(The Conversation) – Since April 2024, wide areas of south and south-east Asia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, have experienced prolonged extreme heat. Covering some of the most densely populated regions in the world, the series of heatwaves has affected everything from human health and wellbeing to the economy and education.

Many pupils in India, Bangladesh, and Philippines have been told to stay at home for days due to a severe health risk from extreme heat, while the heatwaves are becoming a major issue in India’s election. Bangladesh even closed all primary schools for weeks while the temperature reached 43.8°C on April 30.

Once the temperature goes above 38°C, it exceeds the core human body temperature (about 37°C) and the chance of heat exhaustion and even heatstroke increases dramatically. This is compounded by increasing humidity in the region which puts additional heat stress on the human body, as sweat is not able to evaporate as effectively (the primary mechanism for cooling the human body).

That is why extreme heat in a tropical country can be less pleasant and more dangerous than the same temperature in a desert.

Tens of millions of people have been exposed to such health threatening conditions in south and south-east Asia in April and May so far, and this extreme heat has substantially affected labour productivity.

Unusually prolonged periods of extreme heat:

Now shifting westwards:

How it got so hot

Extreme heat is driven by several processes, operating from global down to local scales. At the local level, less vegetation and soil moisture tends to mean more heat, while cities of concrete and asphalt are hotter than the surrounding countryside thanks to the urban heat island effect. Other local and regional factors include the wind, and whether conditions are ripe for clouds to form.

Then there are the more global factors: El Niño, and of course global warming. El Niño refers to the warm phase of a natural fluctuation of temperatures in the tropical Pacific (its opposite side is La Niña).

Voice of America Video: “Heatwave shatters Southeast Asia records in April”

The Pacific has been in an El Niño phase since May 2023, releasing additional heat and exacerbating global warming in many regions. In parts of Asia, this leads to periods of extreme heat happening more often, lasting longer and being even more extreme in addition to global warming contribution.

This is particularly dangerous for the many cities in south and south-east Asia being hit by the current series of heatwaves, which over the past 85 years have already experienced long-term increase in the number of days in April with such dangerously high temperatures.

Short term noise, long term trends:

Occurrences of extreme heat days over years typically looks rather noisy when plotted on a graph. Some years may have many days of extreme heat, others only few or none. But over a longer timescale of multiple decades, a clear trend emerges of more and more very hot days, driven by climate change.

Indeed, scientists from the World Weather Attribution team recently described the latest heatwaves as “impossible” without climate change.

Action needed

April and May are typically the hottest months in south and south-east Asia. As the climate keeps warming, is the region ready for extreme heat?

The projected increases in extreme hot temperatures demands rapid adaptation measures, along with the obvious global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means heat action plans that are tailored to address the specific climate, public health and socioeconomic conditions in a given region. What works in Singapore (urban, wealthy, incredibly humid) might not be appropriate in drier, poorer and more rural parts of India.

We have to combine estimates of environmental hazards with exposure and vulnerabilities information on population and assets to provide actionable risk assessment and formulate efficient temperature mitigation measures for different levels of extreme heat.

Some countries in south and south-east Asia are making progress with their heat action plans in response to extreme heat they have already experienced. However, there is room for further improvement and a more targeted approach at the district level. This is critical as we expect that disruptive extreme heat events in this part of the world will become more frequent, widespread, and intense.

Neven S. Fučkar, Senior Researcher, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Documents released by the Bill Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies during all of World War II.

The US war on the Viet Cong led Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over time.

The renewed 1969-1973 bombing campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March 17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.'”

What kind of genocidal psychopath “beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not even at war?

By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.

Embed from Getty Images
Victim of U.S. Bombing Error. Phnom Penh: Wearing head bandage, this young Cambodian youngster is one of some 300 casualties of bombing error on Neak Luong by U.S. warplanes August 6. He and other victims are awaiting transportation to hospital after having been brought here by Navy boats August 7.Getty Images/ Bettman

So Washington upped the ante. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973, “2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed country in world history.

Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing 16 million Americans.

While they say that 10% of the targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”

Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”

The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.

“Gaza Guernica 1.1,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/IbisPaint, 2023.

Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes, “The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”

It is estimated that the Israeli Air Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them combatants.

Abraham underlines, “the army significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda. The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians (it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes, so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough societal organization to survive to permit the counting.

Reuters: “LIVE: View over Israel-Gaza border”

Kissinger’s butchering of villagers from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the country with sun-drenched white skeletons.

The Communists defeated him in Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party, with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a mixed economy model.

I don’t predict any sort of victory or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots. Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever. They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.

Kissinger rose to positions of power where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.

