has burned down, according to the environmental organisation Environmental People Law (EPL).

“The state of environment in eastern Ukraine constantly deteriorates. Water and soil pollution, degradation of natural reserves, destruction of forests and steppe by fires, transformation of landscapes, mines flooding became everyday reality” - Alla Voytsikhovska, spokesperson EPL

The air is full of harmful substances from burnt-out ammunition, with high levels of sulphur-, nitrogen- and carbon dioxide, that can cause irritation and burning in eyes and airways as well as weaken the body’s immune system. The consequences of the devastation will be more fatal to humans than to nature itself.

But the largest environmental threat comes from flooded mines. Around 100 mines located within separatist territory have been abandoned due to the war and are now contaminating groundwater and rivers. This could poison the Siverskij Donets river which is the regions largest drinking water source and that flows out in the Don and Azovska sea. The TV-station ukelife.tv reports that there are rising levels of radioactive mining water in the proximity of the Yunkom mine where the Soviet Union did nuclear tests in 1979. In the mine Oleksandr-Zakhid there is a layer with over 50 tonnes chlorinated hydrocarbons which have mixed with other toxic substances and now that the pumping of water has stopped risks rising up to ground level, creating a poisonous cloud.

In order to start restoration of pre-war state of environment the scale of economic damage has to be assessed. But a full assessment of environmental damage and restoration costs is only possible after military actions in eastern Ukraine terminates.

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