Hello again, for actually the next to last time
in this course on twenty-first centuary American foreigh policy.
Today, as I'd mentioned in the last we sent the announcements of the sixth week.
We limited our discussion of U.S. Africa relations in order to try to have
at least one lecture on some broader
global issues that don't really define themselves regionally.
And then the very last lecture we'll come to after this one, kind of to
try to give you a wrap up and synthesizing of what we've been doing together.
and this lecture is on global climate change.
there are other issues we could be talking about, global public
health, and pandemics, and many others, that as I said span the
they don't break down regionally, but climate
change, it's just such a huge issue.
I have to say I've pretty strong feelings about it.
and I thought we'd at least spend a little time.
I know there are other courses on Coursera that deal just
with this issue as a scientific issue, as a policy issue.
But let's at least spend a little of our time together to talk
about this from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, but really as very much
of a global issue.
So I spent most of the lecture on this question of global climate
change and taking it from, is it problem to what is the solution?
I briefly just mention some other global environmental issues and, then a little
bit of a sense of what we really need to learn from history on, on these issues.
so this question, might have been asked why I'm asking this
question, from is it a Problem to What is the Solution?
I actually do acknowledge that much of the world has
moved from yes, it's a problem to what is the solution.
but I have to say in my own country, in the United States there still is,
you know, more than there should be questioning is it really a problem,
isn't this just something natural or isn't this an overestimation.
the sky is falling, the sky is falling.
Haven't we sort of seen this before? We have a lot of climate change deniers.
And a very politicized debate in the
United States, since the 1990s, arguably earlier.
And I think the evidence, and I'll review some
of it, is enormously strong, that yes it's a problem.
And that yes, policies
and human actions are contributing to this, it's not
some natural cycle that happens over the centuries and eons.
And frankly it is not just about tomorrow, it is about today.
We are already seeing the effects of climate change in so many respects.
just to review some data from 2012.
la, the past year, last year, 2012 was
the hottest year ever recorded in the United States.
And indeed, ten of the warmest years on
record have all come within the last 15 years.
we are seeing greater frequency of weather extremes.
That scientists are not saying are totally attributable to climate change.
but they are saying pretty much, quite convincingly,
that things like Hurricane Sandy, that climate change,
that hit, the East Coast in places like
New York and New Jersey in particular, in 2012, and did $60 billion of damage, that.
That climate change is a significant factor in this greater frequency
and severity, actually I should be saying, of the weather extreme.
Not just U.S. but some global data. 2012 was China's coldest
winter on record.
On the other hand, Australia had a record heat wave.
Pakistan had extreme flooding.
Middle East, rare and vicious storms bringing rain, snow and flooding.
England had the wettest year since records started over 100 years ago.
And has had four of its five wettest years in the past decade.
Rio de Janeiro had a day with
109.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest recorded there since
records began in 1915. This is, or part of it here that's called
climate change, it's not just global warming but it's the extreme fluctuations.
What some people call climate weirding that's been happening.
So, you have a range of things and I'm not a climate scientists, but
it's just not hard in a common sense way to see
that this, these extremes in climate weirding, are not normal for climate.
here's a graph taken from one of the reports, citations
in the back of this lecture, showing the global warming trend.
And, and the blue.
Up and down our short term natural variability in
climate that you see just through natural
things that things change from year to year.
the red lines runs through them though is the long term climate trend, trend.
And we see the difference from the average going up at a pretty steady pace from
1970 to 2010 as a very significant trend that scientists have identified.
if we take satellite based estimates of sea levels
since 1992 in 60 day averages, and sea levels again are
affected by climate change, other factors but particularly by climate change.
and we see some ups and downs.
As we go through this, but look at where we
are in 2012 compared to where we were in 1992, 93.
more evidence.
you look at snow packs and the glacial retreats.
This is Mount Kilimanjaro.
From 1993, you know, fairly significant ice
pack there on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
To 2000, not a lot of ice pack left and you can do that with many, many other
mountain ranges, so you know, the evidence is about as strong as it
can get. that climate change is a serious problem.
It's not just natural cyclical fluctuations, and it is being
caused by emissions and other aspects of policy and human behavoir.
So if we think about this in the framework we've been
using throughout this course, climate change is an economic issue of prosperity.
there's been a lot of concern about
what are the costs of reducing climate change, can we really
bear those in times of economic hardship, recession, and the like?
but there have been many studies that have been done that show the costs of not
doing so, of not reducing climate change, you
know, substantially exceed the cost of reducing it.
