MOSCOW -- A global warming pact to be agreed next month in Copenhagen must take into account the carbon dioxide absorption potential of Russia's sprawling forests, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Monday.

"Are we ready to support Denmark's efforts in the post-Kyoto period? We are ready to do this," Putin said at a press conference with visiting Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen.

"But there are two conditions: all countries must sign it. And Russia will insist that capacity of its forests for absorbing carbon dioxide must be taken into account."

Putin's conditions highlighted another impediment on the already-difficult path to reaching an agreement at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, which is due to take place in Copenhagen on Dec. 7-18.

The demand spells out a position previously adopted by Russia under the Kyoto Protocol, whose current pledges expire at the end of 2012.

Russia and other countries demanded big concessions on forestry in 2001 when Kyoto's complex rulebook was being negotiated.

They argued that forests are a bulwark against global warming as trees absorb carbon dioxide -- the principal greenhouse gas -- through the natural process of photosynthesis.

The issue of how much forested land should be offset against emissions targets by rich countries turned out to be a major stumbling block for completing Kyoto.

The treaty eventually took effect in February 2005 after a long delay by Russia in ratifying it.

Many green activists say the forestry rules are a potential loophole, enabling polluting countries to statistically write off their emissions yet not reduce them in real terms.

The Copenhagen meeting is set to bring together 192 countries in an effort to negotiate a new global warming agreement for the period after 2012.

But diplomats say it is unlikely that a legally binding treaty can be agreed given divisions among the participants, notably between rich and developing countries over who should bear the main burden for emission cuts.

Rasmussen said he expected a political accord, rather than a legally binding treaty, to be adopted at the conference.

"I expect a politically binding agreement that will take effect right after the signature. This agreement will be the basis for a legally binding agreement," Rasmussen told reporters.

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MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the lucrative resource tends to be very bad for the people who live above it.

We spoke recently about his reporting on this resource curse, and about a strategy he proposes for environmental activists—sourcing gasoline to show buyers the violence their gas money supports.

Q. You call oil “black oxygen.” Unpack that phrase a little.

A.Oil makes our cars move. It makes the planes fly. It’s in our clothes. It’s in our food because it’s in fertilizers. It’s in chemicals. It is just absolutely everywhere in modern existence. It also is everywhere in terms of politics. It’s a major preoccupation of the governments that need it, and it’s the major preoccupation of the governments that have it.

Beyond that, it is a major factor in terms of pollution that occurs in the world today. Even when oil and natural gas are operating the way they are supposed to be, they still cause a lot of damage to the earth. Burning them puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. We all know where that’s leading us.

In my book I describe oil not only as black oxygen but also as like gravity, because it’s invisible in a way. From the moment it comes out of the ground until the moment it goes into our gas tank, we do not see it. Yet, like gravity, it influences everything we do.

Q. What makes the oil industry so much more harmful than others?

A.It’s an extractive industry. As with all extractive industries, the word itself tells you quite a lot: you’re gouging into the earth to get something, and that’s never a gentle process.

Second, unlike many other natural resources, oil is really concentrated and really valuable. Whoever owns a certain oilfield--and it usually ends up being a government or a royal family--has an extraordinary amount of concentrated money at their disposal. It’s not a resource like fertile land that is spread over many, many thousands of acres owned by many, many people. It’s not like manufacturing industries where there a lot of workers and a lot of owners and there are products that come out. This is really, really concentrated power. The cliché is that absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Oil can have a very similar effect because the possessor of oil possesses a country’s destiny.

Q. Does it matter where I buy my gas, or are all oil companies equally harmful? And what about state-owned oil companies like Brazil’s Petrobas?

A.I’ve looked at that question a lot. The more you look at it, there’s something objectionable about pretty much all the oil we consume. If the oil comes from Nigeria, there’s a war being fought over oil in Nigeria. If the oil comes from Ecuador, there’s a tremendous amount of environmental damage that’s coming from that oil. Ironically, most of Ecuador’s oil that goes to the United States goes to California, one of the most environmentally conscious states in the country. If the oil comes from Saudi Arabia, the income from it has gone to feed a lot of Islamic extremism.

Even if the oil is from Canada--which is actually the largest supplier of oil to the United States--a fair amount of Canadian oil comes from tar sands. There you have to cook the earth by using other forms of energy--natural gas, for example--and a lot of water. Canada is a great country politically, and there’s no corruption really associated with the Canadian oil. But there is an environmental toll.

Q. Your book focuses social and human-rights costs of oil extraction. How did climate change play into your reporting with political leaders, executives, and workers?

A.The climate argument has been made really well and continues to be made really well. But I was most interested in writing about the social costs of oil, meaning human rights, violence, and poverty.
So when I went to Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, etc., I focused on how people’s lives been affected by the oil that they export.

And honestly, the environmental issues for them are not the same ones they are for us. When I went to the Niger Delta I had to get permission and an aide from the warlord, because if I didn’t have his protection I’d be kidnapped in an instant. We took a canoe up the creeks and it was a terrible situation with wells dripping oil into the water, with flares all over the place, with fighting going on. I spent the night in one totally destitute village. It has no running water or electricity, it has no healthcare, nothing.

Right across from the creek is a multi-billion dollar Shell natural gas processing facility, with massive flares. In the west, flaring is very tightly regulated. In Nigeria, it’s supposed to be but it’s not. At this particular Soku facility, which is actually shut down at the moment due to fighting, there are massive flares going off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Huge, huge flares. This is consistent throughout the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons flaring is restricted in the United States and elsewhere is not simply because it emits a lot of greenhouse gases, but because it’s incredibly harmful to human health. The toxins and the chemicals that are emitted in flaring are tremendous. So for these villagers in the Niger Delta, the climate issue for them wasn’t that in 20 or 30 years the world temperatures will have increased by another degree and weather patterns will have changed slightly. The climate issue for them is that they were breathing toxic chemicals as a result of this flare that was 40 yards across the creek.

Q. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an impressive piece of reporting (Paul Salopek’s “A tank of gas, a world of trouble”) in which a reporter traced gasoline from a suburban gas station back into all the places it came from. What did you make of that?

A. What he did was fantastic. There’s myth that’s perpetrated by the oil industry, and accepted by pretty much everyone, that it’s impossible to trace the oil that you put into your tank. Shell or Exxon say their oil comes from a lot of different sources, it’s mixed together, and it’s just not tracked down to the local level. They say it’s impossible to do. Paul Salopek said, “Let me check into that.” He found out that it is possible to source gasoline that you put into your tank and find out where it actually comes from. He really blew the lid off this myth.

This knowledge needs to get out. When you don’t know the origin of the product you’re buying, you can’t possibly care about the human-rights abuses or the pollution at the point of origin. That goes for tennis shoes as well as oil. By sourcing it, there is a lever that environmental activist groups can use to make people aware on a very local level of what is in their gas tank and what the price is beyond the $2.50 or $3.00 that they are forking over per gallon. It’s a lever that I don’t think environmental activist groups are fully aware of. Who knows where it will get them, but it could be useful.

Q. Is sourcing gasoline still really difficult to do?

A. Salopek had to get some proprietary data in order to get the information. But he’s just one reporter. If he can do it then an environmental group could too, I would think.

Q. What about solutions to the oil problem—do you have any?

A. I do, but none that are original. There are lots of plans and a lot technology that make a lot of sense. The real problem for us isn’t solutions--the problem is embracing the solutions. The political leadership of this country, perhaps spurred on by the citizenry, needs to actually take the steps of investing in conservation, in efficiency, in renewable energy … the list goes on.

The main problem is motivating people, and motivating political leadership. Not just the White House, which seems quite motivated, but all of the interest groups that it has to deal with. All of the regional interest groups it has to deal with. That’s the problem area.

I don’t have an answer for getting from here to there. In writing the book I hoped to make people understand oil more, and therefore support the kinds of changes necessary to get us to a post-oil future.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. The colors reflect different level of oil consumption (per country, not per capita).

Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Aaron Pava of CivicActions

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Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The new great game of the twenty-first century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass -- the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.

The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent NATO summit Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.

If you had to put that Euro part of Pipelineistan into a formula, you might do so this way: Nabucco (pushed by the U.S.) versus South Stream (pushed by Russia). Be patient. You'll understand in a moment.

