Climate Change and Security
I have decided to speak to this issue in the broadest possible sense.
Scientists (barring a tiny minority) are pretty certain that Anthropogenic Climate Change is happening. While many the carbon energy mafia intends to resist a shift away from using fossil fuels, we the people of Earth will eventually pay the price of this phenomenal stupidity.
Long before we drown in the rising waters from molten polar ice caps or burn up as global temperatures spike, a myriad variety of security threats will emerge.
A peculiar aspect of anthropogenic climate change is that it is not reversible on the scale we might think. It has taken us a hundred years to get here and even if we were to stop fossil fuel utilization today it would not mean that warming would stop [
1]. Cutting fossil fuel use helps but not as much as one would think [
2]. And the mere act of curtailing fossil fuel use is fraught with complications - there is no clarity on whether the debt created in the changeover is serviceable
at all.
With that in the background, we need to accept that certain realities and restructure our national security frameworks to accommodate these realities.
The realities I refer to above are as follows
0) We may not be able to reduce emissions enough by 2030 to keep the global temperatures below 1.5C and the excursions from the mean temperature will likely grow in the foreseeable future.
1)
Abrupt Climate Change may NOT be avoidable (this contrasts with the latest IPCC assessment that it is not presently considered a low likelihood event). This kind of event represents a catastrophic risk, no amount of resources set aside for mitigation will be enough. There is NO response modality that is sufficient. An Abrupt Climate Change situation will most likely be an extinction level event.
2) Climate Change driven dynamics will present itself in unpredictable ways. There is a relatively small fraction weather patterns where we have *some* predictive power. Where possible we may be able to leverage this into a real world prediction of where to deploy mitigation resources - but in all probability - the prediction will be crap. We will be hit by extreme climate events in places we are least prepared to cope with.
In the face of these realities there will be certain social and political consequences.
a) There has always been a class divide in human society - this will unfortunately hold true for climate information as well. A social ordering will develop based on the foreknowledge of imminent climate events. The "Haves" will possess the knowledge and be better positioned to handle the consequences than the "Have Nots" who will essentially pay for their ignorance with their lives.
b) Among the "Haves" there will always be too factions - the first that seeks to preserve the exclusivity of their club and the second that seeks to spread the knowledge and expand the club.
c) The "Have Nots" will also have two factions - one which accepts the massive reduction in their life expectancy and the second which does not and fights to establish a more equitable distribution of knowledge.
(No prizes for guessing which faction I belong to).
Having put all that out there - we have what it takes to flesh out emergent national security threats or perhaps I should call them what they are "Global Security Threats". Post globalization, national security seems like a poor framework to capture events that clearly span the planet. I mean even those anti-Globalization Nationalism movements are acting in concert and building a global alliance ... so ... yeah.
A quick list of the major global security threats in order of priority
1) A millenarist cult that seeks to precipitate a Climate apocalypse and ensure that only its "chosen ones" survive.
2) A cabal of "Haves" that obsesses about loss of primacy in global affairs and triggers obscure conflicts in the hope of keeping the "Have Nots" preoccupied.
3) A disorganized "Have Not" led "Resistance" which seeks to coerce the "Haves" into sharing information.
4) A pervasive apathy by the first faction of the "Have Nots" which makes meaningful resolution of climate mitigation issues impossible.
I hope to discuss each of these four threats in some detail in upcoming posts.
Apologies in advance for the delays and typos, it is a lot of thinking and it is difficult to get it all down in a concise text.
Food insecurity and political stability
Political systems are often anchored to key economic flows.
For example, in the medieval period, feudals earned their keep by ensuring a steady flow of agricultural taxes. The extent of food commodities recovered from taxation effectively capped their ability to access strategic metals, fabrics and ceramics. Those caps in turn kept the size of the feudal's army in check and that led to obvious limits on the size of the fief etc...