Over two weeks after our visit to the monument, on 14 June 2023, the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte stated on behalf of his government that 17 August 1945 will henceforth be acknowledged as the date on which the Republic of Indonesia came into being, and hence as the end of Dutch colonial rule over the archipelago – hereby abandoning the government’s previous position that the republic did not come into being until 27 December 1949, the day on which the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to Indonesia. In the four intervening years the Netherlands had waged a bloody war against the Indonesian inhabitants who were fighting for their country’s independence.

This must be seen as a historic breakthrough in Dutch government thinking. All twenty-nine (!) of the governments that ruled the Netherlands in the past 78 years had insisted that the Republic of Indonesia was not founded until the day when the Netherlands transferred sovereignty; and every one of them had therefore refused to send the Indonesian people their best wishes on 17 August.

Author provided.

In the past twenty years I have returned numerous times to the land of my birth, usually with my partner and always with different children, grandchildren and sons- and daughters-in-law, to show them where I spent the first eleven years of my life; but not once had I visited the Proclamation Monument. Not that I underestimated the importance of the proclamation on 17 August 1945; but somehow I never got round to it. In my publications I did state at length how shameful I found it that the Netherlands so stubbornly refused to acknowledge the date – and how incomprehensible I found it that so many Dutch people had since then swallowed the story that the Netherlands was simply quelling public disorder on its own territory and persisted in dismissing the whole thing as mere ‘policing operations’ (in Dutch, politionele acties).

However, anyone who thinks that the statement on 14 June marked the end of Dutch hypocrisy on the subject is mistaken – for the government added that the acts of violence committed by the Netherlands during the four years of fighting cannot be deemed war crimes ‘in a legal sense’, since this was not a war between two recognised states.

Instead of having the courage to admit that the colonial war should never have been fought in the first place, the Dutch government continues to hide behind such evasions. And, in turn, the organisers of the Netherlands’ annual Day of Remembrance on Amsterdam’s Dam Square on 4 May did not have the courage to accept the implications of such trickery. When it was decided to include those killed during the ‘policing operations’ in the number of commemorated deaths, I asked whether this meant the 100,000 Indonesian as well as the 6,000 Dutch dead – since the commemoration concerned people who had died on our own territory. No, I was told, only the Dutch dead were commemorated. But, I said, the Indonesian dead were still Dutch subjects between 1945 and 1949, before Dutch sovereignty was transferred to the Republic of Indonesia? But no, they were not commemorated.

I always felt sorry for the hundreds of thousands of Dutch soldiers who were sent overseas to face the horrors of a colonial war. And how much those of them who helped commit war crimes and had to live with those memories for the rest of their lives must have suffered. But we should not forget that at least four thousand conscripts, including quite a few communists, refused to go – and were then not only sentenced to long periods of imprisonment here in the Netherlands, but in many cases also had great trouble finding work afterwards. These people have still not been rehabilitated.

The fact that I first visited the Proclamation Monument with my granddaughter and son-in-law on 29 May 2023 had nothing to do with the coming Dutch government statement, for I had no idea that it was to be made. But it had everything to do with the research done by my brother Hugo Wertheim in 2016. That was when our family learned that my mother, my sister, my brother and I were within earshot of the proclamation – as prisoners in the ‘ADEK’ Japanese internment camp. During our nostalgic visits to Indonesia we always skipped this last of the three camps we had been in, for we knew that the collection of huts it had consisted of had been demolished and replaced by a housing district. But my brother had compared the map of Batavia (as Jakarta was known under Dutch rule) in 1942 with that of modern Jakarta, and had seen that there was now a Proklamasipark right next to the former site of the ADEK camp; and when he later took his family there, they found the monument in the middle of a park.

On checking the diary our mother had kept throughout our internment, we discovered that she had happened to be on guard duty on the night of 17 August 1945. All the adult women in the camp had to take turns at this, noting any signs of trouble and reporting them to the Japanese camp command. Approaching the camp fence, she had suddenly heard sounds that turned out to come from a loudspeaker just outside the camp. She had gone as close to the fence as she could and tried to catch what was being said, but was unable to. The next day, she wrote in her diary, she had told her fellow inmates that she was sure something unusual had been going on there.

We now know that in the middle of what is now the Proclamation Park was the (later demolished) house where Sukarno had gone to live in 1942 after he was released by the Japanese from his years of imprisonment and exile under the Dutch colonial regime. We also know that the proclamation was made from the veranda of the house, and that a (banned) red-and-white flag had been hurriedly sewn together the night before, then fastened to a length of bamboo and planted in the garden (to this day red and white are the colours of the Indonesian flag). Finally, we know that the event was wildly celebrated by a jubilant crowd of Indonesians.[1]

17 August 1945. Sukarno, with Hatta at his side, reads the Proclamation on the veranda of his house in Jakarta.

In the light of the Dutch government’s recent and embarrassingly belated recognition of the de facto independence of the Indonesian people, let me end here with the words of one of the Netherlands’ greatest writers, Louis Couperus, written around 1900. He had then lived in Java for nine months, had observed at first hand how the Indonesians behaved towards us, their rulers, and had lucidly predicted that their subjugation would not last forever.

Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force (original Dutch title: De Stille Kracht)

The mystique of the visible things on the mysterious island that is Java … Outwardly the docile colony with a dominated race that was no match for the crass merchants who … in their greed and thirst for profit … set foot and planted their flag on the collapsing kingdoms … that trembled as if shaken by a volcanic earthquake.

And yet, in the depths of their souls, undominated, although, with a nobly contemptuous smile, resigning themselves and smoothly adjusting to their fate; in the depths of their souls, freely living a mysterious life of their own, concealed from the Western gaze, however hard it tried to fathom their secrets – as if with a philosophy of ever-smiling preservation of a noble calm, flexibly accepting, seemingly courteous – but, deep within, sacredly convinced of their own opinion, and so remote from any ruler’s idea or culture that there could never be the slightest fraternisation between master and servant….

And then the Westerner, proud of his power, strength, civilisation and humanity, ruling blindly, selfishly, egoistically from on high amid all the complicated machinery of his authority which he operates like a piece of clockwork, controlling every movement, until his domination of the visible things – colonisation of a land alien in both blood and soul – can appear to the stranger, the outsider, as a masterly act of creation.

Yet beneath all this outward display lies the hidden force – beneath all this calm grandeur the menacing rumble of the future, like the subterranean roar of volcanoes, inaudible to the human ear. And it is as if the dominated are aware, and are waiting for the natural surge of things to produce the sacred moment that is bound to come…. For they have grasped the ruler at a single perceptive glance, in his illusions of civilisation and humanity, and know that these are nothing.

Although they give him the respectful title of ‘lord’ and ‘master’, they are deeply aware of his democratic merchant’s nature, and tacitly despise him and judge him with a smile they share with their fellows. Never do they attack the formal features of slavish servitude, and through semba (deference) they pretend to be inferior … yet they know that they are superior, and that what is will not remain so forever – that the present will vanish.

Without uttering a word, they hope that God will restore what has been suppressed, one day, in the distant swellings of the dawning future. But they feel, hope and perceive it in the depths of their souls, which they never reveal to their rulers … who always remain an unreadable book, in the unknown, untranslatable language in which the words are the same but differ in their colouring … And never is there the comprehending harmony; never does the mutual love blossom; and always there is that gulf, that depth, that abyss, that broad distance from which the mystery will one day burst forth like a tempest….

[1] This and much more is described at length in my article that was published on 18 August 2017, seventy years after the proclamation, in the Dutch monthly De Groene Amsterdammer, as well as in the English version on Juan Cole’s Informed comment website https://www.juancole.com/2017/10/colonial-policing-indonesian.html.

Reprinted from ( Jacobin NL with the author’s permission.

(The Conversation) – When 2022 began, there was trepidation about what might happen in at least ten regions. Topping most lists were concerns about tensions in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.

What actually transpired in 2022 were some of the most shocking humanitarian scenes in modern history – with a backdrop of the continuing pandemic and extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change.

This has prompted experts to speak of an era of “polycrisis”, where countries are dealing with cascading and interconnected crises.

The World Bank estimates 23 countries – with a combined population of 850 million people – currently face high or medium intensity conflict. The number of conflict-affected countries has doubled over the past decade.

This has triggered massive refugee flows. As of May 2022, a global record of 100 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide.

With the backdrop of last year’s bitter legacy, what crises are most concerning as we head into 2023?

There are a range of new flashpoints and ongoing deadly conflicts the world has largely ignored due to the focus on Ukraine.

2022’s bitter legacy

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been seared into our memories of 2022. It has been one of the fastest and largest displacement crises in decades.

Also making headlines last year was continuing violence in Afghanistan, where six million people were on the brink of famine by August 2022 according to the UN refugee agency, and the mayhem in Myanmar following the military’s February 2021 coup.

The opening days of 2023 look bleak. Those in Ukraine and Afghanistan are now facing winter without access to food, water, health care and other essential supplies.

The situation in Myanmar is only worsening, especially for ethnic minority regions and in Rohingya refugee camps.

New flashpoint: Iran

In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini was arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, and she died after being held in their custody on September 16 last year.

Her death set off a sustained uprising in more than 150 cities and 140 universities in all 31 provinces of Iran, according to UN human rights chief Volker Türk.

More than 15,000 people, including children, have been arrested in connection with the protests and are threatened with execution. At least 26 of them currently face the death penalty, and at least four have reportedly already been executed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps say the average age of arrested protesters is as young as 15.

