Newt Gingrich’s Declaration of Energy Independence – Beyond Peak Oil David Steven0

Newt Gingrich has just released a half-hour lecture on US energy policy.

To say, the ex-speaker is bullish on US domestic energy prospects is an understatement. He sets four objectives: (i) zero dependence on imported energy from potentially hostile states (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc); (ii) over a million additional high-paid jobs in the energy sector; (iii) a strengthened dollar due to a reduction of energy imports and increase in exports; (iv) gas at $2.50 per gallon.

Newt’s vision is based on massive exploitation of what he believes are more or less unlimited unconventional oil and gas reserves. The US could have three times as much oil as Saudi Arabia, he argues, and gas for 100 years or more. The geopolitical consequences of this bounty will be striking. As President, he would have the Saudis firmly in his sights:

I want to get to a point where we produce so much oil in the United States that no American president will ever again bow to a Saudi King. I thought, frankly, it’s time that we tell the Saudis the truth: We know that they are the largest funders of schools called madrassas, which teach hate. We know that they spend several billion dollars a year exporting a very, very extreme version called Wahhabism, and we know that they are not straight with us.

And up until now, our presidents have been too cautious to say, “Oh gee, I don’t want to offend the Saudis. I don’t want them to do something with their oil supply.”

Well, we have an opportunity now to turn that around. We have an opportunity to build up the American oil supply, the American natural gas supply, so we can then tell the Saudis the truth, so we can deal with them from a position of strength, so we can no longer worry about the Persian Gulf.

And at that point, if, in fact, the Iranians want to do something with the Straits of Hormuz, maybe the Chinese have a problem or the Indians have a problem or the Europeans have a problem. But I am not sure at that point that the Americans will have a problem if we become once again what we were in World War II, the leading producer of oil in the world.

As is often the case, Newt has tapped deep into the Zeitgeist by choosing today to go large on energy. Talk to American policy makers and they have become incredibly bullish about the prospects for the domestic sector (although few, of course, rising to Gingrichian heights of enthusiasm).

Citigroup recently proclaimed the end of Peak Oil, triggering a debate on whether shale gas and tight oil prospects are fundamental game changers or whether they will have a more marginal – although still significant – impact (see Chris Nelder for example). No-one credible I have talked to would disagree that a shift of some kind is afoot.

Newt is also right to see potential geopolitical advantages for the US. American energy demand is fairly stable and its domestic endowment is growing. In contrast, China and India face decades of rapidly increasing consumption of all natural resources. They also still have lots and lots of resource-hungry cities to build. Their transition is going to be much more tricky to handle.

The US also has leadership in key technologies (fracking, enhanced oil recovery, solar, even nuclear) that are increasingly valuable as energy demand grows. And it’s well-placed on food and land (although water is a big problem for some parts of the country).

Characteristically, of course, Gingrich overplays his hand (that’s his shtick). America sitting back while the Gulf implodes? Good luck with that. And market prices for oil – less so for gas – are set globally. Demand overseas will continue to drive the price the American consumer pays for gasoline at home: ‘oil isolationism’ is, and will remain, a fantasy.

And, of course, climate change does not get a mention in Gingrich’s current world view (although it used to), even though new fossil fuel discoveries are putting huge amounts of new carbon in play. That is not a problem that can be ignored ad infinitum.

I’m expecting Newt’s energy fervour to be much mocked, but don’t bet against him getting some momentum too. And the mood could spread. We might see quite a lot more bullish talk on energy in the American presidential debate.

Update: Just reading the transcript, one misses some of the glory of Newt’s delivery, which is Pinteresque at times: “Under President Obama, because he is so anti‑American [pause] energy, we have actually had a 40 percent reduction in development of oil offshore.”

Going Silent: Where Languages Are Dying Fastest Seth Kaplan0

If you speak a language no one else does, is it still considered a language?

Courtesy: Wall Street Journal.

The future of global governance in Abu Dhabi Richard Gowan0

This is just a quick note for any GD readers in Abu Dhabi.  On the evening of Monday 20 February, I’ll be interviewing Stanford University’s Stephen Stedman live at NYU Abu Dhabi about recent work he’s been doing with Kofi Annan on elections, crisis management, events in the Middle East and the future of global governance.  

It’s filling up, but you can still register at this link.

Heartland: Hacked Off (updated) David Steven0

I am hacked off by almost everything about the breathless exposé of Heartland’s (purported) internal strategic documents.  Here’s Think Progress’s measured presentation of the scoop:

Heartland Documents Reveal Fringe Denial Group Plans to Pursue Koch Money, Dupe Children and Ruin Their Future

So what do we have? Nothing less or more than you’d expect. Papers that show the organisation believes climate change is a hoax and that it wants to raise money to promote that view. As if any of that’s a surprise.

