A sustainable future is within reach, but it won’t prevent the world from experiencing the potentially catastrophic environmental and political consequences of climate change and environmental degradation, former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Stanford audience.

Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and served as the energy secretary under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, held a seminar at CISAC on Tuesday on climate change, sustainability and security.

The consequences of the damage wrought by unsustainable resource depletion and air pollution will manifest in a hotter, more dangerous world, said the Stanford physics professor.

Average global temperatures have skyrocketed past normal levels since the Industrial Revolution and have plateaued in the last few months at the highest points in history. Chu said the plateau is likely due to it taking a long time for the lower depths of the oceans to warm up.

“There is a built-in time delay between committing damage, which we’ve already done, and feeling the true consequences. All we can say is that temperatures are likely to climb again, we just don’t know when – could be 50 to 100 years – and by how much,” said Chu.

Even if the world were to stop using coal, oil, and natural gas today, he said, it would not stop the oncoming consequences. “It’s like a long-time chain-smoker who stops smoking. Stopping does not necessarily prevent the occurrence of lung cancer.”

Chu said the battle between scientists and the tobacco industry in the 20th century is analogous to today’s conflict between scientists and the energy industries.

“A lot of what you hear from the incumbent energy industries and their representatives are the same kinds of arguments that the tobacco industry made when the science showing the harm cigarettes caused came out,” said Chu.

Ironically, the same science showing the damage cigarettes cause to health can be used to demonstrate the hazards of air pollution today.

Chu noted that a recent study found that for every 10 micrograms of pollution per cubic meter, the chances of contracting lung cancer increases 36 percent. This lends alarming perspective to pollution in places such as China and India.

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The U.S. Embassy in Beijing tracks air pollution levels daily.

“The average level of air pollution was 194 micrograms per cubic meter. So it’s possible that breathing the average air in Beijing is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” he said. “Even if it’s a third of that, it’s still really bad. But again, there is going to be a lag time between now and a possible rash of deaths by lung cancer.

In addition to causing large-scale health crises, global warming and environmental degradation may exacerbate, or even cause, potential conflicts between countries.

“I think water insecurity concerns me more than even rising sea levels,” said Chu, noting that today’s conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are exacerbated by water insecurity.

“India is already nervous that China will direct water runoff from the Himalayas to water-starved Northern China and away from India or Bangladesh, which are also water-starved,” he said. “India is also concerned that millions of Bangladeshis could become environmental refugees and start streaming into India.”

Chu recalled that when he was energy secretary, one of his biggest climate-change allies was the Department of Defense

“They will be the ones called on to help with those stresses and they see serious geopolitical risks due to climate change,” he said.

Despite the dangers ahead, Chu is optimistic about great strides in sustainable technology.

Chu and some of his colleagues studied a phenomenon that may bode well for creating a more environmentally friendly economy: putting efficiency standards on electronic appliances, which eventually could lead to a decline in the cost of appliances.

In addition to economical energy standards, new and cheaper green energy technology is within sight. Chu is working with Stanford Professor Yi Cui on creating a lithium-sulfur battery that may be significantly lighter than the current electric batteries used by cars such as Tesla and charge 200 miles in 10 minutes.

Additionally, wind energy is set to become cheaper than natural gas. Chu said that in the Midwest, where the wind is best and cheapest, contracts are selling anywhere between 2.5 and 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If you build a new natural gas plant, it would be about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“To be fair, wind does have the benefit of a production tax credit and if you take that away, wind would be somewhere around 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. But I think within the next dozen years wind will, on its own, be cheaper than natural gas,” he said.

Solar is even more surprising, said Chu. In July 2008, contracts were going for 18 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas in 2014, two contracts were signed one for 5 cents and the other for 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar has the advantage of being scalable and the amount of solar resources available around the world is substantial.

“There’s plenty of solar energy available to power the entire world several times over,” he said.

Nonetheless, public policy nudges are still needed.

“There is still no serious discussion in the U.S. about creating a national grid with long distance transmission lines, which will be necessary for a sustainable future. But before that can happen, the campaign by incumbent industries to discredit and doubt climate science has to be defeated.”

North Korea fired off short-range missiles last Tuesday close to the arrival of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to the region. Carter, who was on his inaugural trip to Asia as the newly confirmed Secretary of Defense, said the launch was a sign of the region’s continued tensions.

