Eric Umansky

The Taliban and Global Warming

Barnett Rubin, a top expert on Afghanistan, has a post up pointing out that one of the biggest problems in Afghanistan over the past year has been soaring food prices. People literally can't pay for bread:

I had heard quite a bit about this bread. Someone told me that food prices had gone up 70 percent. After General Musharraf declared a state of Emergency during my visit in November, notes from Pakistani friends often spoke of a growing shortage of "atta" (whole wheat flour). On my flight to Delhi from Kabul I sat with a senior official of the Indian Customs Service who was advising the Afghan Customs Department. He told me that Afghanistan was importing only ten percent the amount of wheat that it had last year....

And of course, when you can't put food on the table,  that might make you less sympathetic to your government and more sympathetic to insurgents, say the Taliban. Barnett again:

At several meetings I have heard former Minister of Finance of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani say that the most common definition of a "Talib" in southern Afghanistan is "an unemployed youth." Some Kandahari fruit traders I interviewed said that nearly all the fighting in Afghanistan was due to unemployment. Statistically, youth employment is one of the most robust correlates of civil violence.

Wondering what accounts for the price increase, Barnett came across this article in the WSJ:

The little known Minneapolis Grain Exchange is suddenly one of the hottest spots in the global financial markets....Minneapolis has become ground zero for the global wheat shortage, which has been caused by drought in Australia and poor weather in other grain-producing countries. Global stocks are projected to reach 30-year lows this year, while U.S. stocks will reach 60-year lows.

The rise in agricultural prices, combined with high oil prices .. have contributed to higher food inflation in the U.S. and around the world....

To cope with high prices, countries have been rationing supplies by leveling tariffs or taxes on grain exports. [Kazakhstan and Syria have taxed or canceled exports, while Jordan and Egypt are short of food.] Pakistan recently stopped exporting some of its wheat flour to Afghanistan.

It's obviously way speculative to assert that global warming is contributing to the Taliban insurgency. But it's also perfectly plausible.  There's a reason the Pentagon has started studying the national security threat posed by global warming. 

This week in Friday Night News Dumps

Remember that lobbyist-cum-White House-official who screwed with a government report on global warming? He now sleeps with the fishes. Not that one thing had anything to do with the other, of course. From the Times:

“He had accumulated many weeks of leave and had decided to resign and take the summer off to spend the time with his family,” said Dana Perino, a deputy White House press secretary.

Media's Lack of Pattern Recognition (Global Warming Edition)

Chris Mooney looks at the shallow media frenzy that ensued after the NYT broke news that a Bush appointee (and not a scientist) had rejiggered an EPA report's conclusions on global warming. Take it away, Chris:

[W]hat nobody pointed out is the following: Andy Revkin has broken numerous similar stories over the past several years. In each case, they create a stink for the administration, but because of the short attention span of the media, it's only a temporary one. Then business as usual resumes -- as does the routine politicization of science, apparently. Let's just take a look at some examples of what Revkin has exposed:

April 2, 2002: Following urging by energy interests, the Bush administration pushes to have leading scientist Robert Watson--who is "highly regarded as an atmospheric chemist by many climate experts," according to Revkin--removed as chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Watson is indeed later replaced by a scientist from India.

September 15, 2002: An annual Environmental Protection Agency report on air pollution omits its section on global warming "for the first time in six years," Revkin reports, a decision made "by top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency with White House approval." "There's a complete paranoia about anything on climate, and everything has to be reviewed widely," one EPA insider tells the Times.

June 19, 2003: The White House Council on Environmental Quality drastically edits the global warming section of an EPA report on the state of the environment, leaving the section "whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs." "Among the deletions," writes Revkin, "were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year." An internal EPA memo--which you can download here--objects that due to the White House changes, the report "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change." Ultimately the EPA decides to drop the global warming section from the report entirely.

April 25, 2004: NASA cracks down on its scientists, telling them they are not allowed to do interviews or otherwise comment on the global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. ''It's just another attempt to play down anything that might lead to the conclusion that something must be done'' about climate change, gripes one government scientist to Revkin, who can't use his name "because of standing orders not to talk to the news media."

October 26, 2004: NASA climate expert James Hansen--sometimes called the "father of global warming" for his 1988 congressional testimony calling attention to the problem--goes public with allegations that agency administrator Sean O'Keefe instructed him not to discuss "dangerous anthropogenic interference [with the climate], because we do not know enough or have enough evidence for what would constitute dangerous anthropogenic interference.'' Hansen, a government employee, lays it on the line to denounce the Bush administration's approach to climate science just days before the presidential election.