Collide-a-scape

I’m confused by this post on Iraq’s environmental crisis over at The Duck of Minerva. First, to attribute Iraq’s devastated environment to war, as Roger A. Payne seemingly does, is an oversimplification. Even the LA Times article that he plays off of recognizes that.

Then, after tallying up the devastation, Payne concludes:

In IR [International Relations], much of the research on ecology and security has focused on the possibility that “environmental scarcities” contribute to the outbreak of violent conflict. It would appear as if additional research should focus on the environmental harm of war itself — and the difficulty of making critical green choices in a war context.

Um, when it comes to wreaking havoc and carnage on your enemy, what exactly are the “green choices” that might leave a country’s landscape slightly less in tatters?

What can international relations theory teach us about parenting? As Stephen Walt observes, there’s plenty of strategic maneuvering in both worlds. For example, once kids are mobile, parents learns about a key concept of geopolitics:

the window of opportunity. You’re feeding or changing Kid #1, and Kid #2 makes a bolt out the front door, just like North Korea tested a nuclear weapon while we were busy with Iraq. Or you’re in the middle of a crowded department store and they each decide to head down different aisles. The potential complications of a multipolar order were never clearer the first time this happened to me.

Over at Foreign Policy, Daniel Drezner offers a tutorial on international relations theory as it applies to international climate change negotiations:

China has supplanted America as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. From an economic perspective, we are witnessing a transition from a bipolar world (the US + EU) to a multipolar world (OECD + BRICs). International relations theory is not sanguine about what this means for international cooperation. In theory, a concert of great powers can still foster cooperation. Possible does not mean likely, however.  In practice, as the number of powerful actors increases, the likelihood of meaningful cooperation declines.

Advocates of the Waxman-Markey climate bill argue that the odds of such cooperation greatly improve if the U.S. brings a congressional commitment to the bargaining table. Drezner remains unconvinced:

my expert take is that Waxman-Markey is kind of like Obama’s other soft power initiatives–they certainly don’t hurt, but they also don’t help all that much either.

Prodded by his editor to offer an alternative course of action, Drezner suggests that an international climate change framework

link adaptation benefits to constructive steps on mitigation.  The expert consensus on global warming is that regardless on what is done to mitigate its effects, adaptation to elevated levels of greenhouse gases will be required. Furthermore, this burden will fall disproportionately on the developing world.  Unlike mitigation, which is a pure public good, adaptation is an excudable benefit.  If a climate change regime proffers an adaptation fund of some sort linked to concrete steps on mitigation, it could nudge the big LDC emitters towards the necessary levels of cooperation

That’s intriguing. I wonder what climate policy experts make of this.