The United States consistently expresses concern over North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, yet attempts to resume the Six-Party Talks, the negotiations to denuclearize North Korea which began in 2003, have been unsuccessful. The United Kingdom, although not an official participant in the Talks, has had diplomatic relations with North Korea since 2000, setting itself apart from many in the West, and from Japan which do not have formal diplomatic ties with the country. 

In a new policy brief, Mike Cowin, the 2014-15 Pantech Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), discusses lesser-known channels of engagement between the United Kingdom and North Korea. 

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Cowin is the former deputy head of mission at the British Embassy Pyongyang, and implemented many of the programs he describes in the paper, "Critical Engagement": British Policy Towards the DPRK.

Typically small-scale and led largely in collaboration with European NGOs, the Embassy’s initiatives span from humanitarian aid – providing water supplies and sewage systems – to exchanges – hosting visiting delegations of North Korean paralympic athletes and English teachers.

The Embassy also works to build a stronger understanding of modern Britain in North Korea. They have shown films such as Wallace and Grommit and Philomena at the Pyongyang International Film Festival, and supplemented reading materials in the Grand People’s Study House, a central library in Pyongyang.

Cowin says that it’s not easy to construct these exchanges, but if established, they provide small steps in the right direction, and help set the stage for critical engagement in the future. The United Kingdom’s approach shares commonalities with the suggestions made by a Stanford research team in Tailored Engagement, he says.

“The United Kingdom’s efforts are not going to have the immediate result we all want. However, they do show that the DPRK is not completely isolated from the Western world and that it is possible to carry out engagement,” he says.

Cowin is also the author of an earlier policy brief on relations between North Korea and the European Union.

A chance course at Stanford and a study-abroad trip to Nepal changed the trajectory of Marshall Burke's career, leading him to a human-focused approach studying climate change. His latest work deals with the link between rising temperatures and human violence. 

I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

That a connection exists between hot temperatures and flaring tempers is an old observation. In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio begs his friend Mercutio to take shelter from the heat, lest it lead to a street fight with a member of the Capulet family.

“Even in Shakespeare’s time, it was recognized that people are more likely to lose their tempers when it’s hot outside,” said Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in the department of Environmental Earth System Science and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).

The link between temperature and violence has come under increased scientific scrutiny in recent years because of climate change. In 2013, Burke made waves in scientific circles and in the popular press when he and Solomon Hsiang, now an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, performed a meta-analysis of over 50 scientific studies and found that climate change is increasing various kinds of human conflict–everything from individual-level violence, such as assault and robbery, all the way up to group-level conflicts such as civil wars and skirmishes between nations.

"What we see is that over and over, no matter where you look, you see more conflict and more violence when temperatures are hotter than average," Burke said.

Climate change and violence

Prior to Burke and Hsiang's study, several papers had suggested possible links between climate change and violence, but the research was scattered across disciplines and the results often conflicted with one another. The pair sought to cut through the morass by putting all of the papers on an equal empirical footing. "We got a hold of all of the datasets that we could and reanalyzed them in exactly the same way," Burke said. "When we did that, what came through was a very strong and consistent relationship between hotter-than-average temperatures and increases in all these types of conflicts."

We are learning about ourselves and we can shape our trajectories in ways that we wouldn't have been able to if we didn't have this information. To me, that's very hopeful.

Burke says he was surprised by the how strong and consistent the signal was. For example, of the 27 studies from the modern era that looked directly at the relationship between temperature and conflict, all 27 of them found a positive relationship. "The chance of that happening at random or by chance is less than 1 in 10 million,” Burke said.

Burke finds it fascinating that a relationship between temperature and violence should exist at all. Economists have speculated that temperature affects human conflict through changes in economic productivity. The idea is that by increasing the likelihood of droughts in certain parts of the world, climate change is reducing crop productivity and driving people already in dire straits to take desperate measures such as joining rebellions. "In places like Sub-Saharan Africa, you don't need that many people to start a civil war," Burke said.

Human physiology almost certainly plays a key role as well. Studies show that people just behave badly when it’s hot. "Experiments have shown that whether it’s a cooperation task, or one that requires concentration, people just do poorly if it's hotter in the room," Burke said. "We're just wired to do better at some temperatures than at others."