The prospects of a peaceful resolution of this crisis in 2023 are low and require strong global intervention.

Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong has made firm statements against the death penalty and this “dark chapter” in Iran’s history with her Canadian and New Zealand counterparts, and she should continue this rhetoric.

Tensions in the Asia-Pacific

In our region, Sri Lanka faced economic collapse and a mostly peaceful uprising in mid-2022, and remains in a precarious position.

North Korea remains an aggressive actor. Military tensions on the Korean peninsula have risen sharply this year as Pyongyang has carried out an unprecedented blitz of weapons tests, including the launch of one of its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles in November.

From Australia’s perspective, our primary national security risk remains developments in the South China Sea and Taiwan.

More aggressive language on Taiwan emerged from the Chinese Communist Party Congress, and statements by President Joe Biden indicated the United States would not stand by if China invaded Taiwan.

Current Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has pledged to double Japan’s defence spending in response to these tensions.

There’s a high risk of miscalculation on this issue from all sides, and there’s the growing threat of grey zone tactics – coercive measures which don’t qualify as conventional military battle.

We must avoid tunnel vision

What we also witnessed in 2022 was that the world’s gaze and assistance was so firmly focused on events in Ukraine that many other long-running conflicts producing extreme human suffering were ignored or receded into the background.

For example, it’s hard to overstate the severity of the crises in East Africa of food, shelter and health systems – though comparably this has received little media attention.

What’s more, the UN Human Rights Office estimates more than 306,000 civilians were killed over ten years in the Syrian conflict, and any peaceful resolution is still “elusive” according to UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen.

There are deep structural conflicts in Haiti, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo threatening people, species and the environment. The global community must pay attention.

Dealing with ‘polycrisis’

Nations, civil society movements and the UN must be nimble enough to deal with the state of “polycrisis” or “permacrisis” the globe is enduring – where armed conflicts combine with and exacerbate issues such as inflation, cyber threats, geo-politics and the energy crisis.

World leaders are dealing with a host of pressing issues:

• the climate emergency

• the socio-economic repercussions of the COVID pandemic, by no means over

• 100 million displaced people

• the increasing global population, now over eight billion

• the rising cost of living.

All this means 2023 is likely to be another turbulent year.

Susan Harris Rimmer, Professor and Director of the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the devastation of climate change makes the need to decarbonise clearer by the day, countries face the question of what to do with their old fossil fuel infrastructure. While some environmental activists have taken to sabotaging the carbon economy on the back of its emissions in the Global North, the picture is different in oil-producing countries of the Global South, where energy infrastructure has fed communities for decades. There, the emphasis is placed on memory and institutionalisation.

Oil’s conquest of Iran and Malaysia

The cases of Malaysia and Iran, where oil has significantly contributed to economic growth, give us a glimpse into how authorities are currently reckoning with their fossil fuel heritage. In the 20th century, the arrival of international oil companies in the major port cities on the Persian Gulf in Iran and the South China Sea in Malaysia transformed the built environment, accelerated urbanisation and impacted peoples’ everyday lives. Even today, the dynamics and actors of oil in Iran and Malaysia continue to reshape industry, society, culture, and politics while leaving their mark on the built environment and urban spaces.

Founded in 1978, the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) is an international organisation established to explore, protect, conserve and explain the remains of industrialisation. In 2020, it published the first global assessment of the heritage of petroleum production, the oil industry and the places, structures, sites, and landscapes that might be chosen to conserve for their historical, technical, social, or architectural attributes. In a 2020 report, the organisation defined the heritage of the petroleum industry as

“the most significant fixed, tangible evidence for the discovery, exploitation, production, and consumption of petroleum products and their impact on human and natural landscapes”.

Iran’s petroleum museums

Less than a decade ago, Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum began to consider establishing museums with a view to preserving the country’s industrial heritage. Those in the port city of Adaban in the country’s southwest, include an old refinery, gas station, and the oldest oil-related technical training school. In sections of the old ports, passersby can appreciate cranes and heavy machinery, such as the Akwan and Sulfur cranes, as well as an exhibition about the reconstruction of the refineries following the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

The country is projecting to open other oil museums in major oil port cities. One of them is Masjed Suleiman, a city in the southwestern province of Khuzestan widely recognised as the birthplace of the oil industry in the Middle East. Its museum hosts the oldest oil recovery site in the region. In Tehran, the Museum of Oil Industry Technology will detail the nature and importance of oil, gas, and petrochemicals since 1901. It was in that year that the British speculator William D’Arcy received a concession to explore and develop southern Iran’s oil resources.

When the oil industry refuses to die

In Malaysia, the oil industry is omnipresent in everyday life, which raises challenges to global decarbonisation efforts. The national oil company Petronas is visible everywhere, from the dissemination of scholarships, the establishment of a university, and the iconic Petronas Twin Towers to the transformation of sleepy towns into sprawling industrial complexes. The industry goes back to the early 1900s, when oil was struck in the jungles of Miri, Sarawak, under British rule.

