William Ophuls has just written a book entitled Requiem for Modern Politics. It was published in 1997 by Westview Press, a division of Harper-Collins. This book is a sequel of Ecology of and the Politics of Scarcity. In the Introduction to the latest review by Ophuls,he quotes Robert Kaplan who wrote The Ends of the Earth:A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century:
It is time to understand the 'environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh -- developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts -- will be the core foreign [policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War.
There is at least enough natural gas in Central Asia to heat the homes of the world for another century. And with new discovery of oil in the same area of the world, its use may be enough to power the automobile industry in places where the auto does not already dominate a country's culture and inevitably postpones the day of reckoning. As Ophuls notes, "...the more we succeed in doing so, the higher psychological social and political price we shall have to pay. China pas already passed the point of no return and its institutions operated by Communist theology are essentially designed to disintegrate.
Energy from the Middle East should be considered ahead of the oil and gas in Central Asia. In Iraq, for example, semiofficial sources suggest that Iraq has oil reserves of 120.0 million barrels and 117 .9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Neighboring Iran has 93.0 billion barrels of oil reserves in the ground and 741.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Kuwait has 96.5 billion barrels of oil reserves and 52.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Saudi Arabia has 261.3 billion barrels of oil reserves and 188.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The United Arab Emirates have 97.8 billion barrels of oil in the ground and 204.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Bahrain is a small player in the Middle East. It has 0.2 billion barrels of oil and 5.2 trillion feet of natural gas. Beneath the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf lies a vast pool of natural gas, some 282.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas owned by Qatar (pronounced gutter) and 3.7 billion barrels of oil. This North Field extends northeast into Iran, but it is the world's largest natural gas field next to Iran and Russia. Oil experts believe that the North Field in Qatar holds so much gas that it can be trapped in huge quantities for at least 200 years.
The rate of imports offers some insight into the centuries ahead. In 1995, for example, the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy and France combined imported about 9.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas liquefied for shipment by tankers as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). The cost of such gas is lower than gas from competitive sources, because the flow of gas is so powerful. Thus, Qatar doesn't have to drill too many wells. Nor is Qatari gas associated with the production of oil; such a mixture is less desirable because it can make gas production more costly and complicated. A cost add-on, however, is the process of converting natural gas into LNG for shipment by sea. In the Far East, only Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have the facilities to unload LNG at a port of entry. So does the United States. Most of Europe may be served by gas pipelines from the Middle East and the gas facilities in Central Asia. Azerbaijan alone claims oil reserves of 200 billion barrels and gas in the ground is estimated at 80 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
Its claims are wildly exaggerated. An Economic and Trade Overview off the Internet observed that Azerbaijan's oil reserves were about 3 billion barrels, but some experts put its ultimate potential at 40 billion barrels. Azerbaijan is one of the oldest producing regions of the world, but like most of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), its oil and gas industry suffers from outdated technology and poor planning which have resulted in underproduction, waste and severe environmental degradation both on and offshore.
The City of Baku has organized and promoted a Caspian Sea Infrastructure Conference in October, 1997. Other areas of the world produce oil and gas in commercially significant amounts. The United States has its Prudhoe Bay oil shipped by pipeline to Valdez, Alaska. Mexico and Venezuela are also big oil producers, and the latter has produced almost intolerable levels of air and water pollution in Caracas and Lake Maracaibo. Indonesia and Brunei have huge oil fields, and Malaysia has natural gas it sells to Japan. For most of July and August 1997, a pall of haze has shrouded Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur and other parts of peninsular Malaysia.
The haze is a recurring problem for Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Hong Kong and Shanghai, two of China's largest cities are similarly covered by smog. It is caused by smoke drifting from forests being burned and cleared in nearby Indonesia for agriculture. Clear-cutting of forests has become a recipe for environmental decay afflicting Asia as increasing population combines with rapid economic growth, urbanization and industrialization generating an explosive demand for energy. A recent study by the Asian Development Bank found that the costs of environmental damage in Asia were already (1997) "staggeringly high and that if the region failed to implement better environmental policies, it would pay even more dearly for environmental negligence. Without conscious shifts in environmental policy, most of Asia will become dirtier, noisier, more congested, more eroded , less forested and less biologically diverse. The substainability of Asia's prosperity could be threatened."
Vaclav Smil, a Canadian environmental specialist, has estimated that the annual cost of damage to China's natural resources is "probably equivalent to at least 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product -- $552 billion in 1996 -- and may well be as high as 15 percent. In only six of China's 27 largest cities is drinking water quality within state standards. Contamination of crops by polluted water endangers health and reduces opportunities for export of products. And the loss of arable land to urban encroachment and soil erosion means that, by the year 2000, Bangladesh and Egypt will be the only two populous nations with less arable land per capita than China." The government in Beijing may well have had this pending disaster in mind when China's National Environmental Protection Agency announced an environmental forum to be held in Beijing between November 18 and 21, 1997. See http://www.ihei.com/
Smil added another cautionary note. "China like other countries in the early stages of rapid economic development, has been slow to allocate capital for environmental management and now has extensive areas of badly damaged ecosystems. These factors, together with China's huge population and ambitious development aspirations, make it the world's most worrisome case of environmental degradation. If China were to consume resources at the level of South Korea or Taiwan and import crude oil and grain at the rates comparable to those of other rapidly growing East Asian economies, it would need more energy and more cereal than are currently available on the world market." Recently, the news that the tobacco companies might look with favor on settlement of cases brought by the states encouraged the domestic tobacco companies.
