Crawling from the Wreckage (35 page)

By the end of this month all U.S. military forces will have withdrawn from Iraqi cities. Effectively, the U.S. war in Iraq is over. Was it worth it?

There are two quite separate balance sheets of costs and benefits, one
for Iraqis and the other for Americans. It’s too early to give a final answer for the Iraqis, but, for the United States, the answer is definitely no.

No matter what happens in Iraq now, the Obama administration will not recommit U.S. troops to a combat role in the country, so we can calculate approximately how much the Iraq adventure cost the United States with some confidence. The total cost will work out to well over a trillion dollars, if we count the long-term cost of caring for the veterans.

Random attacks may kill a few hundred more American soldiers in Iraq before all the troops go home, but the final death toll will certainly be less than five thousand. That is only one-tenth of the fatalities that U.S. troops suffered in the Korean War or the Vietnam War, so the cost in lives was relatively low for Americans. But what did the United States gain in return for that investment?

Not a subservient ally, certainly. When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki held a meeting with three hundred top Iraqi military commanders early this month, an American general showed up to monitor the proceedings as usual. He was politely asked to leave. Washington’s ability to influence decisions in Iraq is dwindling by the day.

So the balance sheet for the United States is in the red, but not catastrophically so. The investment did not produce any worthwhile returns, but the negative consequences were not great either, and the investment was not all that big. More money has been thrown at failing American banks in the past eight months than was thrown at Iraq in six years.

What about the Iraqis, then? For them, the price in lives was at least a hundred times higher, and maybe more. They also suffered the almost complete collapse of an economy that was already severely damaged by Saddam’s wars and the subsequent trade embargo. The level of violence has dropped sharply from its peak in 2006–07, but the monthly death toll from political killings (including sectarian ones) is still higher than it was during the last decade of Saddam’s rule.

For the 80 percent of Iraqis who speak Arabic, the greatest costs have been the destruction of the old secular society, which, even under Saddam, allowed women more freedom than most other Arab regimes, and the brutal ethnic cleansing that resulted in an almost complete physical separation of the Shia and Sunni populations. At least three million people are still afraid to return to their homes, and most never will.

That was a direct result of the American invasion, for without it the al-Qaeda fanatics would never have gained such a foothold in the Sunni community. Nevertheless, it was the senseless al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the Shias that unleashed the civil war of 2006–07, which the Sunnis, being outnumbered three-to-one, were bound to lose. It will take at least a generation to heal this wound.

The other 20 percent of the population, the Kurds of northern Iraq, got a semi-independent state out of the invasion, though they still go along with the fiction of a united Iraq. This is not a stable arrangement, however, and the risk of an Arab-Kurdish war in Iraq over the ownership of the Kirkuk oil fields cannot be discounted.

On the other hand, Iraqis now have a more or less democratic system, with more or less free media. They have a government that is more corrupt and significantly less competent than the old Baathist regime, but at least it will not waste the country’s wealth on foreign wars. Given ten or fifteen years of good luck and high oil prices, Iraq could climb back to the level of prosperity it enjoyed in the 1970s.

So was it all worth it? There is no consensus on this question even among the Iraqis themselves. We may know the answer by 2020.

Most people, not just in the United States but everywhere in the West, are still unwilling to accept that people in the poor countries have the same right to consume at industrial levels as people in the rich countries do. As witness: Western media treatment of the Nano car
.

The jokes about the Nano, Tata Motors’ new affordable car for the Indian middle class, were harmless, although very old. They told the same jokes about the Fiat 500 and the Citroen 2CV in the 1950s, when mass car ownership first came to Europe. “How do you double the value of a Nano?” “Fill the tank.” “How many engineers does it take to make a Nano?” “Two. One to fold and one to apply the glue.” But the hypocrisy wasn’t funny at all.

The typical story in the Western media began by marvelling that Tata has managed to build a car that will sell for only 100,000 rupees ($2,500). Everybody agrees that it’s “cute” and that it can hold five people, provided they don’t all inhale at the same time. It has no radio, no air conditioning, and only one big windshield wiper, but such economies mean that it really is within reach of tens of millions of Indians who could only afford a scooter up to now. And that is where the hypocrisy kicks in.

What will become of us when all these Indians start driving around in cars? There’s over a billion of them, and the world just can’t take any more emissions. It’s not the “People’s Car,” as Tata bills it, but rather the “People’s Polluter,” moaned Canada’s
National Post
, adding that “a few dozen million new cars pumping out pollution in a state of semipermanent gridlock is hardly what the Kyoto Protocol had in mind.”

But hang on a minute. Aren’t there more than a dozen million cars in Canada already, even though it only has one-thirtieth of India’s population? Aren’t they, on average, twice the size of the Nano (or, in the case of the larger sport utility vehicles, five times the size)? Does the phrase “double standard” come to mind?

“India’s vehicles spewed 219 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005,” fretted the
Guardian
in London. “Experts say that figure will jump almost sevenfold to 1,470 million tons by 2035 if car travel remains unchecked.” And the
Washington Post
wrote: “If millions of Indians and Chinese get to have their own cars, the planet is doomed. Suddenly, the cute little Nano starts to look a lot less winning.”

But practically every family in the United States and Britain already has its own car (or two). Don’t they realize how ugly such commentary sounds? Don’t they understand that everybody on the planet has an equal right to own a car, if they can afford it?

If the total number of people who can afford cars exceeds the number of cars that the planet can tolerate, then we will just have to work out a rationing system that everybody finds fair, or live with the consequences of exceeding the limits.