The conservation of Malaysia’s oil legacy has proven somewhat challenging, as most rigs are located offshore and sites still very much in use. Efforts have also been limited and lack a centralised plan. In a federal nation, each state dictates its own policies, which extends to museums. Under the Sarawak Tourism Board, the oil rig in Miri has been transformed into a museum and tourist site but remains the only one of its kind.

Conservation efforts have mainly focused on education with an emphasis on science and technology. Most attractions, such as the Petrosains Discovery Centre and the Petronas University of Technology, prioritise public awareness and learning. Malaysia’s national narrative is consistently upbeat – that the oil industry has improved society, transformed of remote villages, advanced educational opportunities, and led to dramatic changes in landscapes and cityscapes.

Toward post-pandemic and post-oil futures

Malaysia and Iran have taken different approaches when preserving the oil industry as part of their tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Nonetheless, a common element of is to separate the oil industry from its imperial pasts by preserving historical sites and narrating them as part of the national narrative.

For Malaysia, Petronas and the oil industry is promoted as a success story, intertwining petrol and nationalism. The preservation of the Miri oil rig as a tourist site serves the dual purpose of an attempt to safeguard the historical value of the location and to integrate it as a part of Sarawak’s story.

However, rising concerns about climate change, the environment, and corporate responsibility are increasing pressure on oil companies to reduce their carbon footprint by supporting clean and renewable energy, but these efforts appear to lag behind companies such as British Petroleum, which has moved into electric charging and renewable energy. Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic caused consumer demand for oil to plummet, which will likely continue to depress Iranian and Malaysian exports for the months to come.

The impact of the Covid-19 and climate crises

In the case of Iran, the Covid-19 crisis and the fluctuations in oil prices coincide with intensified sanctions by the United States against Iran, also known as the “maximum pressure campaign”. Despite its rich oil and gas resources, the country needs new technology investments and development plans to prepare for the post-fossil-fuel future. However, that will be hard to achieve without resolving US-Iran tensions and easing sanctions. To balance future economic growth with social development and environmental protection, Iran needs to invest more in plans for sustainable development and transition to less environmentally harmful energy sources.

Malaysia’s response acknowledges of the twin effects of Covid-19 and global warming: change in weather patterns and a decrease in demand for oil. Since the 2010s, there has been some movement in the energy sector to prepare for the post oil future. Over nearly a decade, Petronas has focused on solar power, wind energy and clean hydrogen, pledging to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

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But it took until 2020 amid the Covid-19 crisis and growing international awareness over the climate emergency for momentum to pick up. In 2021, the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources set targets to decarbonise the country by 45% by 2030. While these efforts have been applauded, some hindrances remain, such as financial constraints and a lack of engagement with nongovernmental organisations.

Lessons from Malaysia’s palm oil heritage

Given changing global attitudes toward the oil industry, the question arises how the industrial heritage of Malaysia and Iran can be envisioned. Will oil rigs become relics of human greed instead of human advancement? And how will the national narrative reconcile this new reality with the importance of oil in the countries’ decolonisation process?

For Malaysia, it’s a question that has already been asked regarding palm oil and deforestation. Environmental activists in the country and abroad have highlighted their negative impact, which resulted in poor publicity for the country. However, through government engagement with youth and activists, there has been some improvement with how palm oil is viewed especially with regards to sustainability efforts.

Oil heritage perhaps needs to walk a similar path, encouraging honest conversations between policymakers, NGOs, industry stakeholders and historical organisations. The Covid-19 pandemic has also provided vital lessons and introduced new practices emphasising corporate responsibility toward workers. Improved governmental cooperation has also shown that it is possible to work toward common goals, which can be expanded to issues such as heritage. If implemented appropriately, such approaches may spell a bright future for how we view oil as part of a national narrative.

50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention (16 November 2022): World Heritage as a source of resilience, humanity and innovation.

Rowena Abdul Razak, Guest Teacher in International History, London School of Economics and Political Science and Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor in Architecture and Urban History, Texas Tech University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sun Cable‘s plans for an enormous 20 gigawatt (GW) solar farm outside Darwin, Australia, along with 42 GW of battery storage, which will generate electricity for Singapore over a 3,000-mile-long undersea cable, exemplifies the innovative thinking required for this transformation. Indonesia has given permission for the undersea cables to be laid in its territorial waters. The project would also help power Darwin, Australia, with a population near 150,000, which is the provincial capital.

Australia has lots of wilderness (the center of the continent is virtually uninhabited) and lots of sunshine, so it is an ideal producer of solar energy.