At the most basic level, it's a matter of the West yet again trying, in the energy sphere, to bypass Russia. For this to happen, however -- and it wouldn't hurt if you opened the nearest atlas for a moment -- Europe desperately needs to get a handle on Central Asian energy resources, which is easy to say but has proven surprisingly hard to do. No wonder the NATO Secretary General's special representative, Robert Simmons, has been logging massive frequent-flyer miles to Central Asia over these last few years.

Just under the surface of an edgy entente cordiale between the European Union (E.U.) and Russia lurks the possibility of a no-holds-barred energy war -- Liquid War, as I call it. The E.U. and the U.S. are pinning their hopes on a prospective 2051 mile-long, $10.7 billion pipeline dubbed Nabucco. Planning for it began way back in 2004 and construction is finally expected to start, if all goes well (and it may not), in 2010. So if you're a NATO optimist, you hope that natural gas from the Caspian Sea, maybe even from Iran (barring the usual American blockade), will begin flowing through it by 2015. The gas will be delivered to Erzurum in Turkey and then transported to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.

Why, you might ask, is the pipeline meant to save Europe named for a Verdi opera? Well, Austrian and Turkish energy executives happened to see the opera together in Vienna in 2002 while discussing their energy dilemmas, and the biblical plight of the Jews exiled by King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), a love story set amid a ferocious struggle for freedom and power, swept them away. Still, it's a stretch to turn aluminum tubes into dramatic characters.

Of course, the operatic theater here isn't really in the tubing, it's in the politics and strategic implications that surround the pipeline. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Nabucco is seen not as a European economic or energy project, but as a creature of Washington, just like the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey that President Bill Clinton and his crew backed so vigorously in the 1990s and which was finally finished in 2005. For those who have never believed the Cold War is over -- the Eastern Europeans among them -- once again it's the good guys (the West) against the commies ... sorry, the Russians ... at an energy-rich OK Corral.

The Great Borderless Gas Bazaar

Russia's answer to Nabucco is the 746 mile-long, $15 billion South Stream pipeline, also scheduled to be finished in 2015; it is slated to carry Siberian natural gas under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. From Bulgaria, one branch of the pipeline would then run south through Greece to southern Italy while the other would run north through Serbia and Hungary towards northern Italy.

Now, add another pipeline to the picture, the $9.1 billion Nord Stream that will soon enough snake from Western Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, which already imports 41.5 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The giant Russian energy firm Gazprom holds a controlling 51 percent of Nord Stream stock; the rest belongs to German and Dutch companies. The chairman of the board is none other than former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Put this all together and Russia, with its pipelines running in all directions and firmly embedded in Europe, spells trouble for Nabucco's future and frustration for Washington's New Great Game plans to contain the Russian energy juggernaut. And that's without even mentioning Ukhta which, chances are, you've never heard of. If you aren't in the energy business, why should you have? After all, it's a backwater village in Russia's autonomous republic of Komi, 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. Built by forced labor, it was once part of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag archipelago. By 2030, however, you'll know its name. By then, a pipeline from remote Ukhta will be flooding Europe with natural gas and the village will be one of Nord Stream's key transit nodes.

While Nabucco as well as South Stream remain virtual, Nord Stream is a Terminator on the run. By 2010, it will be tunneling under the Baltic Sea heading for Germany. By 2011, it should be delivering the goods and a second pipe -- 39 foot wide, 100,000 tubes long -- will be under construction to double its capacity by 2014. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller pulls no punches: this, he says, will be "the safest and most modern pipeline in the world."

How can Verdi lovers possibly compete? In the middle of a global recession, Gazprom is spending at least $20 billion to conquer Europe via Nord and South Stream. The strategy is a killer: pump gas under the sea directly to Europe, avoiding messy transit routes across troublesome countries like Ukraine. No wonder Gazprom, which today controls 26 percent of the European gas market, is expected to have a 33 percent share by 2020.

In other words, in many ways, the Nabucco versus South Stream energy war already looks settled. Nabucco is, at best, likely to be a secondary pipeline, incapable, as Washington once hoped, of breaking the E.U. away from energy dependence on Russia.

Brussels, predictably, is in its usual multilingual policy mess. Most bureaucrats at its monster, directive-churning body, the European Commission, publicly bemoan the "pipeline war." On the other hand, Ona Jukneviciene, chairwoman of the committees at the European Parliament dealing with Central Asia, admits that Nabucco cannot be the only option.

As for Reinhard Mitschek, managing director of the Nabucco consortium, he tries to put a brave face on things when he stresses, "we will transport Russian gas, Azeri gas, Iraqi gas." As for the top European official on energy matters, Andris Piebalgs, he can't help being a pragmatist: "We'll continue to work with Russia because Russia has energy resources."

From a business point of view, it's tough to argue with South Stream's selling points. Unlike Nabucco, it will offer cheaper, all-Russian natural gas that won't have to transit through potential war zones, and while Nabucco will always deliver limited amounts of Caspian natural gas to market, South Stream, given Russian resources, will have plenty of room to increase its output.

The fact is that, as of now, Nabucco still has no guaranteed sources of gas. In order for the gas to come from energy-rich Turkmenistan, to take but one example, the Turkmen leadership would have to break a deal they've already made with Russia, which now buys all of that country's export gas. There's no way that Moscow is likely to let one of the former Soviet Republics do that easily. In addition, both Russia and Iran could well be capable of blocking any pipeline straddling the floor of the Caspian Sea.

Gazprom will pay to build South Stream, and then distribute and sell gas it already controls to Europe; Nabucco, on the other hand, has to rely on a messy consortium of six countries (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Germany) simply to finance one-third of its prospective costs, and then convince wary international bankers to shell out the rest.

The Pentagon does the Black Sea

So what does Washington want out of this mess? That's easy. Rewind to then-prospective Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her Senate confirmation hearings on Jan. 13, 2009. There, she decried Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas and issued an urgent call for "investments in the Trans-Caspian energy sector." Think of it as a signal: The new Obama administration would be as committed to Nabucco as the Bush administration had been.

What is never spelled out is why. Enter the Black Sea, that crucial geo-strategic stage where Europe meets the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Enter, thus, Bulgaria, home to a new Pentagon air base in Bezmer, one of six new strategic bases being built outside the U.S. and as potentially important to Washington's future games as the stalwart air bases in Incirlik, Turkey, and Aviano, Italy have been in the past. (Aviano was the key U.S./NATO base for the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999.)

With the Pentagon's bases already creeping within a stone's throw of Southwest and Central Asia, it doesn't take a genius to imagine the role Bezmer might play in any future attack on Iran (something the Russian defense establishment has already taken careful note of). With both Romania and Bulgaria now part of NATO, Article 5 of the alliance's charter now applies. NATO can take action "in the event of crises which jeopardize Euro-Atlantic stability and could affect the security of Alliance members."

In this way, Pipelineistan meets the American Empire of Bases.

Young Turks and Wily Russians

Why is everyone so damn hooked on Central Asian oil and gas? Elshad Nasirov, deputy chairman of the state-owned Azerbaijani oil company SOCAR, sums the addiction up succinctly enough: "This is the place where there is oil and gas in abundance. It is not Arab, not Persian, not Russian, and not OPEC."

It's the Caspian and, unfortunately for Europe, the region could, in energy terms, turn out to be not the caviar for which it's renowned but so many rotten fish eggs. No one knows, after all, whether the E.U. will ever be able to buy Iranian gas via Nabucco. No one knows whether the Central Asian "stans" have enough gas to supply Russia, China, and Turkey, not to mention India and Pakistan. No one knows whether any of their leaders will have the nerve to renege on their deals with Gazprom.

Ever since a 2008 British study determined that Turkmenistan may have natural gas reserves second only to Russia on the planet, the European Commission has been on a no-holds-barred tear to lure that country into delivering some of its future gas directly to Europe -- and not through the Russian pipeline system either. Turkmenistan's inscrutable leader, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, just has to say the word, but despite the claims of E.U. officials that he has agreed to send some gas Europe-wards, he's never offered a public word of confirmation. No wonder: with Nabucco unbuilt and a pipeline from his country to China still under construction, Turkmenistan can play Pipelineistan games only with Russia and Iran. In fact, Russia essentially controls the flow of Turkmen gas for the next 15 years.

