Sea rise not that scary?

That's the case that climate adaptationist Bjorn Lomborg (don't call him a skeptic) makes at Project Syndicate, because we've dealt with it already:

Imagine that over the next 70 or 80 years, a giant port city – say, Tokyo – found itself engulfed by sea levels rising as much as 15 feet or more... Without a vast, highly coordinated global effort, how could we possibly cope with sea-level rises on that order of magnitude?

Well, we already have. In fact, we’re doing it right now. Since 1930, excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused Tokyo to subside by as much as 15 feet, with some of the lowest parts of the downtown area dropping almost a foot per year in some years. Similar subsidence has occurred over the past century in a wide range of cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Osaka, Bangkok, and Jakarta. In each case, the city has managed to protect itself from such large sea-level rises and thrive.

Lomborg cites research research claiming that over 95% of the world's coastal population is urban, making rising oceans no big deal.

A 20-foot rise in sea levels (which, not incidentally, is about ten times more than the United Nations climate panel’s worst-case expectations) would inundate about 16,000 square miles of coastline, where more than 400 million people currently live... [and] the vast majority of those 400 million people reside within cities, where they could be protected relatively easily, as in Tokyo.

Off the top of my head, I'd challenge this with Bangladesh, which has 160 million people and is very low-lying:

Is it really fair to assume Dhaka has an easy out just because it's "urban"? Maybe Jakarta has coped with rising seas, but Indonesia's per capita GDP is still 3x that of Bangladesh.

Lagos and Karachi are two other poor coastal megacities that would be worth doing the same analysis for.

Update: I just had dinner with someone from Bangladesh who confirmed that the idea that rising seas won't hit Bangladesh hard is preposterous. First, there are millions of people living in low-lying, non-urban areas (especially hundreds of islands in the Ganges Delta). Second, much of the productive agricultural land is similarly low and is already suffering from soaring salinity in many areas. So it seems that the underlying analysis is weak, and Lomborg himself should be doing better quality control of the sources he chooses to cite.

Update 2: A few relevant numbers to refine our back-of-the-envelope: 46% of Bangladeshis live within 10 meters of the average sea level, and the country is only 27% urban. So it seems very unlikely that Lomborg's math that "only ~15 million people would need to be relocated [over the course of the century]" can possibly be right.

The other oil spill

The Deepwater Horizon spill has continued to worsen - the latest estimates of leak volume have doubled (again), BP's reputation is plummeting (as is its market value), the Obama administration appears largely powerless and increasingly blamed, and U.S. consumers and taxpayers appear to be the major losers in the long term. But as the Guardian pointed out, Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill - and it has been going on for decades.

One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

That is a wide range of estimates - at 7 barrels per ton, Amnesty's estimate for last year is almost equivalent to the other estimate for the past century. But even if we take the former estimate, it would take the Deepwater Horizon well almost a year flowing at the new estimated 30,000 bbl/day rate to equal the amount of oil leaked into the Niger Delta over time - and look at the horrific environmental and economic consequences after only a month.

The problem with Nigeria, of course, is the security challenges atop the technical ones.

Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents – one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.

I don't have any answers - it is such a complicated situation that it is hard to know the best way to intervene, even if the political will could be summoned. But maybe one tiny silver lining of the Gulf disaster is that Americans will now appreciate more vividly the consequences that Nigeria has faced for so long - I know I do.

Hard to be transparent about oil when...

... you don't know how much is being produced:

The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has described the records of the country’s crude production and export as unclear, saying that after 58 years of oil production, the country does not know exactly the quantity it produces.

Speaking at the presentation of a research report on the Nigeria Extractive Industry in Abuja weekend, Chairman of the Board of NEITI, Prof. Asisi Asobie, said despite all the inroads made by the country to expand operations in the oil industry, it had not been able to get operators to tell the truth about the actual oil volumes produced.