The planned facility, in the Northern Territory, will consisted of 28 million solar panels on nearly 30,000 acres of land, according to Peter Hannam.

Australia, 5 October 2011, Own work This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Adobe Illustrator. Author: TUBS. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Sun Cable has raised some $250 million for the $30 billion project so far, according to Hannam at The Guardian. Billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest, have recently invested the bulk of the money so far raised. .

h/t Sun Cable.

The island city-state of Singapore is the major beneficiary of the project.

Solar panels have plummeted in price and are increasingly the best source of electricity. But they are relatively bulky and solar farms require some wide open spaces, spaces that Singapore lacks.

Singapore. © Juan Cole.

Although it only has about 6 million people, Singapore’s gross domestic product is around $400 billion per year, more than much large countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, and nearly as big as major countries like South Africa and Egypt. Singapore is an important container port. It doesn’t have petroleum of its own, but it refines crude into gasoline. It produces semiconductors and other high tech products, and provides financial services. But at 281 sq mi., it is less than half the size of the US Virgin Islands and about half the size of Guam, two of the smallest territories in the United States.

Singapore. © Juan Cole.

The Newcastle Waters solar project would provide 15% of Singapore’s electricity. The company is hoping to complete it by 2028, only six years from now. Right now Singapore depends almost entirely on methane gas for its electricity generation and if this project comes in on time, it will allow the country to attain its 2030 carbon dioxide reduction goals in accord with the Paris Climate Treaty.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Rohingya refugees and victims are suing Facebook for $150 billion. They allege that Facebook played a key role in the brutal crackdown against Muslims in Myanmar by promoting anti-Rohingya posts. This online hate turned into real-world violence, according to the lawsuit.

As stated by Noam Chomsky, author of Manufacturing Consent, in this new digital era, Facebook is not just a platform for sharing knowledge or social networking, it is also a space for manipulation, targeting, and incitement. The Rohingya case and lawsuit, to a large extent, confirms Chomsky’s view.

Meanwhile, this week a letter submitted by lawyers to Facebook’s UK office shows the reality of this case. It says their clients and family members have been subjected to acts of “serious violence, murder and/or other grave human rights abuses” as part of a campaign of genocide conducted by the ruling regime and civilian extremists in Myanmar.

In 2019, I met with Dr Maung Zarni to discuss his book, Essays on Myanmar’s Genocide of Rohingyas (2012-2018). Zarni told me that he had been following and documenting the stories of the Rohingya genocide as a Burmese exiled human rights activist.

I opened the discussion about Facebook’s Rohingya case and asked him: “Does Facebook really support genocide in Rohingya?”

“Facebook acts against its promise. It has become a means for those seeking to spread hate and cause harm, and posts have been linked to offline violence,” he responded candidly.

In 2018, Facebook confessed that it had not done enough to prevent the incitement of violence and hate speech against the Rohingya, the Muslim minority in Myanmar.

Zarni explained: “We understand that the Facebook posts were not from everyday internet users. Instead, they were from Myanmar military personnel who turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing, according to former military officials, researchers, and civilian officials in the country.”

Seemingly, the campaign in Myanmar looked similar to Russia’s online influence and disinformation campaigns prior to the 2016 US presidential election. According to the book, Hybrid War: Attack on the West, human rights groups focused on the Facebook group, “Opposite Eyes”, which shared Myanmar’s military propaganda pictures.

Facebook is failing to aid an important international effort to establish accountability. This creates global concerns, especially regarding the brainwashing of youth in Myanmar. As observed by the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM) in its September 2018 report: “For most users age between 16-35 [in Myanmar], Facebook is the internet.” The report also states that “Facebook has been used to spread hate” in the country and regretted that the company was unable to provide country-specific information about hate speech on its platform.

Facebook’s manipulation of consent on Myanmar’s genocide policy against Rohingya Muslims is neither new nor shocking. The UN refugee agency even inappropriately collected and shared personal information on Rohingya refugees with Bangladesh, which was then shared with Myanmar to verify people for possible repatriation.

Filtering laws on social media must be applied strictly by governments for the protection of its users.

Elif Selin Calik is a journalist and independent researcher. She is a regular contributor to publications like TRT World, Daily Sabah, Rising Powers in Global Governance and Hurriyet Daily News. She was one of the the founders of the In-Depth News Department of Anadolu News Agency and participated in United Nations COP23 in Bonn as an observer. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from the International University of Sarajevo and a second MA in Global Diplomacy from SOAS, University of London

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

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What’s behind the $150 billion Rohingya-Facebook lawsuit? | DW News

The Indo-Pacific region, which includes 24 nations and stretches from Australia to Japan and from India to the U.S. west coast, is home to both the largest concentration of humanity and the greatest source of global emissions. In 2020, the region produced 16.75 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the consumption of oil, gas and coal — more than all other regions worldwide combined.