Should Gurbanguly someday say the magic word -- and assuming the Russians don't throw a monkey wrench into the works -- he can marry Turkey, as the key transit country, with the E.U. and let them all sing Verdi till the sheep come home. In the meantime, angst is the name of the game in Europe (and so in Washington).

A declassified dossier from the FSB, the Russian heir to the KGB, is adamant: considering Nabucco's shortcomings, "Russia will remain the primary supplier of energy to Europe for the foreseeable future." Call it a matter of having your gas and processing it, too. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been making the point for years. If Europe tries to snub it, Russia will simply build its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, to facilitate storage and transport, and sell its LNG all over the world.

Anyway it's worth paying attention to what the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute (where Putin earned his doctorate) has to say. According to the institute, Russia has only 20 years' worth of its own natural gas reserves left. Since Russia plans to sell up to 40 percent of its gas abroad, "Russian" gas may in the future actually mean Central Asian gas. All the more reason for the Russians to make sure that those massive Turkmen and other reserves flow north, not west.

Whatever Washington thinks, the Europeans know that energy independence from Russia is, in reality, inconceivable. Bottom line when it comes to natural gas: Europe needs everything -- Nord Stream, South Stream, and Nabucco. The bulk of the natural gas in this Pipelineistan maze may well turn out to be Central Asian anyway and a substantial part could be Iranian, if the Obama administration ever normalizes relations with Iran.

That, then, is the current state of play in the European wing of Pipelineistan. Russia seems to have virtually guaranteed its status as the top gas supplier to Europe for the foreseeable future. But that brings us to Turkey, a key regional power for both the U.S. and the E.U. As President Obama has recognized, Turkey is both a real and a metaphorical bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is also an ideal transit country for carrying non-Russian gas to Europe and is now playing its own suitably complex Pipelineistan game.

Chances are that, like Ukhta in far off Siberia, you've never heard of Yumurtalik either. It's a fishing port squeezed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Taurus mountains, very close to Ceyhan, the terminal for two key nodes of Pipelineistan: the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline from Iraq and the monster BTC pipeline. Turkey wants to turn Yumurtalik-Ceyhan into nothing less than the Rotterdam of the Mediterranean.

Even as it dreams of future E.U. membership, however, Turkey worries about antagonizing Moscow. And yet, being aboard the Nabucco Express and already fully committed to the functioning BTC pipeline puts the country on a potential collision course with Russia, its largest trading partner. Of course, this does not displease Washington.

On the other hand, the Turkish leadership draws ever closer to Iran, which provides 38 percent of Turkey's oil and 25 percent of its natural gas. Ankara and Tehran also have geopolitical affinities (especially in fighting Kurdish separatism). Together, they offer the best alternative to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia) in terms of supplying Europe with Iranian natural gas. All this, of course, drives Washington nuts.

Needless to say, the Nabucco consortium itself would kill to have Iran as a gas supplier for the pipeline. They are also familiar with realpolitik: this could happen only with a Washington-blessed solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier. Iran, for its part, knows well how to seduce Europe. Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), has insisted Iran is Europe's "sole option" for the success of Nabucco.

Is Russia just watching all this gas go by? Of course not. In October 2007, Putin signed a key agreement with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: If Iran cannot sell its gas to Nabucco -- a likelihood given the turbulence of American domestic politics and its foreign policy -- Russia will buy it. Translation: Iranian gas could end up, like Central Asian gas, heading for Europe as more "Russian" gas. With its European and Iranian policies at cross-purposes, Washington will not be amused.

When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to "rethink Nabucco" if the tricky negotiations for Turkey to enter the E.U. drag on forever, E.U. leaders got the message (as much as France and Germany may be against a "Europe without borders"). Pragmatically, most E.U. leaders know very well that they need excellent relations with Turkey to one day have access to the Big Prize, Iranian gas; and that puts Europe's energy and E.U. membership inclinations at loggerheads.

Last July in Ankara, Nabucco was formally launched by an inter-governmental agreement. The representatives of Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary were there. Obama's special Eurasian envoy, Richard Morningstar (a veteran of the BTC adventure), was there as well. The Central Asian stans were not there.

But crucially, Gurbanguly, ever the showman, finally made an entrance without ever leaving Turkmenistan, (almost) uttering the magic words in a meeting with his ministers in the capital, Ashgabat, on July 10: "Turkmenistan, staying committed to the principles of diversification of supply of its energy resources to the world markets, is going to use all available opportunities to participate in major international projects -- such as, for example, [the] Nabucco project."

At the Vienna headquarters of Nabucco the mantra remains: this is "no anti-Russian project." Still, everyone knows that Russia's leaders are eager to kill it, and not a soul from Brussels to Vienna, Washington to Ashgabat, knows how to link Central Asia to Europe via a non-Russian pipeline, at the cost of more than $10 billion, without some assurance that Turkmeni, Kazakh, Azerbaijani, and/or Iranian natural gas will be fully (or even partially) on board. Who would be foolish enough to invest that kind of money without some guarantee that hundreds of miles of aluminum tubes won't remain empty? You don't need Verdi to tell you this is one hell of a quirky plot for a global opera.

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Red Square in Moscow: It gets cold there, but that doesn't mean they like global warming.Russia may be one of the coldest nations on Earth, but it has no interest in seeing global warming continue unchecked, the Russian ambassador to the United States said in an interview.

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak said Russia is willing to work with other countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. He disagreed sharply with recent news reports suggesting Russian leaders may welcome climate change because it would make Arctic gas and oil deposits and northern regions more accessible.

“Climate change brings not only the warming of Siberia, it brings many problems that we’ll have to cope with,” Kislyak said. “They will outweigh the benefits, the perceived benefits. We have developed a lot of technologies to make even the most remote places in Siberia accessible. It’s not the biggest problem.”

Heading into climate talks in Copenhagen this December, Russia wants to ensure that all heavy emitters are involved in an international treaty, he said. Russia is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the United States.

“We want all the countries that contribute to climate change to be on board in cutting emissions,” Kislyak said. “That is kind of our guiding principle. Certainly the negotiations are going to be difficult. But I would say that, more or less, our positions are closer and closer with the United States.”

Kislyak, a veteran diplomat and a nuclear physicist by training, acknowledged that climate change wasn’t high among his areas of expertise. He framed the issue largely in economic terms.

“We want the issue of climate change to be addressed in a way that will promote the stability of the climate, rather than the way it is devolving now,” he said. “But I think everybody would claim that. The issue is, at what price and who is going to do what?”

We spoke after his talk on Russian-U.S. relations in Seattle last Friday, hosted by the Foundation for Russian American Economic Cooperation. Last September Kislyak began his ambassadorship in the aftermath of the violent conflict in South Ossetia, a time he described as the lowest point in U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War. In his address, he said he drew a good deal of optimism from President Barack Obama’s meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow last month. Yet he gave unapologetic defenses for Russia’s position in Georgia, its stance on Iran’s nuclear pursuits, and its opposition to a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe.

“We were told [the missile shield] is not against us, it’s against Iran, so Russia shouldn’t be worried. People are saying Russia was consulted when the decision was made. All of this is not completely true,” he said.

He also took a confrontational tone in discussing the Kyoto climate treaty. “We are, by the way, members of the Kyoto Protocol,” he said. “You are not. And we can afford this, easily.”

What he didn’t say is that the reason Russia can afford to meet Kyoto benchmarks is because they are based on emissions levels from 1990, two years before Russia’s economy nosedived in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Russia can continue growing its economy (and climate pollution with it) and stay comfortably within Kyoto standards for several years.

Kislyak had more to say about energy efficiency, which is a focal point of a recent report from the Center for American Progress that calls for a “reset” of U.S.-Russia relations via climate and energy cooperation.

“It is a priority for Russia because our economy is much less efficient than many others--several times less efficient,” he said. “It’s not because we are not technologically advanced, it’s because we have been living with the luxury of having so much fossil fuel that we simply didn’t care too much about it.

“Times have changed and we understand that fossil fuels need to be left for future generations. We need to be energy sufficient, but I would underline that it’s part of the Russian economic program no matter what. Whether there will be [an international climate] conference or not, we are going to modernize our economy for our own people.”