So to do more about climate change is
consistent with the prosperity P of the four Ps.
It is clearly a humanitarian
issue, and really gets at our principles.
I mean, hurricane Sandy in the United States.
Typhoon Haiyan, that as I record this, has
just inflicted its damage in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Droughts in Africa and many other parts, and other parts of climate weirding.
There's an enormous humanitarian issue about here, right in the here and
now, today, yesterday in the tomorrow that's just around the corner people
suffering enormous consequences for this. prosperity, principles.
It's also a peace issue and here I'm not going to go to some what might
consider some peace nicky, you know, unrealistic kind of organizations.
I'll give you two quotes, one from the United States
National Intelligence Council, that is the principal sort of think
tank within the U.S. intelligence community, and that concerns itself
with things like terrorism and a variety of other things.
in their Global Trends 2012 report, that really
looks toward 2030, it was issued in 2012, they
identified climate change as one of the four
mega trends that, that will most affect U.S. security.
Global security too but their job is to put it just in terms of U.S. security.
And they say that
by 2030, the year that is not too far away,
the emissions trajectory will be
cast determining this century's climate outcome.
it's in the works and when they say it'll be cast, they'll say by 2030 it'll be
harder, if at all possible, to affect that
emissions trajectory if we don't do things before then.
in 2011, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff of the military, Admiral Mike Mullen,
stated quote, climate change and he went on to
talk about its effects on agriculture, water, food, etc.
Create conditions that could lead to failed states,
instability, and potentially radicalization.
Is it a peace issue?
You bet it is. and it's a power issue.
Again, to go to a, a source that deals
with power, a 2012, report from the US Pentagon.
quote, climate change will shape the operating environment,
roles and missions that the US military undertakes.
the ability to project power in terms of the
military, will be affected by how climate change affects environment in
which the US military works in many parts of the world.
its roles and missions.
and in another sense
you know, the power that comes with being a leader on this global issue.
if we think positively about this, what kind
of soft power and other kinds of power can
be enhanced if the United States were to become
a leader rather than a laggard, on these issues.
we've have American leaders that have tried to make this.
a salient issue.
former vice president of the United States Al Gore received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, which he shared with the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which continues to this day to issue reports.
There's one about to come out very soon,
another one for their work on global climate change.
Now, truth in advertising.
I spent a number of years working for Al Gore when he was in the senate.
spent a year as one of his foreign policy aides, and I worked for him as a foreign
policy adviser when he was a candidate for vice president in 1992, and then again,
very much as a senior foreign policy adviser,
when he was the candidate for president, 2000.
I did not work on these particular issues, I worked on other foreign policy issues.
But I want to lay that out there, as I bring them to your attention.
but Al Gore has done an enormous amount, and continues to work on these issues.
And like any other individual, he has his own contradictions that people point out.
But fundamentally, he is a leader in the effort to
try to figure out ways to deal with climate change.
US policy I referred to the United States before as a laggard.
both in terms of our domestic policy and internationally.
we did not sign the Kyoto Treaty back in 1997,
which was an international treaty to do something about climate change.
but to be honest with you, the Kyoto Treaty had many other failures.
and, and the United Nations and other international actors also have
been not doing what they need to do on climate change.
China, which is the second largest source of
emissions in the world today, next to the United
States, is now actually starting to talk in
its own planning about what it calls qualitative development.
beginning to pay more attention to, to concerns about emissions and other things
because of the tremendous pollution problems in
Beijing and other major cities the toll
it's taking on public health on the Chinese people.
many other countries also have challenges on climate change policies.
there's some interesting issues between developed
and developing countries about what's equity.
Many developing countries say, well, you industrial powers spent over a century
industrializing, you're not really caring very
much about these issues like climate change.
And
now we're trying to dev, develop, and, you know,
we should have the same privileges as you did.
again, not
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we can get too deeply into.
My own view on this is consistent with the
principle of what's been called common but differentiated responsibility.
which basically says yes, those that have contributed over time to
global emissions bear more of the
responsibility for doing something about it.
but there's a common responsibility. It is a problem we all face, and so,
you know, newly industrializing countries, China, India,
and others also need to do their share.