Because global warming is unlikely to abate anytime soon, even if mitigation policies are enacted, understanding why hotter temperatures brings out the worst in humans is crucial for determining solutions to curb violent tendencies as global temperatures rise, Burke said. "If the root cause is agricultural, we might want to invest in things that boost crop yields or that reduces crop sensitivity to really hot temperatures," he added. "If it’s something to do with human physiology, the problem becomes much more difficult. You might say, well we could just invest in air conditioning, but even in the U.S. where we have lots of air conditioning, you still see this strong relationship."

Burke's own background is in economics, but he plans to team up with medical scientists to explore just how temperature affects human physiology. "That's what's exciting about being at Stanford, and one of the main reasons I accepted a position here," Burke said. "It's really easy to cross disciplines here and make connections in other fields."

People-focused

Being interdisciplinary comes naturally to Burke. His undergraduate education at Stanford University straddled the social sciences and the natural sciences. Initially an Earth Systems major, Burke later switched to International Relations after taking a course called "The World Food Economy" that was co-taught by Roz Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in Earth Science. "I took that class and it literally changed my trajectory. I knew that this kind of human-focused research was what I wanted to do," Burke said.

Burke was also deeply affected by time he spent living in Nepal with poor farming families during his junior year as part of a semester abroad program. "It was my first real confrontation with deep and grinding rural poverty," he said. "That experience made me want to understand what's going on and think about the kind of research I needed to do if I wanted to help."

After graduating, Burke worked as a research assistant for Naylor and Walter Falcon, now the deputy director of FSE, where he helped investigate the impacts of agricultural systems on the environment and ways to use agriculture to reduce poverty around the world.  "Since most of the poor people in the world continue to work in agriculture, our idea was that if we could improve how much was produced on small farms, it would have a big impact on global poverty," Burke said.

Burke also credits Naylor and Falcon with making him think more deeply about the connections between climate change and agriculture. Later, while earning his PhD in agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Burke's research interests broadened further to look at how climate change effects on agriculture might in turn impact the economic health and social cohesion of a country. "For me, it was a natural to begin by thinking about climate change impacts on agriculture and then following that line of reasoning to investigate other knock-on effects," Burke said.

A silver lining

When Burke is not at Stanford, he can often be found taking photographs or hiking and rock climbing with his family. His office is decorated with photos he’s taken of Death Valley, Yosemite Valley, and Nepal, where he returned with his wife for their honeymoon.

Burke credits the time he spent outdoors as a child for his lifelong interest in environmental issues, and it's a tradition that he continues with his two young girls. "We have two-year-old twins, and my wife and I have little harnesses that we use to take them rock climbing. So far they're more interested in swinging around on the rope than in actually climbing, but it's fun," he said.

Burke says the time he spends in the mountains and deserts are not just for his own mental well being and happiness. “It’s a constant reminder about the things I work on and what’s at stake,” he said.

Marshall Burke and his wife rocking climbing with their two-year-old daughter at Joshua Tree.

He acknowledged that many of the predictions from climate change impact studies are frightening and depressing, but he thinks there is a silver lining that often gets overlooked. "We live in a unique moment in history when we have a wealth of tools and data that can help us understand how human societies and the environment are coupled," Burke said.

"We are learning about ourselves and we can shape our trajectories in ways that we wouldn't have been able to if we didn't have this information. To me, that's very hopeful."

Burke is also a fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Ker Than is associate director of communications for the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Contact: 650-723-9820, kerthan@stanford.edu

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry stood before a team of soldiers preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Their mission would be quite different from the ones he led in the South Asian country during the height of the war.

The officers of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Bridge Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, in Fort Campbell, Ky., would soon be leading a team of about 2,000 soldiers to provide operational support and advise Afghan national forces as the U.S.-led Coalition forces withdraw and the country takes over the battle against the Taliban.

“I spoke to them about the history of the U.S. diplomatic, development and military activities in Afghanistan since 9/11,” said Eikenberry, now the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Eikenberry was a military commander in Afghanistan from 2002-2003 and then again from 2005-2009. He would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Kabul from 2009 to 2011.