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Here’s one thing citizens of the United States, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories have in common: According to a new 19-country public opinion poll on climate change, they’re the least likely to want more action on the issue from their governments.

American citizens showed the least interest of all the countries in response to this question: “How high a priority do you think the government should place on addressing climate change?”

The poll released today by WorldPublicOpinion.org covered 19 nations that include the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters and together comprise 60 percent of the world’s population. A total of 18,578 respondents were asked about what their government is already doing, what it should be doing, and how high a priority their fellow citizens consider addressing climate change to be.

The U.S. respondents also scored lowest when they were asked to rank from 1 to 10, “How high a priority does the government [currently] place on addressing climate change?”

Taken together, the two questions suggest that 52 percent of Americans want their government to do more than it currently is on the issue. In 15 of the 19 nations, majorities said their government should make addressing climate change a higher priority.

The survey also found most people underestimate the amount of support their peers have for addressing the shared threat of climate change. In other words, your neighbors are probably more willing than you think to support a climate plan. Respondents across all countries estimated that their peers gave climate change a 6.42 priority (10 being the highest priority). In fact, the average priority was higher—7.33.

Worldpublicopinion.org director Steven Kull says the sociological term for this common phenomenon is “pluralistic ignorance.”

“This is a sort of general tendency people have to underestimate others in terms of readiness to take action to address collective problems” said Kull, a political psychologist who leads the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. “It makes people feel good to think that they are more advanced than others, socially and intellectually. That they can better see the need for addressing long-term problems.”

While this poll focused on average citizens (see the full results methodology [PDF]), previous polls found that political leaders consistently underestimate the support of their citizens for addressing complex, long-term problems such as climate change. The same group’s 2004 Hall of Mirrors study [PDF] found that 71 percent of the public favored ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. However, only 38 percents of U.S. leaders (senior congressional staffers, Bush administration officials, and leaders in business, labor, and media) estimated that a majority of the public would support it. Only 28 percent of leaders estimated that it would be a large majority.

Leaders may be making the same miscalculation about this year’s climate and energy debate, Kull said. He took issue with polls that ask participants to rank a series of issues from most to least important, such as a Pew Research Center project in January.

“Americans consistently say that more should be done [on climate change],” he said. “At the same time if you give them a list of priorities [to rank] climate tends not to be one that they rank as one of the most important.”

Prioritization polls don’t account for the fact that Americans may want significant action on a lot of issues, he said.

China’s strong interest in government climate action is consistent with the findings of other research, said Kull, who has conducted focus-group polling in the country. Even when told by their government that climate change is the responsibility of industrialized nations, Chinese tend to support national action, he said.

“They generally have a kind of can-do attitude,” he said. “They also perceive that their economy is growing so much that they feel like they can afford the costs related to addressing climate change.”

Mexico’s position as the most supportive of government action surprised Kull, and he said he didn’t have a ready interpretation for it.

German participants had the strongest perception that their government was doing a lot on climate. Only 46 percent of Germans wanted their government to do more. Respondents from two other leading emitters--India and Russia--fell in the middle on support for government action.

Polls were conducted by different research centers in each country, and Kull cautioned against making too much of country-to-country comparisons. “We can’t exactly say that everybody relates to this 0-10 scale in the same way,” he said.

The survey relied on respondents’ current knowledge of the issue--each of the three questions used the phrase “addressing climate change” without explaining the threats of climate change or the benefits of stopping it. The survey was conducted from April to early July and had a margin of error of 3 to 4 percentage points.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Conquering its vast wilderness has long been a dream of Russia's rulers, even the not-so-capitalist ones...Freedom Toast via FlickrOK, this is really a glorified retweet, but Brad Plumer has a fascinating post at the New Republic about Russia’s apparent enthusiasm for climate change:  “Many Russia leaders are actually excited about a warmer world where Siberia's thawed out, St. Petersburg's more livable, and state-owned mining companies can drill like crazy in the ice-free Arctic.”

Plumer walks through a dispatch from the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National that outlines what Russia stands to gain from a warming climate, and why the country may have little interest in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. He concludes:

Given our national histories, it’s easier to feel scared by Russia’s stance on climate than, say, Brazil’s. But still. Here’s hoping there are other ways to look at Russia’s position—i.e. reasons it will want to curb warming that aren’t covered by Plumer or a Gulf State newspaper.

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Copenhagen talks ready for take off: 5, 4, 3…

City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks

Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.This Center for American Progress post, by Senior Fellow Andrew Light, Senior Policy Analyst Julian L. Wong, and Fellow Samuel Charap, was first published here.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States. on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia-both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue-explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia, like the United States, is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America's top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world's most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

The Center for American Progress report "After the ‘Reset': A Strategy and New Agenda for U.S. Russia Policy" will be released on July 2 and outlines three avenues of U.S.-Russia bilateral cooperation on climate and energy issues: cooperation on a new international climate change agreement, building Russia's capacity for carbon trading, and cooperating on energy efficiency. Here we expand on these proposals.

Our approach is based on the principle that the best way to engage Russia on global warming is to frame cooperation as a form of advancing economic modernization. We must convince the Russians that joining the community of nations on this issue is in their best economic interest.

The United States should directly engage Russia on reaching a new international climate change agreement.

The build up to the climate summit in Copenhagen is making it clear that broad-based involvement by all countries-but especially the developed countries and major emerging economies in the developing world-is needed to create a consensus on global climate change action. Most of the attention is focused on the United States, the European Union, China, and India as the major players necessary to forge a global deal, and there is insufficient thought given to the role Russia could play in a post-Kyoto agreement. There are however at least two reasons-besides the fact that Russia is a Kyoto signatory and a major emitter-to engage Russia directly in Copenhagen.

First, we should expect some resistance to a Russian embrace of an extension to or replacement of the Kyoto Protocol given the unique history of the relationship between the original assessment of their 2012 Kyoto targets and the transformation of their economy following collapse of the Soviet Union.

Our approach is based on the principle that the best way to engage Russia on global warming is to frame cooperation as a form of advancing economic modernization.

The agreed-to carbon reduction targets in the Kyoto Protocol were indexed to 1990 emission levels. Those countries signing the treaty were obliged to reduce their emissions to an agreed-upon level by 2012 relative to the baseline of their 1990 emissions. Russian emissions dropped considerably because of the economic contraction that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, without any additional efforts Russian emissions will not return to their 1990 levels before at least 2020 and Moscow will not be required to curb its emissions by the end of the Kyoto commitment period in 2012.

This means the Russians are likely to oppose stronger caps on emissions, which will be a necessary part of the hoped-for Copenhagen treaty. Indeed, Russia was the last major economy to announce its proposed post-Kyoto targets of 10 to 15 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Such a proposed range has left many observers underwhelmed because it will actually allow for absolute increases in emissions from Russia's current state, but the international community should view this as an opening bid rather than final offer by actively engaging with Russia in constructive dialogue.

If we cannot strengthen the treaty and move progressively toward gradual but greater emissions cuts then we will not reach the goal of halving global emissions by 2050, something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues is necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Given the sheer quantities of Russian emissions-regardless of their dip below 1990 levels-the Obama administration should work with the Russians to demonstrate that abatement measures are in Moscow's long-term economic interest.

Improvements in energy efficiency and energy intensity, for example, further economic modernization-one of the Kremlin's oft-repeated goals-and they will promote more sustainable economic growth. But for the United States to make this argument we must take the lead and make steady progress in adopting strong domestic clean-energy and climate policy, such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed in the U.S. House last week. We must also be prepared to listen to our Russian counterparts and not lecture, since a finger-wagging approach will only backfire in the Russian context.

Second, Russia could be one of the unacknowledged keys to success at Copenhagen given the likely structure of the treaty. According to the architecture of the first U.N. climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol could not have been enacted unless at least 55 countries signed and ratified it representing at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions. When the first round of commitments were announced enough countries were willing to ratify the treaty but their emissions did not add up to the required amount for implementation. So if Russia had not ratified the treaty in November 2004 it would have not gone into effect. Russian participation could again be critical this time because we can expect a similar proviso in the post-Kyoto treaty.

