Water Wars

BY SHANE HARRIS

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014 

Forget the Islamic State. The new conflicts of the future could be sparked by climate change. 

To the long list of the world's woes, add another: the growing impact of climate change, which could heighten tensions among nations and even spark new wars. That's the grim assessment of the government's new National Intelligence Strategy, which lays out what America's top spies think are the major challenges facing U.S. national security.

The document, released Thursday, is a kind of road map of hazards meant to help U.S. intelligence agencies decide which of the world's biggest problems to study most intensively over the next four years. Water shortages, as well as fierce competition for food and energy, will continue to bedevil leaders in the United States and abroad, the document concludes. "Many governments will face challenges to meet even the basic needs of their people as they confront demographic change, resource constraints, effects of climate change, and risks of global infectious disease outbreaks."

The strain of a growing world population, coupled with the effects of pollution and climate change, has taxed many of the water systems that feed the world's people and are vital for agriculture. More than half of the world's wetlands have disappeared, and climate change around the world has altered weather patterns and led to water shortages, experts say.

Scarcity now poses a global security threat that U.S. intelligence agencies take as seriously as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, according to the strategy, which was produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all American intelligence agencies. And hints of a dystopian future can already be seen. In East Africa, drought has led to lethal fighting among Somali clans for access to potable water. The United Nations World Food Program has estimated that 650 million people are living in areas where flood and droughts can lead to wild spikes in food prices. Public anxiety -- and fascination -- has given rise to a new genre of films, "cli-fi," with apocalyptic climate-change scenarios at the heart of their plots.

To deal with the destabilizing effects of global climate change, as well as other massive threats, the intelligence community plans to focus on providing "deep context, knowledge, and understanding" about how natural resource concerns are affecting nations on a case-by-case basis, the document states.

This isn't the first time that U.S. national security officials have warned that shortages could bring countries into violent competition with one another over life's basic necessities. The previous intelligence strategy, published in 2009, also noted the risks posed by climate change. But the new strategy contains more urgency about the problem, and says that shortages could "exacerbate" regional conflicts that are already raging around the world, whether in war-torn countries or those threatened by pandemics.

The Defense Department has also been sounding alarms on climate change. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review for the first time added it to the list of threats facing the United States. And in 2009, the CIA established a center devoted to studying the security risks from climate change.

The new intelligence strategy arrives at a particularly vulnerable time for the United States, when America's spies are less capable of gathering vital information than they were a year ago, according to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, who oversaw its writing. Clapper argues that intelligence collection has been set back because of the leak of classified NSA documents by Edward Snowden, and that relationships with foreign intelligence agencies have been damaged, as well. Add to that increasingly tight budgets, which have led some unnamed agencies to stop collecting intelligence on important targets, and the result is a "perfect storm" that means "we -- as a nation -- are taking more risk," Clapper said in a statement accompanying the strategy's release.

The new strategy is also notable because, for the first time, it includes a set of "principles of professional ethics" for U.S. intelligence agencies and personnel. The seven principles include "lawfulness" and "integrity," and are partly a response to the criticism that U.S. spy agencies have taken over their role in torture, warrantless wiretapping, and other controversies since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

"I believe, if we keep these [principles] in front of us, we can continue the crucial work in support of our senior policymakers while we also increase transparency and protect privacy and civil liberties," Clapper said. Ever since NSA documents were leaked by Snowden last year, Clapper's office has been under pressure to release more information about the legal justification for intrusive surveillance programs, particularly the bulk collection of Americans' phone records by the NSA. Clapper's office has declassified and published thousands of pages of court documents and legal memoranda in an effort to counter critics who say that the Obama administration, contrary to the president's commitment to transparency, has shrouded the actions of U.S. spy agencies in secrecy and launched an unprecedented crackdown on government employees who leak to journalists about programs that the employees think could violate the law.

The Obama administration has prosecuted more federal employees for unauthorized disclosures of classified information than all previous administrations combined. And the Justice Department is currently trying to force a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, James Risen, to identify his source for a story about a failed CIA effort to stall Iran's nuclear weapons program. Risen has refused to identify his source in court, and his case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court, with far-reaching implications for press freedoms and the intelligence agencies.

This article offers very little theoretical or empirical support that water shortage will lead to war (in fact, most of the article seems to be about CIA ethics and the Snowden leaks). Water alone has almost never lead to an outbreak of war, and water scarcity usually brings about more cooperation that conflict (the Indus treaty is a great example). Water(and resources in general) are often used as justification for war, but are rarely the actually cause. Most countries prefer to trade with each other rather than fight expensive wars that make the shortages worse. Look at the facts, not the hyperbole 

Water and war? You mean like, uh, Syria where Israel's use of the Golan, Turkey's damming projects and Assad's policies forced Sunnis off of the land into towns where they competed with Alawites for jobs and ultimately civil war broke out? You mean like that?

Newsflash! All conflict is resource conflict. Each side supports its claim with religious or political ideology. 

As resources shrink, who each claimant is willing to include in their group of sharers shrinks also. So Syrians is less attractive as group to share with than Alawite or Sunni. 

Everyone would understand and solve conflict better, if the media reported this and did not really believe this nonsense about good guys and bad guys and religious warfare. 

It is not a matter of "if" conflicts will be exacerbated or started due to scarcity. They already are. Why do you think China invaded Tibet? Why do you think India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir? Hell there are growing conflicts among states in the US over water allocation.