There’s really no news here at all. No smoking gun. No admission that Heartland knows global warming is real, for example, but isn’t saying so. Or that it was behind the hacking of UAE’s Climate Research Unit. Rarely has so much hot air (geddit?) been expended over so little.

Now I know why I am supposed to get all riled up by this story. (i) Heartland is wrong. (ii) It’s wrong in a way that is convenient for its funders. (iii) And, of course, this is sweet revenge Climategate – where the media also got its knickers-in-a-twist about innocuous emails written by climate scientists.

But none of these reasons stop this being a stupid non-story. Especially not the fact that something similar (or worse) was done to ‘our’ side.

But then… then… there’s Heartland’s asinine reaction. I know that, in the media age, s/he who is most offended against wins, but this is truly ridiculous:

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

It’s a criminal offence even to comment on this story? And you’re worried about your reputation? What reputation?

Anyway – I have commented on Heartland-gate and will continue to do so if I don’t have anything better to do. And, if Heartland doesn’t like it, I think the gentleman below captures my sentiment very well….

Update (21/2/12): Predictably enough, this sorry saga has degenerated further. On the one hand – and quite extraordinarily – the Heartland crew has followed through on its threat to get legal with the blogosphere, going after sites that have:

Posted links to a document titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy.”

Posted links to certain other documents purporting to be those of The Heartland Institute.

Posted blogs or web pages discussing any or all of these documents.

The final clause would draw into its net most of the Western world’s media – and Global Dashboard. And this from an allegedly libertarian think thank.

Then we have last night’s confession by Peter Gleick that he obtained and then leaked the documents. Time will tell if he also faked one or more of them. Idiot.

(BTW how long until Gleick resigns from this Task Force on Scientific Ethics?)

Brookings: How Not to Evaluate Aid Effectiveness Seth Kaplan3

There have been growing demands for greater independent evaluation of foreign aid for at least half a decade now. As William Easterly argued as far back as 2006:

We need independent evaluation of foreign aid. It’s amazing that we’ve gone a half century without this. . . . [Truly independent evaluation of aid would] give feedback to see which interventions are working and give incentives to aid staff to find things that work.

The Center for Global Development summarized the need in its report When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation:

Impact evaluations do not have to be conducted in-house. Indeed, their integrity, credibility, and quality is enhanced if they are external and independent.

It is with this understanding that I read the recent Brookings report on aid to fragile states. more »

Greece: the image that will reassure the markets Richard Gowan1

The Greek President speaks on the Euro crisis today, with an interesting backdrop.

Blundering down a humanitarian corridor into Syria? Richard Gowan0

At the start of December, I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy reviewing proposals for “humanitarian corridors” into Syria and/or the creation of a buffer zone on its border with Turkey as safe haven for displaced civilians. I noted that the precedents, ranging from Bosnia to Sudan, weren’t good:

Today’s U.N. mission in Darfur is mainly concerned with guarding aid convoys and displaced persons’ camps. Yet the Darfur case underlines the problems with such humanitarian operations. Although the mission involves 25,000 personnel, their vulnerability to attacks by bandits and interference by Sudanese forces has led some to conclude the peacekeepers are effectively hostages themselves.

Would a humanitarian operation in Syria fare any better, even if the situation there deteriorates to the point that the anti-interventionists in Beijing and Moscow back down? A few factors are positive: Syria is at least smaller and far less remote than Darfur. But it is hard to see how any outside force, whatever its make-up and mandate, could avoid being targeted by one side or other in the evolving conflict. The U.N. force in Lebanon has lost personnel to terrorist attacks, even though these have been smaller than the attacks on U.S. and French troops in Beirut in the 1980s.

So even if outside forces were to deploy to protect humanitarian corridors, buffer zones or safe areas in Syria with the best intentions, they could soon be dragged into fighting or forced to exit. The need to keep international personnel safe could also be an obstacle to mediating a peace deal.

But this week, these ideas are very much back in play.  France is talking about humanitarian corridors again:

France said on Wednesday it was discussing a new U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria with Russia and wanted the council to consider creating “humanitarian corridors” in the country.

“We are renegotiating a resolution at the U.N. Security Council to persuade the Russians,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told France Info radio. [ . . . ] ”The idea of humanitarian corridors that I previously proposed to allow NGOs to reach the zones where there are scandalous massacres should be discussed at the Security Council,” Juppe said.

Turkish officials meanwhile say that they still don’t want to create a buffer zone, but they have started talking about humanitarian corridors too.  I can see that the need to do something – anything – in Syria feels very strong now, but I stand by my conclusions from December:

While talk of a humanitarian intervention in Syria may be comforting in the short term, it is deceptively dangerous. Arab, European, and Turkish planners should be ready for all eventualities. If Syria sinks into war, peacekeepers may be required to stabilize it later. But “humanitarian corridors” and “safe areas” are not a strategy to prevent that war escalating now.