This is the notion that there's a differentiated
responsibility in which the richer and the countries that
have benefited from so called free emissions for longer
should bear more of the cost and the burden.
But it is a common responsibility that we all face because climate
change knows no boundaries, and, and knows, knows no geographic boundaries in
the kind of issues that we are faced with.
there's much room for, for better policy across the board.
And again, I say that in no way to minimize what the United States needs to
do but also to acknowledge that it is a global responsibility.
And everyone out there in your own countries can
work hard to improve your own country's global environmental policies
while those of us in the United States have to accept
the responsibility to, to do more and better, here for our policy.
it's not the only global environmental issue.
and there are so many others that pose real policy challenges.
The world's oceans, the acidity has been increasing, according to one authoritative
report, quote, faster than at any time in the past 300 million years.
I can't quite get my arms around 300 million years, but
it's a pretty big figure, and so the point is pretty strong.
Concerns about the global collapse of fish species
because of acidity increasing and, and other factors.
Desertification.
almost 9 billion acres worldwide, 25% of the Earth's land mass, with
costs of over 40 billion annually and nearly 1 billion people in 100
countries at risk.
Here's a photo from, from Mauritania in Africa, of
the sand dunes from desertification advancing on the capital city.
biodiversity.
Excuse me, and the loss due to human actions.
One third of land mammals face extinction.
this graph is pressures driving global biodiversity
in the trend scenario, and you see,
the kinds of pressures coming on biodiversity from crops, pasture.
Forestry, abandoned agricultural land and what we basically see over
time is more, and more species abundance being threatened.
from 1970.
Here we are in 2010, 2030, 2050.
it's not a good direction that these bar graphs are going in.
deforestation, this is a photo of Haiti.
but globally almost 2 billion people in 40
nations with critically low levels of forest and
many other issues; air pollution and a variety
of other issues on the global environmental agenda.
my point really today is to, is to highlight this
issue beyond our regional foresight to say it's an enormous issue.
and it is not just about some future moment.
It is about today, and it is also about things if we don't do
them today, they become harder, more costly,
and potentially not possible down the road.
so we really need to learn from history.
There's a book that you all m, some of you may be familiar
with written by a Professor at UCLA
Jared Diamond, called Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed. and the keyword here is choose.
he asked the question.
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He looks at societies like Easter Island or the, or the Norse settlement
in Greenland and many others which thrived at certain points in history.
An collapsed principly because of environmental degradation.
and he asked the question, as he goes back on the
histories, how could a society failed to have seen the dangers
that seem so clear in retrospect?
they had to be clear at the moment on Easter Island, or in Greenland.
and they are clear as we've given you some sampling of today.
and he asks a question, we have to ask ourselves today,
how could we, as a society, fail to see the dangers.
We don't want them to just be clear
in retrospect, they're clear enough now for policy action.
and to which he also adds, globalization makes
it impossible for societies to collapse in isolation.
In other words, you know, if it's Mauritania or
islands in the pacific or where ever frankly,
you can't just say, well you know, that's really terrible but that's their problem.
Globalization makes it impossible for societies to collapse
in isolation. We're all at it connected.
Global climate change is a global problem.
One country can't solve it all on its own, but nor can one
country shield itself from the problems that are part of the globalized ecosystem.
and frankly, it is very much about choice.
you know, my own book we called The Dynamics
of Choice
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it's not on the title, it's on the inside title page,
The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century, 21st Century American Policy.
Jared Diamond talks about choice.
These are choices we make in society.
United States, the global societies, China India,
Brazil Japan, whatever, whatever country we're talking about.
and so that's a point I really just want to leave you with today.
you know,
the, the, the, issues for cli-, for global environmental issues.
Some of them really are from the bottom up.
There are many things that are being done
at the local levels that are very important.
but a lot of it is going to come, if you will, from the
top down, from policies that have to
be decided by governments and international institutions.
choice.
very important and I get a little worked up, as
you can see in this issue, because I, I get
frustrated by people sort of thinking that we can leave this for tomorrow.
it's not manana, it's oy, it's today.
we'll come back one more time in our last lecture, and there I'll come
back a little bit to the 4Ps framework and try to give a sense.
For what I think the overall agenda is in a synthesizing way for US foreign policy.
So we'll see you one more time for
one more lecture in 21st Century American foreign policy.
Thanks very much and see you then.