Fresh water is more valuable than any other natural resource. Life does not exist without it. The coming decades will only see greater conflict over this most precious and increasingly scarce resource.

And uh... let's not forget the big Venn overlap with water wars and Islamic countries, eh? 

Russia and China are close to another mammoth natural gas deal that could reshape the world's energy map. 

Right as the West is tightening the screws on Russia's energy sector, Vladimir Putin is accelerating his own pivot to the east, moving closer to another giant natural gas deal with China.

If consummated this fall, the multibillion-dollar deal would at least partially alleviate Russia's fears about finding future markets for its gas exports and China's worries over finding future energy supplies, especially natural gas, for its growing economy and population. By potentially boosting Russia's leverage with respect to Europe while dealing a blow to other gas exporters' hopes of leaping into the Chinese market, the deal's knock-on effects could be felt from Brussels to British Columbia.

But as with another, $400 billion gas deal the two countries signed in May, plenty of questions remain, including whether the two sides can agree on a price for the gas, and whether sanctions-battered Russian firms will be able to finance the billions of dollars needed to build new gas-export infrastructure in western Siberia.

On Wednesday, Gazprom chief Alexei Miller told Putin that the gas giant is ready to sign a 30-year deal to supply China with 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas through the so-called western route, which would snake from western Siberia to sparsely populated areas in western China and then overland to the Chinese coast. The contract could be signed in November.

Miller added that, since talks with Beijing accelerated after the completion of the eastern Siberian gas deal in May, the two sides are considering increasing the western export route to as much as 100 billion cubic meters of gas per year. Today, Gazprom exports about 160 billion cubic meters of gas to all of Europe. But Europe is increasingly casting about for alternatives, especially after last week's suspicious interruptions of Russian gas deliveries to eastern Europe.

To be sure, China drove a hard bargain on price for the last gas deal. The western route would deliver gas to remote parts of the country, making it even harder for Gazprom to charge a premium. That means that while the western route might be an alternate outlet for Russian gas, it wouldn't necessarily be a lucrative one.

Russian officials including Putin started talking up the prospects of the western gas route, also known as the Altai route, even before the ink was dry on the other huge gas deal with China. And for an obvious reason: Linking gas fields in western Siberia, which today supply Europe, with China would give Moscow the ability to shift energy supplies west or east as it sees fit.

"This will give us big advantages in rechanneling gas flows, depending on the world market situation," Putin said earlier this month at a groundbreaking ceremony in eastern Siberia.

So what's changed? Two things: Russia's energy sector is under greater pressure due to enhanced sanctions because of the Ukraine crisis, and China's need for Russian gas appears greater now than it did just a few months ago.

The United States and the European Union have steadily increased the pressure on big Russian energy firms with the latest round of sanctions unveiled earlier in September. Those measures would restrict Russia's ability to tap oil in challenging environments, such as deepwater offshore, the Arctic, and in shale. Congress is currently preparing even stiffer sanctions on Russia that would increase the pressure on its energy sector; legislation winding its way through the Senate this week would take particular aim at Gazprom if gas supplies to Europe are interrupted, for example. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed the bill Thursday.

"The Altai deal will be Putin's calculated response towards U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia, and the biggest beneficiary will be China," said Keun-Wook Paik, an expert on Sino-Russian energy relations.

"Putin looks determined to show that Russia has a very powerful vehicle that can respond to Washington and Brussels's sanctions policy against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis."

"Putin looks determined to show that Russia has a very powerful vehicle that can respond to Washington and Brussels's sanctions policy against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis."

What's more, the Ukraine crisis seems to have focused Europe on the need to wean off excessive reliance on Russian gas, after a pair of gas-supply crises in the last decade failed to really rouse policymakers. Countries across the continent are seeking alternative sources of gas and, next month, the European Commission will present the results of the stress test it performed to check Europe's resilience to Russian energy blackmail.

That's all potentially bad news for Gazprom, which exports most of its gas to Europe and which is now expecting its lowest-ever gas production this year due to the aftermath of the Ukraine mess.

But it takes two to tango. After years of politely brushing aside Russian advances, Beijing may be more willing to dance. And that's because as China starts to rein in its use of heavily polluting coal, it needs more natural gas. With the world's most plentiful shale gas resources on paper, China hoped that domestic production would go some way toward meeting its energy needs.

But last month, Chinese officials abruptly cut in half China's goals for shale gas production in 2020, from about 60 billion cubic meters to just 30 bcm. That's a reflection that China's shale deposits are deeper and harder to tap, especially for China's unwieldy state-owned firms, than similar deposits in the United States.

"They are turning from quite optimistic to more realistic" about shale gas, said Wang Tao, a climate and energy expert at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

To make up the shortfall, China can either turn to imported liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which is expensive in Asia, or piped gas from Central Asia and Russia. Perhaps coincidentally, the initial volumes to be exported on the Altai route from Russia match the shortfall in Chinese domestic shale gas production.

And as more, cheaper piped gas makes its way from western Siberia to the Chinese market, that will leave less room for LNG; Paik estimates that the Altai route will "wipe out" about 21 million tons of LNG imports into China per year.

I was under the impression that the deliveries were at or above the minimum contracted for, and that it was obvious that the countries affected were simply re-selling gas to Ukraine, in breach of their contracts. As usual the author takes every opportunity to disseminate propaganda.