Oil sands production in Canada has contaminated surrounding lakes with substances linked to cancer, according to a new study. The scientific findings may help the case against building Keystone XL, a pipeline that would connect Canadian oil sands with American refineries.
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Production at the world's third largest source of oil has polluted surrounding waters with toxic substances, according to a new study. The findings add fuel to a fiery debate over a proposed pipeline connecting Canadian oil sands with US refineries.
Lakes as far as 56 miles away from production facilities near Fort McMurray, Alberta, show unnaturally high levels of substances linked to cancer. Researchers say they are the result of roughly half a century of development at the Athabasca oil sands.
While concentrations of carcinogens remain low compared with those found in urban lakes, scientists at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, called the findings, released Monday, “worrying” and warned of future effects from the spread of oil sands contaminants.
Japan-China: Bloomberg has published an excellent report that describes the economic consequences of Japan's dispute with China over ownership of the Senkaku Islands. No other news outlet has published a comparably insightful and detailed account.
The first point the journalists made is that trade relations between China and Japan multiply the costs of a territorial dispute. Japan's trade with China is valued at more than $300 billion per year, which is potentially at risk.
A Chinese boycott of Japanese imports would hurt China but might already have resulted in a reduction of GDP, according to Bloomberg citing JPMorgan Chase, because of reduced Chinese purchases of Japanese goods.
Ripple effects in China from boycotts of Japanese manufactures put at risk the jobs of millions of Chinese who work in Japanese industries in China. Japanese auto sales declined. Air travel cancellations increased in both countries. One Japanese department store retailer closed 60 of 169 stores because of anti-Japanese vandalism and threats.
Comment: The key point is that global economic integration magnifies the consequences of international disputes. Interdependency means both sides seriously suffer economically, although security incidents result in no casualties. Japan might have sustained a .5 per cent decline in GDP in the last quarter of 2012, essentially because of Chinese hostile, nationalistic responses to the islands dispute.
Both sides got hurt, but China can absorb the consequences more than Japan.
Another key point is that the dispute shows how the Chinese fight in every kind of battle space – at sea, in the air, on the land, in cyber space, in international political space and in economic space. Total warfare means total to the Chinese. They are experimenting with that in the Senkakus dispute.
The spread of violence and instability from Syria and Libya; increasing terrorism across key growth economies; the heightened risk of social unrest driving regime change; and resource nationalism will be the drivers of political risk for 2013, according to the fifth annual Political Risk Atlas, released by Maplecroft.
Maplecroftās Political Risk Atlas 2013 (PRA) includes 50 risk indices and interactive maps developed to enable companies and investors to monitor the key political issues and trends affecting the business environments of 197 countries. The Atlas includes dynamic short-term risks, such as rule of law, political violence including terrorism, the macroeconomic environment, expropriation, resource nationalism and regime stability, as well as structural long-term risks, such as economic diversification, resource security, infrastructure readiness, and human rights. Indeed, changing patterns of human rights risk on the ground are considered leading indicators of political risk by Maplecroft.
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Phi Beta Iota: There is still a need for a map that integrates the ten high level threats to humanity and performance across all organizations on the twelve core policies.
Iāve been invited by PopTech and theĀ RockefellerĀ Foundation to give the opening remarks at an upcoming event on interdisciplinary dimensions of resilience, which is Ā being hosted at Georgetown University. This event is connected to their new program focus on āCreating Resilience Through Big Data.ā Iām absolutely de-lighted to be involved and am very much looking forward to the conversations. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize the presentation I intend to give and to solicit feedback from readers. So please feel free to use the comments section below to share your thoughts. My focus is primarily on disaster resilience. Why? Because understanding how to bolster resilience to extreme events will provide insights on how to also manage less extreme events, while the converse may not be true.
One of the guiding questions for the meeting is this: āHow do you understand resilience conceptually at present?ā First, discourse matters. Ā The term resilience is important because it focuses not on us, the development and disaster response community, but rather on local at-risk communities. While āvulnerabilityā and āfragilityā were used in past discourse, these terms focus on the negative and seem to invoke the need for external protection, overlooking the fact that many local coping mechanisms do exist. From the perspective of this top-down approach, international organizations are the rescuers and aid does not arrive until theseĀ institutionsĀ mobilize.
Joseph Stiglitz, an economist I admire and would trust as one of several advisers has written a provocative essay, “The Post-Crisis Crisis” (Project Syndicate, 9 January 2013).Ā Here is his opening:
NEW YORK ā In the shadow of the euro crisis and Americaās fiscal cliff, it is easy to ignore the global economyās long-term problems. But, while we focus on immediate concerns, they continue to fester, and we overlook them at our peril.Ā The most serious is global warming. While the global economyās weak performance has led to a corresponding slowdown in the increase in carbon emissions, it amounts to only a short respite. And we are far behind the curve: Because we have been so slow to respond to climate change, achieving the targeted limit of a two-degree (centigrade) rise in global temperature, will require sharp reductions in emissions in the future.Ā Some suggest that, given the economic slowdown, we should put global warming on the backburner. On the contrary, retrofitting the global economy for climate change would help to restore aggregate demand and growth.Ā Read full article.
Joseph is well-intentioned in his focus on global warming and the need to create resilient localities and nations that ut people to work creating green infrastructure, but this is — with all humility — like painting the Titanic before driving it into the iceberg.Ā Cosmetic.
Cambridge, Mass. — IN the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agencyās contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of āZero Dark Thirty,ā published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Departmentās case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.
The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.
Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agencyās clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly āon background.ā Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.
Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to āneither confirm nor denyā had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim.
I am no fan of excessive secrecy, or of prosecuting whistle-blowers or leakers whose actions cannot be shown to have damaged American security. The C.I.A. needs secrecy, as do those who place their lives in the agencyās hands, but the agency cannot have it both ways.