What it’s like to work in international development Alex Evans0

By Ahmed El Mezeny at Save the Children in Egypt, via Facebook. Outstanding.

Is Pakistan an emerging market? Seth Kaplan6

Most people in the West believe that Pakistan is an unstable country on the verge of imminent collapse or an explosion of violence. It is consistently portrayed—by politicians, policymakers, and the media—as the most dangerous and dysfunctional state in the world, struggling with terrorism, an out-of-control military, and interreligious conflict.

And yet, Pakistan is included on Goldman Sachs’ list of the next eleven (N-11) most important emerging markets. Although it has (along with Nigeria and Bangladesh) “broad and systematic issues across a range of areas” that will prevent it from fully delivering on its growth potential, the country’s large population (it currently has 180 million people) assures its inclusion. Indeed, within a generation, Pakistan will have the fourth largest number of people in the world, behind only India, China, and the United States, and be a market too significant to ignore.

It was possible to see this potential before 2007. Ranked highly for the openness of its markets, the country drew billions in foreign investment in the mid-2000s while chalking up growth rates of seven percent per year. Its equity markets were one of the best performers worldwide. The middle class was expanding rapidly, reaching into the tens of millions. Goldman predicted in 2007 that Pakistan could “ultimately have the potential to become similar to the smaller of today’s G7 in terms of size.”

Of course, much has changed since 2007. Or has it? more »

Should we give up on girls? Or how misrepresenting evidence can set back gender equality Mark Weston2

Earlier this week I argued on here for men to be brought into discussions and policy-making on gender and development. I did not expect to be arguing just two days later that women should not be neglected in such debates. But an article on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog this morning (h/t Claire Melamed for the link) has forced me temporarily to switch sides – my brothers will have to survive without me for a while.

The article is titled, ‘Will the ‘girl effect’ really help to combat poverty?’ The sub-heading reads: ‘Many development organisations see empowering girls – and enabling them to delay childbearing – as a powerful means to tackle poverty, but the evidence so far doesn’t bear this out.’

In this ADD world, where many people have time only for headlines, I wonder how many readers (or how many of the thousands who read a short link to the piece on Twitter) will see this and move on, sighing about another massive waste of money and time and wondering when the world will finally realise that aid doesn’t work.

Those who take the time to read the full article are less likely to go away with such thoughts. For it’s not really about empowering girls at all, but about one relatively minor aspect of empowering girls – delaying pregnancy. ‘Time will tell,’ the author, Ofra Koffman, writes with foreboding, ‘whether the “girl effect” will become one of those promising interventions that turn out to be more of a myth than a panacea.’ But her argument addresses only part of this question, and even this is based on flimsy evidence. For example, Ms Koffman uses the fact that adolescent fertility is not much higher in Rwanda than in the United States to show that the links between teenage pregnancy and economic development are weak. The obvious flaw in this case is that adolescent fertility in the US today tells us nothing about its effect on development because the US is a developed country. A comparison with youth fertility when the US was developing would have been more pertinent, but even then there may have been confounding factors two or three centuries ago that muddied the picture.

That disadvantaged women in the UK who delay pregnancy are no better off than their peers is a slightly stronger argument against policies to reduce adolescent fertility (although again the relevance of the UK to, say, Burkina Faso is debatable), but what the article entirely omits to mention is that such policies are very far from the central plank of efforts to empower women and girls. Sanitation, healthcare, microfinance and, most importantly, education have received at least as much attention and resources, but all these are absent from the Guardian piece.

Their omission is not surprising, for including them would fatally undermine the argument that women’s empowerment is a waste of time. Girls’ education, for example, has multiple positive impacts on their and their families’ lives, from health improvements for women and their children (see here, here and here for evidence from developing countries), to improvements in their own and their countries’ economic circumstances (see here and here). Girl Effect, the Nike-sponsored program that this article references, acknowledges that there are many ways to achieve its goal of strengthening women’s status. The writer implies that adolescent fertility is all such programs focus on, but the Girl Effect website highlights the importance of education, healthcare, and HIV prevention, and DFID (also referenced), the World Bank and other development agencies, as well as many of the developing-country governments that bear the ultimate responsibility for educating their people, are fully aware that the benefits of girls’ schooling go far beyond delayed pregnancy.

Now I may be overly harsh in criticising the author of this piece, who might not have written the title and the sub-head herself. But between them, she and the Guardian have done women and girls a disservice. Efforts to improve women’s lives have transformed developed societies – it would be a shame if such ill thought-through articles denied developing countries the same opportunity.

Syria: is love the answer? Richard Gowan0

War is not the answer, Marvin Gaye once observed, and only love can conquer hate. Now Citizens for Global Solutions is trying to translate this into policy by asking everyone to sign an electronic Valentine’s Day card to the Syrian people.  