If there was a drought and the feudal did not possess enough reserve to keep the famine small (i.e. as situation where commodity prices are extremely unstable or worse still - farmers are too hungry to farm) - the feudal was kicked out of power. In this fashion the productivity of the land determined the half life of the local feudal order.
In our modern world - a variant of the same phenomena is at work.
I say "productivity of the land" but more correctly it should be the
apparent or
perceived productivity of the land.
This is because productivity is (at its core) a psychological construct. I have to believe/feel that the effort I am putting into the doing this activity is going to yield a large bounty in the future. This is a very big part of agro-economics as it takes time for the crops to grow, the herds to grow etc... there is no instant gratification.
There is a flip side to this.
If the land grows things I do not want/cannot eat - I feel it is not productive. If I fear I will not be able to eat my next meal per my choices - I become what the US agro-economists called "Food Insecure".
At one extreme "Food Insecurity" relates to the physical availability of food - but in another extreme it relates to the perception of the loss of a part of my preferred diet *and* any ensuing loss of status.
A very good example of this is the attitude of midwestern White Men towards beef. Having grown up in a culture of farming (which Sarah Taber refers to a "Farming Cosplay") - Beef is seen as the ultimate symbol of the productivity of the land. To be able to afford beef on the table is a big deal, it is correlated the status in society, to wealth, the number of women you can put in your bed at any given time etc... (Hence Trump Steaks was a status symbol - never meant to be successful as a product but meant to show that Trump was a guy who could afford big steaks!).
I am not saying that the thickness of the steak you eat is thickness of you penis but ... yeah it is just like the thickness of your penis. This why mere talk of vegan ideas bring forth a very derisive response from this demographic. Losing access to beef - is losing status in society.
This is not unique to the US, on a global scale it is observed that richer nations eat more meat. Meat eating correlates with wealth.
Now think about India.
India does not have enough land to allows free grazing like the US or Australia. Here meat is a luxury - even more tied to status. Populations that live along the peninsula - have a diet that emphasizes eggs and seafood. This is also India's most productive belt economically - having benefited from participation in the sea borne trade. The result is a deep sense of economic security, tradition and culture surrounding eating meat.
Now you take a population like that - and you impose vegetarianism on them. Either by indirectly taxing the trade in meat (eg "Cow Slaughter") or by directly imposing dietary bounds on any free meals you supply (such as the approach of the Akshaya Patra Foundation*). What would be the result of this?
The consequence will be a deep sense of food insecurity. This is because food insecurity is a metric that captures the psychological factors associated with the fear of the loss of a food source.
And how will that be different from a situation in Medieval India where a drought has wiped out the land?
Okay there is still food on the plate, but when your culture, ethnic identification etc... are deeply tied to your diet - will not food insecurity bleed over into political insecurity?
And what if the people of these states already fear
loss of political representation due to demographic shifts? or the
linguistic hegemony?
And what will be the outcome for a political formulation which is already so inefficient? where the
Rs/Vote is at least 10x higher than it's peer competitor?
Will there be political stability?
Sure the Left rules WB with a similar structure in place for decades, but is that sustainable at scale? or will one see the kind of dynamics one saw in Soviet Union? Where brutal subterranean battles raged while the General Secretary ruled largely at the pleasure of a highly militarized Siloviki?
They say
Amit Shah will become PM. I welcome it - I like him more than I like Modi or Yogi or other incompetents.
Also please forget about Art 370 removal. It is more important to focus on crafting a new Art 370 framework for southern states, otherwise when the redistribution of LS seats occurs the Peninsular states will simply secede from the Republic.
* Being a Brahmin myself I am extremely reluctant to criticize Akshaya Patra Foundation as it is one of the *few* Brahmin organizations that are actually doing socially productive work, but I feel compelled to say something because of the possibility that its efforts may be perceived as negative and the ensuing social opprobrium will derail a vital effort.
Shift in national security priorities
After reviewing data emerging *after* the recent election in India - I am reasonably convinced that a shift in national security priorities is necessary.