Col. J.B. Vowell, a former CISAC Senior Military Fellow (2012-2013), was leading the brigade, which deployed in late January for a nine-month tour. He had invited Eikenberry to speak to his troops, having met him while he was at Stanford.

The mission of his tour is to advise and protect advisors and, if necessary, support Afghan forces in extreme combat situations. Though a brigade typically has 5,000 soldiers, Vowell’s smaller, tailored team is a sharp departure from previous missions.

Former CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell, left, and Ret. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Jan. 13, 2015.

“So they’ve had to think hard about not only their advisory role, but also who they will protect their own forces with, and what to do if they are called upon to support Afghan forces in an exceptionally dire situation,” said Eikenberry.

These types of operations are part of the central challenges facing the U.S. military today, Eikenberry said, adding that Vowell’s time as a senior military fellow at CISAC helped prepare him for his mission.

“The resources available at FSI help prepare officers for these challenges,” said Eikenberry, who is also an affiliate of FSI's Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. “CISAC does very sophisticated studies in contemporary security problems; CDDRL does very interesting work in the development of political institutions in difficult environments. These are resources military fellows can draw upon.”

Military Fellow Program launched in 2009

When former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry returned to Stanford after his service in Washington, he and current Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter started the Preventative Defense Project at Harvard and Stanford. The project focuses on forging nongovernmental, Track II security partnerships with Russia and its neighbors, engaging China and addressing the lethal legacy of Cold War weapons of mass destruction.

Deborah Gordon, executive director of the project and manager of the military fellows program, said Perry believed that bringing in acting military officers to learn more about strategic defense policy would aid the mission to prevent future threats to global security. 

“Perry started asking the various heads of the military services to allow a fellow to come to CISAC and be more broadly engaged in the university,” she said.

The Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), the umbrella organization for CISAC and other research centers, hosted its first senior military fellow in 2009.  FSI now hosts five, three from the Air Force and two from the Army. Fellows go through a rigorous selection process and attend Stanford for one year to conduct research.

CISAC Senior Research Scholar and retired U.S. Army Col. Joseph Felter helped secure the Army officers for the first fellowships. He had attended Stanford as an active duty officer from 2002-2005 and has a Ph.D. in political science from the university. 

“When I came back to do a War College fellowship from 08-09, the only sponsored spots were at Hoover,” he said, referring to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. “It’s a great institution but it struck me as a bit insulated from the rest of the campus. With the support of the Army War College I volunteered to take the lead on putting together a proposal.”

He persuaded the War College that there was demand for fellows and they approved the establishment of two new fellowships at CISAC. Felter, Gordon and others at CISAC knew that civilian scholars and students at the university would in turn benefit from interacting with active-duty officers for their perspective on the U.S. military around the world.

Among the first fellows were Viet Luong, who is now a one-star general and deputy commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, and Charlie Miller, who is working directly for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey as his senior advisor.

Former CISAC Military Fellow Viet Luong, now a one-star general, teaches a simulation class during his 2011-2012 fellowship.

In addition to meeting current and former government and military leaders and conducting research, fellows participate in Stanford classrooms and seminars.

Army Lt. Col. Dennis Heaney is a senior military fellow at CISAC this academic year. His research focuses on the strategic policy of the Regionally Aligned Forces (RAF), soldiers from all units of the U.S. Armed Forces that support combatant commands.

Heaney is working to delineate out the costs of altering the role of conventional forces - traditionally trained to fight against other national militaries - to fight unconventional wars that are not restricted to any particular geographic zone.

“The real dilemma is conventional Army forces are made for land warfare against other forces. They are not really cut out for irregular warfare,” Heaney said of the RAF. “When you try to do regional engagement it takes you away from your main mission. I may help you, but there is an opportunity cost. Trying to prepare for both regular and irregular warfare takes away from each one. It’s kind of a zero-sum game. So I’m trying to critique that and make recommendations.”

Heaney has been in the Army for 24 years. He started out in the infantry as an officer and then entered the Special Forces in 1997. He is likely to deploy to Afghanistan with the Special Operations Joint Task Force after he completes his fellowship.

“The biggest benefit of being a fellow at Stanford is exposure to high-level folks like Karl Eikenberry, Gen. James Mattis at Hoover, Adm. James Ellis, and former Defense Secretaries William Perry and George Schultz, as well as current Secretary of Defense Ash Carter when he was here for a short time,” Heaney said.