Most observers believe these companies would simply switch their future operations to Asia and Europe. However, China is beginning to tighten up its regulation of smoking, principally by raising the tax on tobacco. This tax should currently produces revenue, about $6 billion per year, but a lot of this is simply not collected, and regulation is essentially not enforced. However, Chinese epidemiologic studies have examined the effects of smoking and air pollution on the incidence of many diseases. Of these, the largest impact on public health arises from chronic obstruction of pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer, coronary heart disease (CHD), and childhood pneumonia. COPD has been found responsible for about 1.5 million deaths in China each year.
The number of deaths in China from COPD are five to six times higher in China than in the United States. Exposure to dust and fumes plus air pollution suggest that the high rates of COPD in China come from indoor air pollution caused by residential fuel combustion. Mortality rates for COPD in rural areas are about 66 percent higher than in the cities. Lung cancer claims about 250,000 lives per year in China The Chinese Environmental Yearbook for 1995 showed that average annual outdoor concentrations of total suspended particulates and sulphur dioxide SO 2 greatly exceeded Chinese and World Health Organizations standards. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death for children in China, killing approximately 300,000 annually. High pneumonia mortality is associated with parents' chronic respiratory infections, crowded living conditions passive smoking, high levels of indoor air pollution from fuel combustion, and parents' delay in seeking medical attention for sick children. These last two factors are thought to be responsible for the fact that the mortality rate from childhood pneumonia in rural areas in China is four times that in the cities. These figures tell only part of the story. Chronic disability from pollution-related lung disease places an enormous load on China's health care system and is responsible for tens of millions of lost work days each year. The economic impact of these pollution-related lung disease is enormous. The medical effect may be even worse. Constant exposure to toxic air quality throughout China tends to reduce the body's attempts to resist other illness, such as tuberculosis, black lung disease and malaria.
The completion of the Three Gorges Dam in 2009 may be a trigger environmental disaster than even its opponents claim. Approximately one million Chinese will have been moved to other locations to make way for the huge inland sea created by damming the Yangtze River. Those ordered to move may well face adverse medical effects, and we know that deterioration of the 'environment tends to reduce resistance to illness in general. India, for example, has had four major malaria epidemics since 1994; last year alone 2.85 million Indians got the disease and some thousands died. Malaria is spreading in Asia borne by migrant workers and other travelers. Red tides may also become a problem for Chinese cities on the coast, such as Dalian, Hong Kong, Macao and Shanghai. They are caused by an inflow of nitrogen, phosphorus and untreated waste. Shellfish are particularly affected, often producing neuro-toxins fatal to humans. Red tides have appeared in the Philippines , Hiroshima Bay,and other areas close to China. In fact, Hong Kong had a red tide only two years ago, 1995. China was witness to what is certainly the world's greatest manmade environmental disaster. The smoke and haze from forest fires in Indonesia will have a long term effect of increasing the death rate in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Brunei. The Suharto government has declined to accept full responsibility for an act that was made illegal in 1995. No one seems willing to act to prevent a recurrence of this catastrophe. However, air pollution in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong has deteriorated in the last ten years or so. These are urban environments.
In large areas of China, desertification has proceeded at an accelerating pace. This is the process by which an area becomes a desert. with the rapid depletion of plant life and the loss of topsoil at desert boundaries and in semiarid regions, usually caused by a combination of drought and the over-exploitation of grasses and other vegetation by people. This process is evident in rural China in for example Sinkiang. So what China seems to have is a population of at least 1.3 billion people, most of them living in urbanized China and exposed to deteriorating air quality, undrinkable water, not enough food, toxic compounds just about everywhere, and noise that assails the ears with decibels of continuous sound at an unbearable level, and a soil that has been leached by decades of poor agricultural practices. Furthermore, the amount of arable land per capita has reached a level lower than most third world countries.
The combination of food shortages throughout China and environmental disaster areas has had serious effect on infant morbidity; the proportion of sickness or of a specific disease in a geographical locality. In neighboring Uzbekistan, infant mortality rose by almost fifty percent between 1970 and 1986. With the single exception of Russia, no other great industrial civilization has so systematically poisoned its land air, water, and people as has China. Historians might well describe China in the 1990s as one vast Belsen, a death camp operated by the Nazis during World War II.
In its book, Death by Default A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages, Human Rights Watch offers a chilling description of the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. In March, 1995 a doctor there Zhanh Shuyun escaped from China carrying with her a substantial archive of secretly obtained orphanage documents. "The documents covering mainly the period 198892 paint a picture of day-today life at that time for the institutional orphans and abandoned children of Shanghai -- one of China's most prosperous cities -- that seems marked by such extremes of official callousness and brutality as to challenge normal belief. In this chapter [it begins on page 117] the evidence contained in those documents is presented in comprehensive detail, with particular attention given core question of extremely high mortality at the orphanage and to the pseudomedical diagnostic and treatment practices that appear, in many cases, to have been its primary cause." China's specious claim to guarantee "the right to subsistence" conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death. The victims are the orphans and abandoned children in custodial institutions run by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. The brutality found in Shanghai is widespread throughout all of China.
The People's Republic of China ratified the United Nations Convention the Rights of the Child in December, 1991. It submitted its first implementation report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 1994. The Chinese government has thus submitted itself voluntarily to international monitoring on the treatment of its minor citizens and may be heard uttering its preposterous mantra that "monitoring" of the welfare of Chinese children is an interference in its internal affairs.
All contents © 1998 William M. Brinton