Due West

Is War An Environmental Issue?

By Dan Whipple, 12-12-06

What’s an environmental issue?

Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says, “If you spend money on water security in sub-Saharan Africa, its certainly has environmental benefits. You have avoid policies that are too narrowly focused Take things like reducing conflict. The two Gulf Wars have had tremendous environmental consequences, but few people consider conflict reduction an environmental issue.”

In the 2006 book How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by the Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School, a group of economists considered the costs and benefits of attempting to reduce civil wars. In their priorities of spending that $50 billion -- better world and so on -- the panel of experts were unable to decide whether reducing civil wars was a good idea or not.

To wit: “Measures to reduce the number, duration, or severity of civil wars would stand very high in the ordering, if they could be expected with any confidence to succeed. Members of the panel were not persuaded that the proposals put before them met that test. The panel noted a strong prima facie case for additional financial support for regional peacekeeping forces in post-conflict countries that met certain criteria, but that the information before them was insufficient for them to assign a ranking. The experts also noted the evidence that growth in incomes reduced the long-term incidence of civil war.”

This must be disheartening news to the people in Darfur and Iraq. There is a reason they call economics “the dismal science.” U.S. Democrats can take heart, though, that an impaneled panel of internationally recognized economists decided that the only solution to the problem is to throw money at it.

The $50 Billion book is gratifyingly precise about the costs of civil wars. “Conflict has a severe effect on human health,” the economists report. “One way of summarizing this effect is to express the cost in terms of Disability Affected Life-Years (DALY).” This measures the number of people adversely affected and for how long. “An average war causes an estimated 0.5 million DALYs each year ... If each DALY is valued at $1,000 (roughly the per capita income in many at-risk countries), the economic cost of harm to human health in a typical war is around $5 billion.”

Furthermore, civil wars cost about 250 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, you spend the equivalent of two-and-a-half countries just to ruin the one you’ve already got. And civil wars are as addictive as crack cocaine, it turns out: “Countries that have just experienced a civil war are more likely to have further conflict.” The chance of a civil war breaking out before you’ve had the first one is about 22 percent. After that first taste, though, the chances of a new civil war go up to nearly 40 percent. The average cost of a single war -- again the precision is pleasing -- is $64 billion.

President Bush should have read this book before he invaded Iraq. Not only did he set himself up for failure -- that 40 percent chance of a rematch -- he overpaid for the privilege by quite a bit.

It turns out that you also can’t solve the civil war problem by nuking them -- an option that has been discussed in every barroom from Boston to Bakersfield. At the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting this week in San Francisco, University of Colorado Owen Toon and colleagues found even a small nuclear war has long-term global human and environmental impacts.

The researchers looked at a nuclear exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons by emerging third-world nuclear powers. These bombs that are considerably smaller than the explosive yield of the major powers’ arsenals. The researchers say they give out only three-hundredths of one percent of the yield. So the whole war would release about three percent of the explosive power of one U.S. or Russian bomb.

The researchers don’t point fingers at anybody, but the most likely scenario for this kind of war is between Pakistan and India. The two nations came alarmingly close to a nuclear exchange in 2002. An estimate at the time by Rashid Naim of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that there would be 500,000 to one million immediate fatalities on each side in a limited exchange on military centers, or 15 million immediate deaths in Pakistan and 30 million in India in an attack on military and major economic targets.

Toon and colleagues’ research concentrated on the climate effects of an exchange like this. They found a significant cooling of the earth -- a global average of about 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit -- that would last for years and dramatically affect the food supply.

The explosions would send black soot into the air, which would rise to the very top of the stratosphere “much higher that is typical of weakly absorbing volcanic sulfate aerosols.” Volcanoes are the closest comparison to nuclear blasts. The expulsion of aerosols -- a scientific catchall name for dust, smoke and other atmospheric particles -- have a pronounced cooling effect on the climate. It’s even been suggested that the current global climate change could be slowed or reversed by deliberately polluting the upper atmosphere.

The global effects of even this limited nuclear war would be dramatic. The report concludes that the direct fatalities would be equivalent to the entire death toll of World War II. But the indirect impacts would also be large, especially the reduction in growing seasons, which “may completely eliminate crops that have insufficient time to reach maturity. These reductions continue for several years.”

All that effort that’s gone into closing the ozone hole would also be wasted. “Global ozone loss is likely,” the report says laconically, “with effects on downward ultraviolet radiation.”

Unlike the $50 Billion book, the Toon et al. report -- which can be found here -- doesn’t say how much all this nuclear war would cost in discounted dollars. Presumably a lot.

But they don’t seem to think it’s a very good idea.

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