We need to bring the Russians on board for an ambitious agenda before Copenhagen sooner rather than later to avoid a deadlock in the international climate negotiations. Immediate bilateral cooperation and engagement is key in making Russia a partner in addressing climate change-it is not in the U.S. interest for Russia to be a spoiler.

But this cooperation faces significant challenges. There are many in the Russian political establishment who believe that the effects of climate change will be positive for their country. What's more, policymakers tend to view climate agreements in exclusively economic and not environmental terms. Russian policymakers, like their Chinese counterparts, emphasize that any emissions caps should not threaten Russia's economic development. However, Russia has recently released a draft climate doctrine that acknowledges the threat posed by climate change-a positive sign.

The United States should help Russia capitalize on the substantial amounts of emission credits it now possesses with the goal of ultimately reducing its emissions.

Russia currently sits on a veritable treasure of tradable carbon credits-by some estimates 1.5 billion euros. Russia is not linked to any existing emissions trading system, such as the European Trading Scheme, and it lacks the institutional capacity to do so. The United States is in a good position to provide capacity building expertise to Russia in establishing an emissions trading market because of our experience in establishing emissions trading markets, most notably the highly successful sulfur dioxide trading scheme in the 1990s and more recently regional (Western Climate Imitative, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and Midwestern Initiative) and voluntary (Chicago Climate Exchange) carbon emissions trading initiatives.

We need to bring the Russians on board for an ambitious agenda before Copenhagen sooner rather than later to avoid a deadlock in the international climate negotiations.

The administration should also create incentives for these U.S. trading centers to collaborate with the Russians to launch a pilot emissions trading scheme in one or more of Russia's heavy industry sectors. Such efforts can include guidance on how to set up inventory systems for tracking greenhouse gas sources and sinks and to establish the architecture and infrastructure for the actual trading of emission credits, with the long-term goal of linking Russia (or specific sectors) into broader trading systems.

Developing Russia's capacity in emissions trading will help it to be in a better position to join a large trading scheme as a full participant if and when it agrees to begin stemming its current emissions. This proposal is likely to be met with support from major Russian enterprises, including the state-controlled oil major Rosneft, which has already demonstrated interest in related emissions trading projects. The larger objective of such cooperation should be clear: demonstrating to the Russian government that joining international efforts to solve global warming can be profitable to them by providing a way of joining the international carbon market. The revenues from carbon credit trading will offset the cost of taking on additional cuts at home.

The United States should also propose a series of cooperative agreements on increasing Russia's energy efficiency.

One of the most striking features of Russia's energy profile is its energy intensity-the amount of energy consumed per unit of gross domestic product-which is higher than any of the world's 10-largest energy-consuming countries, 3.1 times greater than the European Union, and more than twice that of the United States. This massive potential for improvement makes working with the Russians to increase their energy efficiency the most effective short-term way to help them reduce emissions and points toward the clearest path for demonstrating the economic advantages of taking on climate change.

It is important for the United States to adopt this stance to take advantage of the opportunity that has recently opened up in Russia. For the first time the Russian government has demonstrated an interest in increasing efficiency. President Medvedev signed a decree in June 2008 that includes measures aimed at reducing Russia's energy intensity by at least 40 percent by 2020 compared with 2007 levels. And Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issued a government order earlier this year that calls for a significant increase in the energy efficiency of the Russian electric power sector. Medvedev has on several occasions publicly acknowledged the economic benefits of energy efficiency for Russia's economy. As such energy efficiency represents an enormous opportunity for collaboration between our two countries.

Fortunately the United States has a ready and successful model for such collaboration in its experience in working with China on industrial energy efficiency. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a research institution supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, has worked with Chinese scientists and the Chinese government to establish an industrial energy efficiency program that benchmarks China's top 1,000 energy-consuming industries to global best practices.

We recommend that the Obama administration propose a similar type of program that targets Russia's industrial sectors given the potential for substantial financial savings through energy efficiency in Russia's industrial sector and the Russian government's interest. Funding for such a project would come from both the U.S. and Russian governments, working through public-private partnerships, and that any potentially new energy-saving technologies that could emerge from this collaboration be fully shared. We should also frame this project as an opportunity for U.S. and Russian scientists to collaborate on contributing to Russia's innovation agenda and produce technologies that benefit both countries because of the sensitivity of U.S. involvement in the Russian economy.

Further, the United States can play a role in increasing Russian efficiencies by offering expertise to improve energy conservation at Russia's end-user level. The United States has had considerable success with a domestic energy efficiency program called Energy Star, which is administered jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Energy Star adopts the public-private partnership model-a concept gaining traction in Russia-by pairing up with businesses to develop energy efficiency compliance codes for a full range of products and practices, which now cover buildings and facilities and over 60 product categories, such as home appliances, office equipment, lighting, home electronics, and more.

In over 17 years of operation Energy Star has engendered collaboration among 15,000 private- and public-sector organizations, and led to estimated energy savings that translate to $19 billion in 2008 alone. It will be further strengthened by the aforementioned American Clean Energy Security Act should a companion bill in the Senate also pass. We recommend that the United States and Russia use the American experience with Energy Star to develop long-term Russian institutional capacity for establishing best practices, setting energy performance standards, and monitoring energy consumption across a wide range of end uses in Russia.

Russia and the United States were incapable of discussing important issues in the final months of the Bush presidency. The Obama administration now has the opportunity to build a relationship of trust and cooperation to fight a common threat. Working together on advancing energy efficiency in Russia and demonstrating the economic advantages of attending to climate change offers both countries an ideal platform for a new era of constructive diplomacy and joint action. Climate and energy efficiency can also expand the U.S.-Russia relationship beyond the traditional areas of arms control and nonproliferation. President Obama should capitalize on this opportunity starting next week in Moscow when he meets with Medvedev. Confronting this neglected challenge may very well wind up being a key to solving the climate crisis.

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Treat energy efficiency like a utility

Copenhagen: Getting past the urgency trap

The road to Copenhagen

International climate negotiations often seem like some sort of cosmic science fair project -- an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors. There's a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light.

Faith in the UN climate process has dimmed. Joe Romm calls it a "dead man walking." The Copenhagen talks in December are generally discussed with the same dissonant mixture of urgency ("You have to do it in Copenhagen," says UNFCCC chair Yvo de Boer) and fatalism ("There is no movement," says German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel) as the last dozen rounds of international talks.

The Obama administration knows the danger of sclerosis and is working on several fronts to regain a sense of momentum. A good bit of that work will happen during this busy week, which will take the president to Russia to meet with President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin; he'll deliver a major speech on U.S.-Russia relations today. On Wednesday, he heads to Italy for the latest meeting of the G8 countries (US, France, UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada). On Thursday, on the sidelines of the G8, Obama will convene a meeting of the Major Economies Forum (the G8 plus Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa). On Friday he'll head to Ghana and on Saturday he'll deliver a major speech on development and democracy.

At all these events the issue of climate change will play a role. All will reveal something about the Obama administration's approach to international climate negotiations.

The Grand Plan

International climate negotiations have primarily been channeled through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but many in the international community are losing faith in that process, or at least in its monopoly on negotiations. Getting 192 countries to sign on to a meaningful treaty is nigh impossible; the lowest common denominator among 192 wildly diverse countries turns out to be pretty damn low.

Oddly, it was the Bush administration that first saw a way around the thicket. In May 2007 it announced a series of Major Economies Meetings on climate and energy security. The idea was that the largest greenhouse gas emitters could more easily find areas of agreement working directly with one another, and that what consensus they could find would help break the logjam in the UNFCCC process.

The sincerity of Bush's effort was widely doubted -- he (in)famously advocated for purely voluntary measures -- but the basic wisdom of the strategy is apparent to, among others, the Obama administration. In fact Obama seems to be taking it even farther, working not only with smaller groups like the Major Economies Forum (MEF) and the G8, but bilaterally with other large emitters. What shape these smaller deals take could vary, from shared targets to technology R&D agreements, but again, the idea is to show that big emitters are finally acting, taking real steps. This will, it is hoped, cut through the Gordian you-go-first knot sure to bedevil the Copenhagen climate talks.

The strategy began with Todd Stern's initial efforts in China, but "you can definitely say we are looking for other partners," an administration official said.

