Stanford University

Addressing the 'Coal Renaissance' in a Post-Kyoto World

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On Monday, June 13, 2011 at 4:15 p.m. in Panofsky Auditorium, Richard Morse of Stanford University will present a colloquium, "Addressing the 'Coal Renaissance' in a Post-Kyoto World."

Coal has been the world's fastest growing source of fossil fuel since 2000, contributing more to global primary energy supplies than any other source of energy.  Yet it is also the world's leading source of CO2 emissions.  As the Kyoto Protocol approaches its end in 2012 and global carbon policy is fragmented into regional efforts, efforts to mitigate global emissions will require taking a hard look at the realities of coal markets and developing pragmatic strategies that don't rely on carbon policy.

Richard Morse of Stanford's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development will discuss the outlook for global carbon policy, how international coal markets are evolving, and what strategies and technologies might realistically be used to reduce emissions from coal.   Discussion of carbon policy will include the latest developments in Europe, China, and the US, and analysis of international coal markets will highlight key issues for the future of Chinese energy consumption.  Arguing that renewable energy in its current state can only address the coal emissions problem at the margin, Morse will consider the portfolio of carbon mitigation options that can operate at scale, including carbon capture and storage (CCS).  Finally, in light of the recent nuclear tragedy in Japan, Morse will discuss with the SLAC community how to evaluate the relative risks of coal and climate change against the risk of nuclear catastrophe.

The talk is free and open to all.

Panofsky Auditorium
Stanford University

Richard Morse Speaker
Lectures

Demographic Change in East Asia: Economic, Social, and Security Implications

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Japan leads, chased closely by South Korea, with China, on a vastly larger scale, not far behind. Not as mercantilist development states nor as threats to America's high-tech industry, but rather as the world’s most rapidly aging societies.  

A wave of unprecedented demographic change is sweeping across East Asia, the forefront of a phenomenon of longer life expectancy and declining birthrates that together yield a striking rate of aging. Japan already confronts a shrinking population. Korea is graying even more quickly. And although China is projected to grow for another couple of decades, demographic change races against economic development. Could China become the first country to grow old before growing rich? In Southeast Asia, Singapore also is confronting a declining birthrate and an aging society. Increasingly, Asia’s aging countries look to its younger societies, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India, as sources of migrant labor and even wives. Those countries in turn face different demographic challenges, such as how to educate their youth for global competition.

The third Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue will focus on demographic change in the region and its implications across a wide range of areas, including economies, societies, and security. Asia’s experience offers both lessons and warnings for North America and Europe, which are facing similar problems. Questions to be addressed include:

  • What are the inter-relationships between population aging and key macroeconomic variables such as economic growth, savings rates, and public and private intergenerational transfers?
  • How and why do policy responses to population aging differ in Japan, South Korea, and across different regions of China?
  • What are the effects of demographic change on national institutions such as employment practices, pension and welfare systems, and financial systems?
  • What policies can or should be pursued to influence future outcomes?
  • How will demographic change affect security in the Asia-Pacific region?
  • How have patterns of migration impacted society and culture in East Asia, in comparative perspective?
  • How will demographic change influence the movement of people across the region and the prevalence of multicultural families?
  • What lessons can Asia, the United States, and Europe learn from each other to improve the policy response to population aging?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. The first Dialogue examined the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States. It also explored the challenges posed by competition for resources and the possibilities for cooperating to develop sustainable forms of energy and better consumption practices. Last year’s Dialogue considered the question of building an East Asian Community similar in concept to the European Union. Participants discussed existing organizations, such as ASEAN and APEC, and the economic, policy, and security implications of creating an integrated East Asia regional structure.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.

Kyoto International Community House Event Hall
2-1 Torii-cho, Awataguchi,
Sakyo-ku Kyoto, 606-8536
JAPAN

Seminars
Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue

Eggleston considers China's ability to adjust to demographic change

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Karen Eggleston
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Can social, economic, and policy changes turn a period of growing old-age dependency into one of positive opportunity and growth in China? Qiong Zhang and Asia Health Policy Program director Karen Eggleston explore this challenging question in a recent China Brief article. They look back into several decades of China's history and also consider the current demographic picture of one-child families, gender imbalance, declining fertility rates, and a healthy and prosperous aging population.

