Articles by Geoff Dabelko

Go “Geo-Green”

Environmentalists need to seek new allies and new rationales, according to the raging debates spurred by the "Death of Environmentalism." This country's most important foreign affairs column is increasingly giving voice to one such argument.

Tom Friedman in The New York Times once again bangs the drum for energy efficiency, renewables, and lowering oil consumption as a means to spur reform in the Middle East. He does throw in a call for nuclear power, an argument that won't sit well with many greenies.

But Friedman dubs himself a "geo-green," explicitly promoting green behavior for geopolitical ends. He wants to deprive the undemocratic regimes of the Middle East the huge petro dollars that allow them to buy their way out of facing realm reform.

You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.

Environment and forgotten humanitarian stories

Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins Sans Frontieres, has published its top ten underreported humanitarian stories of 2004. Many are from active conflict zones such as Chechnya, Colombia, Northern Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Conflict is a recent memory and simmering threat in others like Liberia and Burundi. Still another is a disease -- resurgent tuberculosis. Ethiopia and North Korea present tragic tales of malnutrition and suffering.

So where is the environment in these stories? In too many of these places ...

They met on the Prius showroom floor …

Environmentalists were there to lighten their ecological footprint. Neocons were there to lighten the fat Saudi pocketbook, full of petro dollars that fund terrorism. According to Robert Bryce, writing in Slate, the strange bedfellows have come together to advocate measures that would increase car fuel efficiency, lessen foreign oil dependence, and pump up renewables.

While Bryce pitches the "sleeping with the enemy" angle, the key point is there are multiple, compelling reasons to aggressively pursue (and for the government to subsidize) energy efficiency, renewables and alternatives to fossil fuels, and reduced dependence on overseas oil. Greens have often worked this issue with one hand tied behind their backs.

Terrorists drive wind power

The surge in residents at Guantanamo Bay (from 2,500 to 10,000 in the past three years) has driven up energy needs for the self-sufficient U.S. Navy base that is a small slice of Cuba.

The LA Times (free registration required) reports that four new windmills and turbines, producing 950 kilowatts of electricity apiece, will soon replace diesel generators as the base's primary source of energy.  The need to be water self-sufficient drives extensive desalination operations on the base, creating the need for all that wind power.

Now if the war on terrorism could only extend that drive for energy independence to the mainland as well!