Russia

Most members of the international community had written Russia off when it comes to climate change. It grudgingly ratified Kyoto back in 2004, serving as the crucial final signatory needed to put the treaty into effect. But since then it's focused on nothing but often dirty and inefficient means of expanding its economy. Just last month, in what many interpreted as a thumb in the eye of the UN process, it announced a "climate plan" that would increase its greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020.

The reason Russia, a Kyoto signatory, can grow its emissions so heedlessly is that emission baselines for the UN process were set at 1990 levels. Of course in 1992 Russia's economy cratered, and with it the country's emissions. The damage was so great that the economy would need to grow substantially to meet a target of 10-15% below 1990 levels by 2020 -- and that's what it plans to do.

Most observers expected Obama to focus exclusively on arms control and the financial crisis when he goes to Russia, since progress on climate seems so hopeless. But as The Guardian reports, the administration fully intends to forge a deal on joint climate action. It's been pulling its ideas from a new report from the Center on American Progress.

The goal is to coax Russia into accepting strong sticks (mandatory targets at the Copenhagen talks) by offering it carrots. One is help entering carbon trading markets. The country is thought to be sitting on some 1.9 billion euros worth of carbon credits -- one of the main reasons it signed Kyoto -- but the government does not have the capacity or infrastructure to monitor emissions and approve projects. The U.S. could help with that, since it has considerable experience with such markets.

The other carrot is efficiency. Russia's energy intensity -- energy use per unit of GDP -- is twice America's, and the highest among the world's high energy consuming countries. Targeted exchange of efficiency technology and know-how could not only bend Russia's emissions curve but make its economy more productive. It's a win-win, but again, the government needs help. (Interestingly, Russia just announced that it will ban some incandescent lights by 2011.)

No big U.S.-Russia agreements on climate are expected this week, but Monday saw the introduction of a working group on energy, formed as part of a high-level bilateral commission created out of the summit. Steven Chu will chair the group on the US side.

G8 + MEF

The MEF is a smaller group of countries than the full UNFCCC, but it's still large and diverse, and there are enormous challenges in the way of getting a substantive agreement this week. Here are a few:

China + India

The overwhelming short-term priorities for developing countries are poverty reduction and economic development, driven in part by coal-based power. That's why China and India have both recently signaled that they will not commit to any binding GHG reduction targets. No, seriously, they won't. Says Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh, “India will not accept any emissions targets -- period. It is the bottom line; a non-negotiable stand. This is not something that India is going to budge on, under any circumstances." OK then!

Both countries (India; China) have also recently expressed ostentatious outrage about the possibility that the United States will impose "carbon tariffs" on imported goods. (A border adjustment provision was inserted in the Waxman-Markey bill before it passed the House.) Developing countries warn of an incipient trade war. Of course, as John Kemp points out, the provisions in the bill are not actually carbon tariffs but "carefully structured as import permits specifically to ensure they are consistent with World Trade Organisation rules." And sure enough, the WTO has signaled that the import permits are legal. China and India fear them.

Obama has spoken publicly against the border adjustments, but as Brad Plumer notes, it's helpful to have that stick in hand to make the carrots look better. (Todd Stern didn't have it when he went to China early last month.)

Of course China is hardly sitting on its hands. It's green stimulus package was both larger and greener than America's. Just this month it boosted its renewable energy targets to 15% by 2020. It looks set to swamp the U.S. in both wind and solar investment this year; between now and 2020, it's expected to spend more on renewables and nuclear than on oil and coal.

The central government has established the State Council's Expert Panel on Climate Change Policy to work on energy development plans that will involve trillions in investment. "Roughly, we need to spend an extra 1 trillion yuan every year to raise energy efficiency," said panel member Bai Quan. Just as importantly, maybe more so, it announced that regional government officials will be judged by reductions in carbon intensity instead of purely by economic growth. Getting career bureaucrats on board is essential to making sure the central planners' schemes become reality. The green shift is dispersing into rural areas as well.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke will head to China later this month to talk turkey. Says Chu, "It's in our interest and China's to explore ways to cooperate for our mutual benefit--by promoting renewable energy, encouraging energy efficiency and cutting pollution." Chu's assistant secretary David Sandalow is hosting a high-level discussion on engaging China on CCS this Thursday in D.C.; a second, focused on finance and political barriers, will happen soon thereafter.

You can imagine Chu announcing a splashy post-combustion CCS development project, or an investment in solar thermal projects, in exchange for back-channel agreements on a timeline for the country to accept hard emission reductions targets (and back off on border adjustment fussing).

What's next

Japan and Brazil are among the other countries with which Obama may pursue bilateral deals, possibly before Copenhagen. The big sticking point with Brazil is avoided deforestation. They don't want it paid for via carbon credits, through the Reduced Emissions through Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program -- they want it paid for with cold hard cash (so old-fashioned!). So far, no one except Norway is biting.

If all goes well -- an enormous if, of course -- the U.S. negotiating team arrive at Copenhagen with a web of bi- and multi-lateral side deals on clean energy technology sharing, adaptation research, development assistance, trade deals, and more. The world's biggest polluters will arrive with agreements in hand. Developing countries will see signs of real movement on the part of developed nations and soften their rigid opposition to targets.

And out of it all will come a stronger, more robust climate treaty, scaffolded by the self-interest of the many countries invested in side deals premised on continued international action.

That's the hope anyway. Needless to say: domestic achievements notwithstanding, if Obama can pull it off he'll be assured of a place in history.

Related Links:

The U.S.-India climate ‘partnership’

Obama administration officials grateful for early spring

Fair, Ambitious & Binding: Essentials for a Successful Climate Deal

This piece was co-written with colleagues from the Center for American Progress: Julian L. Wong, a Senior Policy Analyst, and Samuel Charap, a Fellow.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia—both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue—explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia,like the United States,is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America’s top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world’s most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

The Center for American Progress report “After the ‘Reset’: A Strategy and New Agenda for U.S. Russia Policy” will be released on July 2 and outlines three avenues of U.S.-Russia bilateral cooperation on climate and energy issues: cooperation on a new international climate change agreement, building Russia’s capacity for carbon trading, and cooperating on energy efficiency. Here we expand on these proposals.

Our approach is based on the principle that the best way to engage Russia on global warming is to frame cooperation as a form of advancing economic modernization. We must convince the Russians that joining the community of nations on this issue is in their best economic interest.

Cooperation on Copenhagen

The United States should directly engage Russia on reaching a new international climate change agreement.

The build up to the climate summit in Copenhagen is making it clear that broad-based involvement by all countries—but especially the developed countries and major emerging economies in the developing world—is needed to create a consensus on global climate change action. Most of the attention is focused on the United States, the European Union, China, and India as the major players necessary to forge a global deal, and there is insufficient thought given to the role Russia could play in a post-Kyoto agreement. There are however at least two reasons—besides the fact that Russia is a Kyoto signatory and a major emitter—to engage Russia directly in Copenhagen.

First, we should expect some resistance to a Russian embrace of an extension to or replacement of the Kyoto Protocol given the unique history of the relationship between the original assessment of their 2012 Kyoto targets and the transformation of their economy following collapse of the Soviet Union.

Our approach is based on the principle that the best way to engage Russia on global warming is to frame cooperation as a form of advancing economic modernization.

The agreed-to carbon reduction targets in the Kyoto Protocol were indexed to 1990 emission levels. Those countries signing the treaty were obliged to reduce their emissions to an agreed-upon level by 2012 relative to the baseline of their 1990 emissions. Russian emissions dropped considerably because of the economic contraction that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, without any additional efforts Russian emissions will not return to their 1990 levels before at least 2020 and Moscow will not be required to curb its emissions by the end of the Kyoto commitment period in 2012.

This means the Russians are likely to oppose stronger caps on emissions, which will be a necessary part of the hoped-for Copenhagen treaty. Indeed, Russia was the last major economy to announce its proposed post-Kyoto targets of 10 to 15 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Such a proposed range has left many observers underwhelmed because it will actually allow for absolute increases in emissions from Russia’s current state, but the international community should view this as an opening bid rather than final offer by actively engaging with Russia in constructive dialogue.

If we cannot strengthen the treaty and move progressively toward gradual but greater emissions cuts then we will not reach the goal of halving global emissions by 2050, something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues is necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Given the sheer quantities of Russian emissions—regardless of their dip below 1990 levels—the Obama administration should work with the Russians to demonstrate that abatement measures are in Moscow’s long-term economic interest.