Success in the global effort to keep global warming below 2 C and stop catastrophic climate change depends on the region to move away from coal and other fossil fuels. Yet at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, China and India proposed countries agree to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out.”

Insufficient financing and the need to increase total energy availability — especially as more sectors become electrified — remain among the structural challenges to energy transitions around the world. China, however, is currently in a better position than the West to assist the Indo-Pacific due to geography, trade dynamics and its own clean tech sector. This could reorient economic networks and shift the balance of power in the region.

As a researcher in the field of green-industrial strategy, I am worried that the democratic world is increasingly losing ground to China in this emerging geo-economic arena. Unless the West provides an alternate network to help the region meet its energy transition needs, it risks ceding the economic alignment of the Indo-Pacific region to China’s government.

Decarbonization

A recent Bloomberg report demonstrated that many Indo-Pacific states can’t meet their 2050 energy transition needs from domestic onshore solar and wind generation. Energy imports have long been a feature of regional politics, but the economics of the energy transition change existing dynamics, favouring fixed-grid integration over more flexible liquid energy imports.

It costs less, in many cases, to build large grids that deliver energy as electrons compared to the added costs of using an energy carrier like hydrogen, which might need to be imported, to meet clean energy needs. Already the Indo-Pacific is moving in the direction of being “wired up,” as demonstrated by the proposed 3,800-kilometre-long “sun cable” to connect Australian solar resources with energy markets in Singapore.

The most efficient course of decarbonization for many East Asian states is to expand their grid connections to their neighbour’s, but this is marred by geo-security risks. Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, for example, might be less willing to stand up to Beijing if most of their electricity ran through China. And does Japan really want to meet its renewable energy needs by routing power through Russian grid connections?

In addition, much of the industrial capacity for key green technologies and resources required for Indo-Pacific countries to tap their own renewable resources is based in China. A whopping 70 per cent of global lithium cell manufacturing capacity is found in China, and Chinese firms are responsible for the production of 71 per cent of photovoltaic panels (through a supply chain riddled with the usage of Uyghur slave labour).

Meanwhile, a recent White House report put Chinese firm ownership of global cobalt and lithium processing infrastructure at 72 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively.

Export polluting industries

China’s dominance in the production of clean energy technologies is also bolstered by the success of the nation’s trade networks. China is already the largest source of trade for most countries in the region, and through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is increasingly providing financing for regional infrastructure.

The nature of Chinese infrastructure investments through the initiative has, so far, been damaging to global efforts to combat climate change. China had been the largest financier globally of coal plants, following a development pattern established by wealthier countries (western and non-western), of exporting polluting industries to poorer nations.

However, President Xi Jinping, in keeping with his endorsed vision of ecological civilization, has made improving the sustainability of China’s trade networks a priority. China’s established trade networks within the region provide a foundation for an increasingly Sino-centric economic orbit, and will likely be flipped to distribute clean energy infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.

Energy transitions

It’s important the West develop its own green foreign investment strategy to provide Indo-Pacific states a choice of infrastructure as they transition their economies. Giving Indo-Pacific countries, especially energy-poor South and East Asian states, the option to purchase low-carbon technology and resources from a variety of sources will alleviate pressure to concede to Chinese foreign-policy.

Over the long term, the West must focus on developing supply chains in solar and and lithium-ion batteries to balance out Chinese capacity in these markets. However, there are a range of energy transition technologies that western states hold a competitive advantage in, and that could be the focus of a development strategy for the region — starting right now. Investments should, for instance, immediately focus on lowering the costs of exporting green hydrogen by maritime routes.

Australia and Canada both have favourable renewable energy resources to produce green hydrogen, with Canada a leader in the development of hydrogen fuel cells.

Many Indo-Pacific countries have opportunities to generate power from sources beyond wind and solar, with Indonesia and the Philippines already market leaders for geothermal. When it comes to wind, U.S. and European wind turbine manufacturers share about 60 per cent of the market.

In June, G7 leaders announced the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership, which aims to use their financing potential to help low- and middle-income countries meet an estimated US$40 trillion in infrastructure needs.

It is too early to speculate on the success of the B3W, but its visible actions have been limited to scoping tours in Latin America and West Africa, with another planned for South East Asia.

However, the B3W could look to the recent financing deal between the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom to aid South Africa’s transition from coal power for inspiration. The first B3W funded projects are slated to be announced in early 2022.

Decision-makers in China know that in the short term they are uncertain to come out on top in a hard power competition with the U.S., and have identified economic dominance as another front of strategic competition. Subsequently, if the West doesn’t want to further cede the economic orientation of the Indo-Pacific towards China, it must increase its efforts to provide the region’s states with a strategic choice in how they meet their energy transition infrastructure needs.