“Contraction and convergence” is the phrase they need to learn. It was coined almost twenty years ago by South African-born activist Aubrey Meyer, founder of the Global Commons Institute, and it is still the only plausible way that we might get global agreement on curbing greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. The notion is simple: we must agree on a figure
for total global emissions that cannot be exceeded, rather as we set fishing quotas in order to preserve fish stocks. Then we divide that amount by six and a half billion people, and that gives us the per capita emission limit for everyone on Earth.

Of course, some people (in the developed countries mostly) are currently emitting ten or twenty times as much as other people (mainly in the developing countries), and eventually this will have to stop. The big emitters will gradually have to “contract” their per capita emissions, while the poor countries may continue to grow theirs, until, at an agreed date some decades in the future, the two groups “converge” at the same level of per capita emissions. And that level, by prior agreement, must be low enough that global emissions remain below the danger point.

If you don’t like that idea, then you can go with the alternative: a free-for-all world in which everybody moves towards the level of per capita emissions that now prevails in the developed countries. No negotiations or treaties required: it will happen of its own accord. So will runaway climate change, with average global temperatures climbing as much as six degrees Celsius higher by the end of the century, and a future of famine, war and mass death.

Clucking disapprovingly about mass car ownership in India or China misses the point entirely. At the moment, there are only eleven private cars for every thousand Indians. There are 477 private cars for every thousand Americans. By mid-century, there will have to be the same number of cars per thousand people for both Indians and Americans—and that number will have to be a lot lower than 477, unless somebody comes up with cars that emit no greenhouse gases. Otherwise, everybody loses.

The Holocene era is that blessed time of stable, warm climate (but not too hot) and unchanging sea levels, in which human civilization was born and grew to its present size. In ten thousand years, our numbers have increased about a thousandfold—but we may be about to leave the Holocene, and that would be too bad. No other climatic state would let us maintain our current numbers, and mass diebacks are no fun at all.

James Hansen, the director of
NASA
’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is one of the most respected scientists working in the field of climate studies. It was his famous speech to the U.S. Congress twenty years ago that put climate change on the U.S. political agenda, and led indirectly to the Earth Summit and the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 and to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Now, he has something else to say.

For most of the past decade, Hansen adhered to the emerging consensus among climate scientists that the maximum permissible concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 450 parts per million. That was believed to give us a 50 percent chance of getting away with an average global temperature only two degrees Celsius hotter than it was at the beginning of the 1990s. Now Hansen doesn’t believe in the 450 parts per million barometer anymore.

Four hundred and fifty parts per million was chosen partly because it seemed impossible to stop the rise in carbon dioxide before reaching that point—we’re already at 387 parts per million, and going up almost 3 parts per million per year—and partly because it seemed relatively safe. Two degrees Celsius hotter would turn a lot of subtropical land into desert, cause bigger hurricanes, and turn most of Asia’s big rivers into seasonal watercourses that are empty in summer, but it would not melt the ice caps. At least that’s what scientists thought, although everybody knew that the numbers were soft.

You can do a lot with climate models, but the Earth hasn’t actually seen a carbon dioxide concentration as high as 450 parts per million since about thirty-five million years ago. So Hansen and some colleagues went to work on exactly that period, and came back with some bad news. If you leave the world at even 425 parts per million for very long, all the ice will probably melt: Greenland, Antarctica, the lot. And the sea level will rise seventy to eighty metres.

How do they know this? The world was very hot and completely ice-free for a long time before thirty-five million years ago, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was falling gradually. When it reached 425 parts per million, Antarctica began to freeze over, and if that’s where the first permanent ice appeared while carbon dioxide was on the way down, it’s probably where the last permanent ice will disappear when carbon dioxide is on its way back up.

Now, there’s a big margin of error when you are dealing with thirty-five million years ago: plus or minus 75 parts per million, in this case. That means that the fatal number, when all the ice disappears, could really be as high as 500 parts per million—or it could be as low as 350 parts per million. If that is the range within which
all
the world’s ice will eventually melt, and you like living in the Holocene, then you probably should not put all your money on a 450 parts per million ceiling for carbon dioxide.

So Jim Hansen is now spearheading a campaign to get 350 parts per million recognized as the real long-term target we should be aiming for. Tricky, since we are already at 387 parts per million and rising fast. But last week, when I spoke to him at the Tällberg Forum’s annual conference in Sweden, he explained: “To figure out the optimum is going to take a while, but the fundamental thing about the 350 [parts per million target], and the reason that it completely changes the ball game, is precisely the fact that it’s less than we have now.

“It means that we really have to start to act almost immediately. Even if we cut off coal emissions entirely, carbon dioxide would still get up to at least 400, maybe 425, and then we’re going to have to draw it down, and we’re almost certainly going to have to do it within decades.”

But there is time. The oceans and the ice sheets react so slowly to changes in the air temperature that you can overshoot the limit for a while, so long as you get the temperature back down before irreversible changes set in. Stop at 450 parts per million in twenty-five years’ time, then get back below 400 in another twenty-five, and down to 350 by, say, 2075. It could be done: there is still one last exit for the Holocene.

By late 2008, I was fully up to speed on climate issues. I had interviewed many of the key scientists, read a lot of the research, and come to some conclusions. I had even produced a radio series and written a book about
it
, Climate Wars,
whose second edition I warmly recommend to you. And it seemed absolutely clear to me that we were not going to make it through the crisis without huge losses unless we resorted, at least for a time, to geo-engineering
.