“After 58 years of producing oil, Nigeria does not know how much was being produced. It is regrettable that we have not been able to get oil companies to tell Nigerians exactly what they produce. The sector is shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

I find it quite surprising the that the government wouldn't be able to strong-arm this information from oil companies who depend entirely on the continued legitimacy of their concessions. Have they tried?

Where China’s investing

Statistics shmutistics... while the research apparently says China doesn’t invest disproportionately in resource-rich African countries, a top four of DR Congo (minerals), South Africa (coal and iron ore), Nigeria (oil) and Niger (uranium, and a fresh coup) makes me dubious.

Note also that Australia is number one overall (e.g. here, here, here).

By the way, critical mass has inspired me to add a new label for China in Africa.

Update: OK, on second thought... how is "aid" defined here? If narrowly, then perhaps I buy that Chinese aid specifically is not targeted toward resource-rich Africa countries... but who's to say where building a road, a railroad, a port, an airport becomes investment rather than aid? Building infrastructure frankly has more economic impact than most other foreign aid anyway, in all likelihood.

Update 2: Speaking of Niger, cannot help but pass on this outstanding haiku:

Another colonel
Thinks it’s his turn to spring clean
The big boss – hi coup!

Does the oil curse exist?

The oil curse is a generally accepted truth - there are is no shortage of anecdotes from countries with oil (e.g. Brazil, Nigeria) and concern from those who might discover it (e.g. Greenland). The comparative growth trajectories of Latin America and China/India draw a striking (if not statistically rigorous) contrast between natural resource wealth and economic growth.

But at Aid Watch, Adam Martin questions whether the curse does in fact stand up to analytical scrutiny. He argues that empirical work on the oil curse confuses abundance with dependence and cites three recent papers that show that "even natural resource dependence does not undermine democratization." He later clarifies for commenters:

- I’m not claiming there are no ill effects associated with natural resources. I’m saying these studies failed to find evidence that resources systematically effect democracy, growth, or development, and most of the popular studies that do have fundamental flaws.

- It’s also not the case that these studies (or I) claim that there are NO countries that fit the Curse story, but that it’s not the systemic phenomenon other studies had argued for.

It's quite an interesting and counterintuitive finding. I am inherently skeptical of cross-country regressions, especially when they run counter to things that so many people have seen firsthand in practice. But it is good to keep an open mind, and I applaud Martin for arguing the other side of the story.

How NOT to run a resource wealth fund

Nigeria gives us a textbook example of how NOT to run a save-for-a-rainy-day resource wealth fund:

Nigeria withdrew 87 billion naira ($564 million) from a fund created to save revenue from oil exports when prices are high, ThisDay newspaper reported, citing Oludare Osibote, the country’s acting Accountant-General.

The money will enable the federal, state and local governments to meet some of their expenditures following a drop in revenue earmarked for them in this year’s budget, the Lagos- based newspaper said.

First of all, this is not a rainy day:

Funds are placed into the so-called excess crude account when oil prices rise above $45 a barrel, and are used as a reserve when prices decline.

Compare that to current oil prices of around $70/bbl. But even more concerning is this:

The account now holds about $9 billion, down from $20 billion at the beginning of this year, according to the newspaper.

The fund has lost or had withdrawn half of its assets in the last nine months?? Even though equity markets are up and oil prices have barely dipped below (and mostly stayed well above) the $45/bbl threshold?? Something doesn't add up here.

Infant mortality stat of the day

The bad news is that infant mortality is still far too high, and is highly concentrated: just three countries — India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — between them account for 40% of the world’s under-5 deaths.

That is Felix Salmon; the good news is that worldwide, infant mortality fell 28% between 1990 and 2008.

A poor choice of name

As FP Passport and Chris Blattman have noted, the new Nigerian-Russian energy venture may not be off to the most auspicious start:

It probably seemed a good idea at the time. But Russia's attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time -- after the new company was named Nigaz.

Medvedev in Nigeria

Russia extends its energy reach further into Africa, although this isn't quite as directly threatening to Europe as buying "all future volumes" of Libyan oil and gas...