Improvements in energy efficiency and energy intensity, for example, further economic modernization—one of the Kremlin’s oft-repeated goals—and they will promote more sustainable economic growth. But for the United States to make this argument we must take the lead and make steady progress in adopting strong domestic clean-energy and climate policy, such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed in the U.S. House last week. We must also be prepared to listen to our Russian counterparts and not lecture, since a finger-wagging approach will only backfire in the Russian context.

Second, Russia could be one of the unacknowledged keys to success at Copenhagen given the likely structure of the treaty. According to the architecture of the first U.N. climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol could not have been enacted unless at least 55 countries signed and ratified it representing at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions. When the first round of commitments were announced enough countries were willing to ratify the treaty but their emissions did not add up to the required amount for implementation. So if Russia had not ratified the treaty in November 2004 it would have not gone into effect. Russian participation could again be critical this time because we can expect a similar proviso in the post-Kyoto treaty.

We need to bring the Russians on board for an ambitious agenda before Copenhagen sooner rather than later to avoid a deadlock in the international climate negotiations. Immediate bilateral cooperation and engagement is key in making Russia a partner in addressing climate change—it is not in the U.S. interest for Russia to be a spoiler.

But this cooperation faces significant challenges. There are many in the Russian political establishment who believe that the effects of climate change will be positive for their country. What’s more, policymakers tend to view climate agreements in exclusively economic and not environmental terms. Russian policymakers, like their Chinese counterparts, emphasize that any emissions caps should not threaten Russia’s economic development. However, Russia has recently released a draft climate doctrine that acknowledges the threat posed by climate change—a positive sign.

Building capacity for carbon trading

The United States should help Russia capitalize on the substantial amounts of emission credits it now possesses with the goal of ultimately reducing its emissions.

Russia currently sits on a veritable treasure of tradable carbon credits—by some estimates 1.5 billion euros. Russia is not linked to any existing emissions trading system, such as the European Trading Scheme, and it lacks the institutional capacity to do so. The United States is in a good position to provide capacity building expertise to Russia in establishing an emissions trading market because of our experience in establishing emissions trading markets, most notably the highly successful sulfur dioxide trading scheme in the 1990s and more recently regional (Western Climate Imitative, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and Midwestern Initiative) and voluntary (Chicago Climate Exchange) carbon emissions trading initiatives.

We need to bring the Russians on board for an ambitious agenda before Copenhagen sooner rather than later to avoid a deadlock in the international climate negotiations.

The administration should also create incentives for these U.S. trading centers to collaborate with the Russians to launch a pilot emissions trading scheme in one or more of Russia’s heavy industry sectors. Such efforts can include guidance on how to set up inventory systems for tracking greenhouse gas sources and sinks and to establish the architecture and infrastructure for the actual trading of emission credits, with the long-term goal of linking Russia (or specific sectors) into broader trading systems.

Developing Russia’s capacity in emissions trading will help it to be in a better position to join a large trading scheme as a full participant if and when it agrees to begin stemming its current emissions. This proposal is likely to be met with support from major Russian enterprises, including the state-controlled oil major Rosneft, which has already demonstrated interest in related emissions trading projects. The larger objective of such cooperation should be clear: demonstrating to the Russian government that joining international efforts to solve global warming can be profitable to them by providing a way of joining the international carbon market. The revenues from carbon credit trading will offset the cost of taking on additional cuts at home.

Cooperation on energy efficiency

The United States should also propose a series of cooperative agreements on increasing Russia’s energy efficiency.

One of the most striking features of Russia’s energy profile is its energy intensity—the amount of energy consumed per unit of gross domestic product—which is higher than any of the world’s 10-largest energy-consuming countries, 3.1 times greater than the European Union, and more than twice that of the United States. This massive potential for improvement makes working with the Russians to increase their energy efficiency the most effective short-term way to help them reduce emissions and points toward the clearest path for demonstrating the economic advantages of taking on climate change.

It is important for the United States to adopt this stance to take advantage of the opportunity that has recently opened up in Russia. For the first time the Russian government has demonstrated an interest in increasing efficiency. President Medvedev signed a decree in June 2008 that includes measures aimed at reducing Russia's energy intensity by at least 40 percent by 2020 compared with 2007 levels. And Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issued a government order earlier this year that calls for a significant increase in the energy efficiency of the Russian electric power sector. Medvedev has on several occasions publicly acknowledged the economic benefits of energy efficiency for Russia’s economy. As such energy efficiency represents an enormous opportunity for collaboration between our two countries.

Fortunately the United States has a ready and successful model for such collaboration in its experience in working with China on industrial energy efficiency. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a research institution supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, has worked with Chinese scientists and the Chinese government to establish an industrial energy efficiency program that benchmarks China’s top 1,000 energy-consuming industries to global best practices.

We recommend that the Obama administration propose a similar type of program that targets Russia’s industrial sectors given the potential for substantial financial savings through energy efficiency in Russia’s industrial sector and the Russian government’s interest. Funding for such a project would come from both the U.S. and Russian governments, working through public-private partnerships, and that any potentially new energy-saving technologies that could emerge from this collaboration be fully shared. We should also frame this project as an opportunity for U.S. and Russian scientists to collaborate on contributing to Russia’s innovation agenda and produce technologies that benefit both countries because of the sensitivity of U.S. involvement in the Russian economy.

Further, the United States can play a role in increasing Russian efficiencies by offering expertise to improve energy conservation at Russia’s end-user level. The United States has had considerable success with a domestic energy efficiency program called Energy Star, which is administered jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Energy Star adopts the public-private partnership model—a concept gaining traction in Russia—by pairing up with businesses to develop energy efficiency compliance codes for a full range of products and practices, which now cover buildings and facilities and over 60 product categories, such as home appliances, office equipment, lighting, home electronics, and more.

In over 17 years of operation Energy Star has engendered collaboration among 15,000 private- and public-sector organizations, and led to estimated energy savings that translate to $19 billion in 2008 alone. It will be further strengthened by the aforementioned American Clean Energy Security Act should a companion bill in the Senate also pass. We recommend that the United States and Russia use the American experience with Energy Star to develop long-term Russian institutional capacity for establishing best practices, setting energy performance standards, and monitoring energy consumption across a wide range of end uses in Russia.

Russia and the United States were incapable of discussing important issues in the final months of the Bush presidency. The Obama administration now has the opportunity to build a relationship of trust and cooperation to fight a common threat. Working together on advancing energy efficiency in Russia and demonstrating the economic advantages of attending to climate change offers both countries an ideal platform for a new era of constructive diplomacy and joint action. Climate and energy efficiency can also expand the U.S.-Russia relationship beyond the traditional areas of arms control and nonproliferation. President Obama should capitalize on this opportunity starting next week in Moscow when he meets with Medvedev. Confronting this neglected challenge may very well wind up being a key to solving the climate crisis.

See "After the Reset" for a full report on CAP's recommendations for US-Russia relations.

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The Climate Post is a weekly roundup of climate news, produced by the The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University.

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The word "Copenhagen" hangs over climate discussions everywhere from Washington to Wagga Wagga. That’s because in December the world travels to the Danish capital for the 15th Conference of Parties meeting, affectionately referred to as COP15. There, nations large and small hope to reach a new international agreement that would ratchet down global emissions beginning after 2012.

Expectations for a conclusive deal have diminished over the last several months. But negotiations of every stripe continue, and will accelerate through the summer and fall. This week saw nations, businesses, and advocacy groups ramp up activity.

Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change, traveled to Paris, where he met with representatives from 15 other major economies and the European Union. Together these nations contribute more than 80 percent of industrial CO2 emissions. European officials pressed the U.S. for a stronger emissions reduction program than the one outlined in current climate legislation. Europe’s own goals are tied to the rest of the world. Leaders there have committed by 2020 to a 20 percent reduction in their emissions, below 1990 levels. If negotiators produce a new agreement in Copenhagen, the E.U. has vowed to raise that target to 30 percent.

Stern told his counterparts that pollution reductions below targets in the current House of Representatives climate bill are politically unfeasible: "We are jumping as high as the political system will tolerate."