Carter was a visiting scholar at FSI last year, until he became the nation’s 25th secretary of defense in February.

Heaney participated in CISAC’s signature class, “International Security in a Changing World,” playing the role of military commander during simulations that are the hallmark of the class.

“One simulation was about deciding between ground or air options for a high-value target in Afghanistan,” Heaney said. “Last week we did a simulation about the Islamic State and what options exist.”

Even after they leave, military fellows maintain close ties to Stanford.

Eikenberry is slated to teach a course next term about America’s post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to Skype-in to Col. Vowell’s headquarters,” he said. “I think it would be powerful for the students, after reading essay after essay about the Afghanistan intervention, to actually talk to one of our military leaders currently operating there on the ground.”

There is an effort underway to expand the military fellows program beyond FSI.

“We envision a future where military fellows can embed in the professional schools, like law and business, or in departments like engineering and political science – and even private tech companies like Google and Palantir,” Gordon said. “We want to engage Stanford and Silicon Valley in helping solve our national security problems.”

Joshua Alvarez was a CISAC Honors Student in the 2011-2012 academic year.

Each year the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center offers fellowship opportunities to recent graduates to further their research and engage with scholars at Stanford. Postdoctoral fellows have the opportunity to develop their dissertations for publication, present their research to the Stanford community, and participate in Center activities.

Fellows often go on to pursue teaching positions and advisory roles at top universities and research organizations around the world. Into the future, they remain engaged with the Center and continue to contribute to Shorenstein APARC publications, conferences and related activities.

Shorenstein APARC is pleased to welcome three postdoctoral fellows for the 2015-16 academic year:

Asia Health Policy Fellow

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Saingam’s research interests are public health, substance abuse, drug policy and Southeast Asia. While at Shorenstein APARC, she will research the evolution of substance-abuse control measures and related policy in Thailand.

Saingam seeks to identify potentially effective policy directions suitable for Thailand, and other developing countries in Southeast and East Asia.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned from substance abuse policy implementations in other countries…coping and dealing with substance abuse is a complex story and cannot respond successfully with only one strategy.”

Saingam completed her doctorate in epidemiology at the Prince of Songkla University in 2012, and has served as a researcher at the University’s epidemiology unit since, as well as a researcher at the Thailand Substance Abuse Academic Network since 2014.

Shorenstein APARC Postdoctoral Fellows

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Chang’s research interests are comparative policy analysis and political institutions in East Asia, mainly South Korea and Japan. While at Shorenstein APARC, Chang will conduct research on how countries respond differently to the same external challenges, and how institutions are interpreted and applied in different ways.

His dissertation, which he seeks to build upon, is titled “The Sources of Japanese Conduct: Asymmetric Security Dependence, Role Conceptions, and the Reactive Behavior in response to U.S. Demands.” It is a qualitative comparative case study of how key U.S. allies in Asia – namely Japan and South Korea – and major powers in Europe - the United Kingdom and France responded to the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.

“East Asia is a treasure island of new theory building because some of the big challenges facing East Asia – finding a new role for Japan, denuclearization of North Korea, unification of the Korean peninsula, democratization of China and reconfiguration of its relations with the world, and development and integration of Southeast Asian countries – are truly new ones…”

Chang completed his doctorate in political science from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2014.

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Ravanilla’s research interests are political economy and governance, comparative politics and Southeast Asia. While at Shorenstein APARC, Ravanilla will research how political selection impacts governance, and evaluate possible routes for incentivizing capable and virtuous citizens to run for public office.

His project titled “Nudging Good Politicians” looks at the case of the Sangguniang Kabataan, a governing body in the Philippines comprised of elected youth leaders. Ravanilla aims to apply his research to develop and scale up programs for politicians, especially those at the onset of their careers, which would include specialized leadership training and merit-based endorsement.

“If we could design a policy that screens-in and incentivizes competent and honest citizens to run for office, would it play a catalytic role in improving the quality of the political class, and ultimately, the quality of government?”

Ravanilla is also a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Young Southeast Asia Fellow for 2015-16. He will complete his doctorate in political science and public policy from the University of Michigan in summer 2015.