Heretofore - national security priorities in India centered on the notion that India was an agrarian economy that needed to transition to an industrial economy that self sufficient in critical resources. This transition needed the development of high-intensity energy resources - i.e. the kind that could power the machines used in new industrial economy. In order to build enough of those energy resources, one needed to build a capital reserve and ensure access to fossil and nuclear fuel supplies that could keep the energy conversion machines running. To that end whatever was needed was to be done.
(if that meant turning the youth of an entire state into slaves in a foreign land that accepted payment in rupees for oil - then so be it. If that meant getting in bed with a dictator who wanted rotting rice in exchange for oil - then so be it.... Gandhiji needed enough oil for one kerosene lamp... lighting a billion lamps would require making realistic compromises - or so it was said).
A critical aspect of that older way of thinking was that the energy resources needed for India's transformation were physically quite large. This "large" estimate captured the inefficient nature of resource utilization. A greater portion of the inefficiency was the lack of actionable information. If there was a better way to do things, the people in charge of making the executive decisions were not as informed as they could have been and so bad decisions were made routinely. Additionally a lot of the machines were old - and quite inefficient also.
Over the past three decades in India, there has been significant growth of personal communication and computation devices. This has significantly reduced barriers to information transport inefficiency. This lowering of information flow barriers represents a major advance in managing the shortage in transformative energy resources in India.
The best case scenario would be a secure sharing of mission critical data that results in a gradual increase in energy utilization efficiency and a gradual reduction in the amount of energy resources needed by India to reach a sustainable industrial economic position.
Despite any guidance on best practices, everything is shaped by individuals that make decisions, so in that sense - one has to think of this issue in the widest possible way.
With that in the background, the immediate priority for national security activities becomes clear -
the preservation of a secure national mission critical data space.
Data is almost continuously being created, harvested and trafficked over the electronic networks that now span the length and breadth of India. In order to maintain a high level of integrity and reliability in the data streams - one needs multiple layers of security. Essentially - one needs security of the hardware side, software side and use case side.
So far there is little to be comfortable about.
Simplistic approaches like the ECIL EVM though quite effective at scaling in volume are not scalable in time. In fact they appear to be highly insecure* in the light of what is known now. Hardware side security challenges are getting much more complex and difficult to manage (see the case of the
Chinese hardware hack). With
5G on the horizon, the entire picture is making most heads spin.
Then beyond that there is issue of the security of the software layers - both at the user accessible front end and at the much deeper layers in the network itself (even down to layers of embedded software that perform a variety of algorithmic data filtering). There is a good bit of knowledge in India on embedded software design on various platforms and the ensuing peculiarities of each platform - unless some sort of position of leverage is reached - it will be very difficult to ensure that mission critical software is not completely filled with backdoors and penetrations by hostile actors (see example of
Aadhar fiasco).
And there is the issue of user security culture in India - which as most of you know is a baffling wilderness of encryption, authentication and security consciousness problems. There is no way to easily inoculate the population of India to the dangers here. A disaster will occur, the only hope is to have some bitter medicine handy during the recovery period - that way at least - the lesson is memorable.
One needs to think afresh in the light of current events and what they are really saying.
* A device that breeds a false sense of security is the worst form of device in the world.
PS. If you don't like thinking at this high a level, then perhaps you could think of it in terms of the upcoming discussion with the Chinese on 5G infrastructure deployment in India. and try to answer the following question - what will India hold as leverage over China to preserve its IC's dominance over the large mass of data that these new devices will inevitably harvest?
PPS. And to those of you who love Modi, I ask this - sure today the EC will say nothing is wrong with the "Machine"....(even though everyone can clearly see it is not) but then tomorrow when something else goes wrong the Chinese impose their own will on things - will the EC have the credibility to object? And if it does object, will that not throw into question everything it said before? So will it have an incentive to say anything besides "No No ... everything is fine..."?