Sino the Times: A more promising note rang from Beijing, where the government has issued draft car fuel economy standards tougher than those President Barack Obama announced last week, according to the New York Times. Chinese cars currently average about 35.8 miles per gallon and would be required to reach 42.2 mpg in 2015 (Obama’s new standard is 35.5 mpg by 2016). Chinese officials have yet to address a loophole large enough to drive a Hummer through: Standards apply only to cars produced in China — not imports.

In Beijing, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told Chinese leaders that the "climate crisis is game-changing for the U.S.-China relationship." Pelosi visited Beijing days after the Chinese government issued its formal negotiating stance for Copenhagen, which asks major emitters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2020. It’s hard to come up with a precise analogy for how difficult such a target would be. But certainly Americans could meet it easily by, uh, eliminating all household and commercial refrigeration.

Fortunately, striking a deal might ultimately cost much less than our entire national store of popsicles, ice cream, and frozen vegetables. Reuters interviews Gao Guangsheng, a top official in the National Coordination Committee for Climate Change, who acknowledges flexibility in the Chinese position. "I think Copenhagen may not be the final negotiation. It may set policy intentions so that we can keep negotiating," he said.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who also went to China, put a finer point on current negotiations between the world’s two largest emitters: "Copenhagen will be defined by what the U.S. and China agree on in the next few weeks."

Other nations admit little or no such sunlight between their formal and informal negotiating positions. India has said it will look to the developed world for definitive leadership before considering a rigorous climate policy. ClimateWire explores the task facing climate advocates in India tilting at this particular windmill. "The Indian government’s agenda will not change until Indians want it to change," Malini Mehra, the founder of the Indian nonprofit Centre for Social Markets told U.N. Foundation audience in Washington, DC.

Climate glasnost?: Even intransigent national positions on climate change can change abruptly and dramatically, as they did after the 2008 U.S. election. They can also do so without warning.

Russia surprised the climate world by finally acknowledging the potentially catastrophic threats of manmade warming, Nature reports. The magnitude of this change might not be immediately apparent. Imagine that Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok.) jettisoned his longstanding ridicule of basic science and climate policy, and adopted a position as rigorous as that of Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful House committee chairman and lead author of that chamber’s current climate bill. That’s what happened when the natural resources minister briefed the Russian Cabinet in April. Officials calculated that the economy already takes nearly a $2 billion hit every year, because of climate-related flooding, droughts, and storms.

This thaw in climate politics amounts to a major political shift in Russian attitudes. And its intended result is to prevent actual thaw that would amount to a climate shift in Russian latitudes. Edward Schuur of the University of Florida and colleagues write in Nature that warmer temperatures unleash soil carbon stored for many thousands of years in permafrost. Over the next few decades, carbon release from tundra could "overwhelm" the amount that plants use to grow, creating another accelerator for warming.

"If it isn’t boring, it isn’t green": Stern and Pelosi are not the U.S.’s only world travelers this week. Some 500 business leaders convened in the state of Denmark itself, calling on nations to halve their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a target much lower than the 80 percent or so advocated by Obama and congressional allies.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a London audience that whitewashing the world’s roofs would reflect enough solar energy back into space to match emissions reductions from taking 11 million cars off the road. This is worth keeping in mind in coming weeks and months as Congress considers climate legislation (Legislators have the week off for Memorial Day). Little things, aggregated globally, mean a lot.

"Cap and trade" or no "cap and trade," the White House and Capitol are unlikely to ever change how they address global warming. That’s because both buildings reflect about 240 watts per square meter of solar energy right back up into the sky. (It’s the same principle behind parental encouragement to wear light shirts on sunny summer days. White and light colors reflect energy; black and dark colors absorb it.)

That’s just one approach. These buildings’ whiteness comes from heavy, hydrocarbon paints, which given the size of the buildings probably store several tons of carbon. The buildings themselves keep many tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. The Capitol Rotunda alone, made of Triassic and Cretaceous period sandstone, keeps carbon locked away in rock.

Climate Post is, of course, kidding in pointing out these relatively paltry stores of carbon. But maybe as elected officials and policymakers consider paths forward, they’ll take a moment to meditate on or marvel at the bigger picture — the much bigger picture — of the history they are making (either way), the common U.S. history that led them to this episode, its role in the community of nations, and the community of nations’ current, consequential role in the history of the Earth’s climate and life. How "cool" is that?

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This is a guest post by Pepe Escobar, the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for the Real News. This article draws from his new book, Obama does Globalistan. He may be reached at pepeasia AT yahoo.com. This post was originally published at TomDispatch, and it is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

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What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen," Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow -- which digitally details every single pipeline in Eurasia -- or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.

Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.

Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or that "war on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?

Calling Dr. Zbig

In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the U.S. on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy." Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).

For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from, that is, thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system."

By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.

Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington -- will have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.

Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development of energy alternatives." Though you may not have noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.

In these early skirmishes of the twenty-first century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of 9/11, its leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a while.

Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -- Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan -- which the Clinton administration and then the new Bush administration, run by those former energy men, had been eying covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.

Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -- and thus sell much more to the West than U.S.-imposed sanctions now allow. No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neocon chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a U.S. attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to represent.

Global BRIC-a-brac

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang Province, its Far West.

The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.

Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations -- Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist -- and, because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr. Zbig and President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the twenty-first century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries -- for those of you by now collecting Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high octane dream.

The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.

Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the Chinese border. No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of U.S. military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).

AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered in the U.S., is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan," slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a U.S.-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by President Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and later by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (thence on to Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.

As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base the U.S. had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo. Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neocon-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").

How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's Global War on Terror. Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable -- but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.

Rainy Night in Georgia

If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability -- in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.

It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant," less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.

From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing -- and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.

The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.

For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the U.S. version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.

Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.

President Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC -- its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe -- means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.

In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.

In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC -- once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil -- lives or dies.

Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those U.S. bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.

And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from the Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.

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Showing a distinct lack of American patriotism, Alaskan pollock are reacting to climate-changed warmer waters by swimming northward into Russian territory -- potentially endangering both the U.S.'s billion-dollar pollock industry and U.S.-Russia relations. Climate-related pollock migration "will be a food security issue and has an enormous potential for political upheaval," warns Andrew Rosenberg, former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Salmon, squid, and mackerel are also moving northward, but the certified-sustainable pollock fishery is arguably of most concern. Estimates hold that anywhere between 10 and 30 percent of Alaskan pollock now rear their heads in Russian territory. If Russians schlep up 20 percent of the available catch, "do we eat it and reduce our catches to manage conservatively?" frets marine-policy professor Keith Criddle. "If we get to the position where Russians are taking 50 percent of the catch, what are we going to do?"

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Final venues have been approved for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Following outcry from environmentalists over the original proposal for a gigantic winter-sports complex adjacent to a national park, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reared his head and suggested changes to mitigate eco-impact. Organizers have relocated some venues, as well as cutting a planned inter-venue light-rail system from two tracks to one and a highway from four lanes to three. As organizers make plans to build 250 facilities, mostly from scratch, Sochi 2014 President Dmitry Chernyshenko gives the ambitious assurance that they're "committed to an environmental policy that will not only protect, but also enhance the overall environment of the region." Sochi, by the by, is just 12 miles from Abkhazia, a former territory of Georgia. Notes Olympic affairs expert Eric Morse, "It is possible that [the Russia-Georgia conflict] will have no effect at all, but it's never good when an Olympics is situated on a geopolitical faultline."

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One-fifth of the world's freshwater could be under threat from heavy-metals pollution if a giant lead and zinc mine opens as planned upstream from Russia's giant Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. Mine advocates say leaving the world's third-largest lead and zinc field unmined would be a waste of natural resources regardless of its location, but environmentalists, conservationists, and area business owners are concerned that high doses of heavy metals from the mine could mess with the lake's unique ecology and also discourage tourism. Lake Baikal is home to hundreds of unique species, many of them endemic to Baikal. In 2006, an oil pipeline slated to be built within just miles of the lake was scuttled at the last minute due to intense international and domestic lobbying on behalf of the lake. This summer, Russia's Natural Resources Ministry proposed allowing mining of just half of the lead and zinc deposits near Baikal, but despite such pressure, Russian company MBC Resources still retains a license to extract the deposit's estimated 13.3 million tons of zinc and 2 million tons of lead.

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Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!