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China is now predominantly a country with one-child families. | Stefan Lins
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Farmers in rural China struggling to survive, Scott Rozelle comments

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Two-hundred million farming households in China are struggling to capitalize on their nation's breathtaking economic development. While city dwellers are enjoying fast-rising living standards, much of rural China remains a hardscrabble landscape where average incomes of about $3,200 a year are less than a third of what they are in urban areas. "No one is going to get rich off farming," said Scott Rozelle, an expert on China's rural economy at Stanford University. "It's not going to happen until farm sizes get bigger. That's why millions of people are moving to the cities."

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When will European groups send flotillas to help people of North Korea and Syria?

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Freedom House’s Freedom in the World survey showcases an alarming decline in freedom, democracy and respect for human rights around the world for a fifth consecutive year. Only 60% of the world’s 194 countries and 14 territories can be defined as democracies with respect for fundamental human rights and freedoms.

While universal human rights are trampled upon in dictatorships as North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya and China, the European foreign policy debate is dominated by Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza and the US-led war against international terrorism.

Flotillas to Gaza receive massive publicity in the European press, despite the fact that the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is open and the UN secretary general calling the campaign "an unnecessary provocation."

No flotillas are sailing towards Damascus and Teheran, despite the fact that Amnesty reported some 1,400 deaths in the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime, as well as rape and torture of children. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran has executed 175 people this year, including women, children and homosexuals by public hanging and stoning.

Calls for a boycott of China are rarely issued in the European debate, although the communist regime in Beijing occupies Tibet and accounts for two thirds of the world’s executions. No fly-ins head to Atatürk International Airport, despite the fact that Turkey illegally occupies Northern Cyprus and commits systematic human rights violations in the Kurdish territories.

Elsewhere, very few European writers and cultural figures condemn the Castro regime, despite the fact that Cuba has forced 18 dissident journalists into exile this year.

The one-sidedness of the European foreign policy debate is clearly exemplified in the case of North Korea, one of the world’s worst human rights abusers according to Amnesty. A recently publicized UN report charged that some 3.5 million of the country’s 24 million inhabitants suffer from acute food shortages as result of the totalitarian regime’s policies.

Self-styled peace activists
Pyongyang has established a system of prison camps throughout the country where 200,000 dissidents are subjected to systematic torture and starvation. Forced labor guarantees that no detainees are strong enough to rebel; attempts to escape are punished with torture and execution.

Very few European campaigns are initiated in support of the North Korean people. This selective engagement can be explained by the fact that countries like North Korea don’t generate widespread media coverage or political debate. More significantly, the problems don’t fit into the dominant European foreign policy discourse, which discriminates between moral principles in the name of biased political agendas.

If the Gaza flotilla was motivated by altruistic humanism, we would have seen some boats setting sail for Benghazi, loaded with medicine and humanitarian aid. Ships with oppositional literature and laptops would have done wonders for the democratic opposition in Havana and Tehran. A universal commitment to the promotion of human rights would have prompted European public engagement against the mass starvation and torture in North Korea.

Next time self-styled European human rights and peace activists in Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland or Spain issue declarations in the name of humanism while condemning the only democracy in the Middle East, you should think twice; specifically when these statements are motivated by a questionable commitment to the promotion of democracy and human rights in all countries of the world.

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Ynetnews.com
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Daniel Schatz
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Political Movements in an Authoritarian Hierarchy

This project investigates the sources of stability and conflict in authoritarian regimes, especially regimes that have a unitary national government, apply threats and repression to their own officials, and lack an exit option for bureaucrats to move into careers in a separate private sector. It also seeks to develop theories about political movements in which bureaucrats are viewed as active participants in political processes that can rapidly undermine a government.

The Five-Phases of Economic Development and Institutional Evolution in China and Japan

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This paper adopts a unified approach to an understanding of the development processes of the East Asian economies, Chinese, Japanese and South Korean, in terms of common five phases starting with Malthusian equilibria and extended to forthcoming post-demographic transitions characterized by the shrinkage of the working-age group share in the population. Notwithstanding of the basic commonality, however, there are also marked differences among the East Asian economies in the timing of turning points, durations, and substantive forms of the phases. The paper claims that those differences need to be co-explained by accompanying variations in institutional trajectories. It identifies the Malthusian origins of contrasting political-economic and social-norm characteristics in Chinese and Japanese institutional arrangements and discusses their transformations over successive phases. By delineating institutional characteristics of China and Japan from a game-theoretic perspective, it implicitly challenges prevailing views that contrast the East and the West in such general terms as kinship vs. the third party enforcement of contracts, Confucianism vs. Protestantism, collectivism vs. individualism, authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy, and the like. These dichotomies are too simplistic for explaining the uniqueness, commonality and variations of institutional arrangements in East Asia and their impacts on development processes of respective economies.