I was going to write more, but I’ve decided to let the image speak for itself.

Men and Development: Why gender should not just be about women Mark Weston3

Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.

But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.

The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.

The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.

When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.

But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.

more »

Agenda 21 is Evil David Steven4

The Agenda 21 conspiracy theory is back in the media, thanks to a New York Times report on Tea Party opposition to bike lanes, smart meters, public parks and other dastardly measures that the United Nations is preparing “to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.”

For UN nerds and sustainable development saddos, Agenda 21 is a stunningly tedious ground-breaking attempt to bring together environment and development in a ‘dynamic programme’ to be implemented by a ‘global partnership’ of international organisations, governments, businesses, and local communities in ‘every area in which human impacts on the environment’.

Agenda 21 was agreed at the Earth Summit in 1992 and was briefly a big deal in the 1990s. Even my local Council here in rural England briefly had an Agenda 21 group. Now though, despite being regularly reaffirmed at UN summits, it’s largely forgotten. Neither has it had much, if any, impact on global development, sustainable or otherwise.

But the American right has never seen it that way. I don’t know who first read Agenda 21 and got the fear, but back in 2005, Nancy Levant (author of the anti-feminism tract, The Cultural Devastation of American Women) was already freaking out:

No one told me about Agenda 21. I found it by accident on the Internet. Then I went to the U.N.’s website and read Agenda 21…I started documenting and keeping running lists because, I discovered, Agenda 21 was huge, highly developed, and a done deal…

I also realized that there was no way to explain Agenda 21 easily. It’s too big, profoundly sophisticated, intentionally masked and hidden by corporate agendas and ecological ideologies that are, themselves, exploited by corporate agendas.

But more than that, I realized that for Americans to understand Agenda 21, they would have to come to terms with a truth that, I fear, they won’t believe. What would that truth be? Let me try to say it in one sentence: Agenda 21 is the end of America.

The paranoia, however, goes further back than that – to 2001 or possibly long before (the NYT says that Tom DeWeese has been working on the issue since 1992). At its most extreme, adherents believe that Agenda 21 is a front for a broader “global depopulation eugenics program” which will see six billion people culled from the global population.

The big boys have got in on the act, as well. Glenn Beck portrays Agenda 21 as the perfect example of how globalist elites hide their cunning plans for world domination in plain sight (he’s particularly suspicious of the local government organisation for sustainability – poor old ICLEI). Alex Jones, pushes the idea of a eugenics cult particularly hard. Even David Icke is in on the act.

The UN has always tried to ignore this stuff, imagining it will stay safely out on the fringe. But it hasn’t. Here’s Newt Gingrich opposing Agenda 21 as “a series of centralized planning provisions” that will take control of American private property.  He sees it as an example of how the UN is seeking to establish “extra-constitutional control” over the United States.

Last month, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution recognising the “destructive and insidious” nature of Agenda 21 and the push is now on to get this condemnation onto the party’s platform for the 2012 Convention.

Opposition to Agenda 21 – and to the UN itself – is  now firmly in the Republican mainstream, in other words. The UN could do with thinking carefully about this as it prepared for the Earth Summit’s successor, Rio +20. It wouldn’t want to give the next generation of conspiracy-minded whackjobs more meat to feed on, would it?

Wanted: big ideas Claire Melamed6

So the other day I was asked what I thought the ‘big debates’ were in development.  A dream question.  But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself stumped – and slightly depressed.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing about big issues: trade liberalisation; industrialisation; national sovereignty.  Not that I’d necessarily want to go back to those days, but the nearest thing I could think of to anything that approaches that level of disagreement today is the spat between Jeff Sach’s gang and Michael Clemens’ gang about whether the Millennium villages project is working.  And it’s not even an argument about development policy or practice, but about research methods: essentially, if the project should have used the hugely fashionable randomised evaluation methodology, and identified a control group at the start to be able to see the impact that interventions are having compared to that control group. 

Important stuff, but surely not the be-all and end-all of the potential questions raised by this project.  Who, for example, is asking about the relative importance of improvements within rural areas and movement out of rural areas for development in the long term?  Who is asking about the limits of this kind of aid-based intervention in the absence of institutional and market changes at the national or global level?  more »

Is the map of the Middle East about to change? Seth Kaplan7

If people in the Middle East could democratically choose what country they lived in, would they choose the one they are in now?

Amidst all the talk of an Arab Spring, the fragility of the Arab state is often forgotten.

Whereas developed countries are almost always the product of an organic, internally driven process, in the Middle East’s case, the countries are mostly the product of a British-French agreement made in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) that paid little attention to local sociopolitical realities. As a result, few possess the historical roots, social cohesion, and legitimacy necessary to nurture the complex institutions that are a prerequisite for development and democracy. On the contrary, most suffer from both sectarian divisions and weak government—the causes of state fragility. more »