Jonas Goldman, Reserach Associate, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bloomberg: “Why China’s Electric Car Lead Has Been a Long Time Coming”

( Third Pole ) – Unless the connection between economic security and a green transition is made clear by the media and politicians, the climate summit will remain full of high talk with little content Woman loading charcoal in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. There will be little progress in combating climate change at COP26 unless millions of people are helped to move away from their dependence on the fossil fuel economy. (Image: Alamy)

Omair Ahmad

October 5, 2021

The COP26 summit this year will take place under the shadow of Covid-19. It had to be delayed last year due to the pandemic – with the venue itself being transformed into a temporary hospital – and the problem is ongoing. While public health faced the most direct consequences of the Covid-19 crisis, with millions of lives lost around the world, the other impact for most developing countries has been on financial security. Economic growth and job security plummeted, endangering the future of hundreds of millions, and reversing gains on everything from poverty reduction to nutrition.

The primary issue for most countries attending COP26 will be economic growth and job security of their citizens. These issues are not only compatible with the climate change agenda, they are essential to it. Too often the conversation has been framed as economy versus ecology, but what the pandemic has revealed in unsparing detail is that the current economic model is incredibly fragile, and incapable of dealing with global shocks.

Economic growth and job security are not only compatible with the climate change agenda, they are essential to it

This year’s gas prices hike across Europe, due to competition with Asian markets and slow response from Russia, as well as coal shortages in China and India due to manufacturing and trade disruptions, may mean that millions of people will struggle to keep warm in winter, or will run out of power altogether. Such crises demonstrate the inherent instability of the global fossil fuel system, and things can only worsen as the world faces more shocks due to climate change.

Different conversations on climate insecurity

In many ways the lingering impact of the pandemic – in terms of economic insecurity – is symptomatic of how issues of climate change continue to be covered. Partially because much of the international media is based in developed countries, the precarity of large populations in the face of increased disasters does not get its due. When floods hit Europe, or a massive storm makes landfall in the United States, it is a story for a few news cycles. In India, a flood wiping away villages in Arunachal Pradesh may leave its people abandoned even six years later. Both these issues are climate change-related, but their effects on states that have a robust welfare system, and those that do not, are starkly different.

The relative difference in impact is also why the conversation is framed so differently, making communication across the political divide almost impossible. When developed countries push for a commitment to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, they are largely considering trying to make the world less vulnerable in the future. For developing countries, resources are needed to deal with the fact that their people are vulnerable now. These governments desperately need to provide economic security and prosperity – if only for the regimes to survive. But if they have no reliable pathway except through a broken carbon economy, then neither mitigation nor adaptation will receive priority.

Agriculture and refugees are central to developing countries’ problems

Maybe nothing demonstrates this difference so starkly as the conversations on agriculture and climate refugees. For countries like India, agriculture and its allied industries support nearly half the working population. And this mainstay of the economy is being disrupted in three major ways by climate change: the change in weather patterns in the mountains, making it harder to grow traditional crops; the rise in sea levels leading to greater salinity of coastal lands; and the increased incidence of floods and droughts.

Forced off their lands, some of which are swallowed by seas or eroded by rivers, people are fleeing destitution. Worse, it is next to impossible to assess the scale of this migration since, in most cases, such movement is within the borders of states rather than across them.

For those still making their lives off agriculture, the future looks insecure, and “business as usual” as practised by the developed countries offers little hope. For a year now, farmers have been protesting against three laws passed by the Indian Parliament. These are often seen as pro-business, and certainly they replicate the business model of agriculture in the US. But is this a model that makes sense – in terms of cost of water, fertiliser, crop diversity and resilience in today’s world?

Dubbed the largest civil society protest in the world, it has slowly slipped off the radar from both international and national news coverage, except for stories of violence. This is a disaster, because if the world is not discussing how to do agriculture in a sustainable manner, there is little hope that we can effectively deal with the climate crisis, much less feed the world.

Climate change is the story of thirst, poverty, hunger, deprivation and conflict

Climate change has a real, powerful impact on billions of people, most of whom do not know or do not use that particular term. It is the story of thirst, poverty, hunger, deprivation and conflict caused by changes to the environment on which they depend for their lives and livelihoods. And like most things political, it is about money, how we make it, and how we distribute it.

Unfortunately, neither the delegates who take part in such discussion, nor many of the journalists covering such events, seem willing to make that connection. Without that focus, COP26 runs the risk of being yet another event where high-minded prose hides the fact that our current model of “business as usual” is not even good business, much less good sense.

Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist, with a particular focus on the Himalayan region. He is the author of a political history of Bhutan, and a few novels.

Third Pole

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Euractiv: “COP26 – Can renewed political will result in concrete actions?”