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Social Science Research Network
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Masahiko Aoki
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Top security experts explore Korean Peninsula situation and policies

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The executive summary from the sixth Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum, held June 2011 at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, is now available.

When the semiannual Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum convened in Seoul in late 2010, North Korea had just attacked South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island and revealed to American experts its work on a nuclear enrichment facility. These events capped a year that also witnessed the alleged sinking by North Korea of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan and telling signs of succession preparations underway in North Korea. There have been no major incidents in recent months, but these events and the uncertainty they engendered weigh heavily in the minds of Korea observers and officials in South Korea and the United States.

Views on North Korea’s intentions and domestic political situation are mixed, as are voices on the appropriate U.S. and South Korean response to the events of 2010. These issues fit within a greater discussion of the U.S.-South Korea alliance and the Northeast Asia region wherein China plays a major economic and political role. The most recent Forum, held June 2011 at the Walter. H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), provided an arena for informed, policy-oriented discussion of major peninsular and regional issues impacting South Korea and the United States.

Twenty subject experts and former senior officials from the United States and South Korea gathered at Stanford University on June 8 for an exchange of views. Amidst a diversity of opinions, collectively the participants expressed a wish for regional stability and the continued need for a strong U.S.-South Korea alliance in order to achieve it. The full executive report of this sixth session of the Forum is now available online, and includes discussion of:

  • The current state of North Korea’s nuclear program and possible scenarios for reducing the risk of proliferation
  • North Korea’s 2010 military actions and increasingly strong rhetoric toward South Korea since, especially in relation to its domestic political situation and the impending succession
  • China’s response to North Korea last year and the complex relationship between the two countries, including Kim Jong Il’s frequent recent visits to China
  • Northeast Asian regional cooperation with a focus on the South Korean-Chinese-Japanese leaders’ summit
  • The factor of U.S., South Korean, and Chinese domestic politics in shaping policy toward North Korea, and the upcoming U.S. and South Korean elections
  • The U.S. security role on the Korean Peninsula and in greater Northeast Asia

The Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum was established in 2006 by Shorenstein APARC to serve as an ongoing forum for the exchange of views on issues of significance to the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Co-sponsored with the Sejong Institute, a leading South Korean think tank, the Forum alternates between Stanford and Seoul. Summaries and agendas from past Forums are available on the Shorenstein APARC website.

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Dr. Susan Shirk, University of California San Diego | Heather Ahn
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Incoming Koret and Pantech Fellows bring extensive bilateral and North Korea experience

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Stanford University's Korean Studies Program (KSP) looks forward to welcoming its Koret and Pantech Fellows for the 2011-2012 academic year. Joon-woo Park, a former senior diplomat from Korea with over thirty years of foreign policy experience, will arrive in September to serve as the program's Koret Fellow. While at Stanford, he will conduct research on South Korean foreign policy, including increased U.S.-Korean collaboration on China and prospects for East Asian regional integration based on the European Union model. Katharina Zellweger, currently residing in Pyongyang as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, will join KSP in November as the Pantech Fellow. She is a Swiss national who has spent over fifteen years conducting humanitarian work in North Korea. Her research will explore how aid intervention can stimulate positive sustainable change in that country. The Koret Foundation of San Francisco and the Pantech Company and Curitel Communications (known as the Pantech Group) of Korea generously fund these fellowships.
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Incoming Koret and Pantech Fellows bring extensive bilateral and North Korea experience

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Stanford University's Korean Studies Program (KSP) looks forward to welcoming its Koret and Pantech Fellows for the 2011-2012 academic year. Joon-woo Park, a former senior diplomat from Korea with over thirty years of foreign policy experience, will arrive in September to serve as the program's Koret Fellow. While at Stanford, he will conduct research on South Korean foreign policy, including increased U.S.-Korean collaboration on China and prospects for East Asian regional integration based on the European Union model. Katharina Zellweger, currently residing in Pyongyang as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, will join KSP in November as the Pantech Fellow. She is a Swiss national who has spent over fifteen years conducting humanitarian work in North Korea. Her research will explore how aid intervention can stimulate positive sustainable change in that country. The Koret Foundation of San Francisco and the Pantech Company and Curitel Communications (known as the Pantech Group) of Korea generously fund these fellowships.
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