Volunteers from the University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and Hands-on Bay Area came together last night for "Bring Me A Book" Volunteer Night. The event took place at the Bring Me A Book headquarters in nearby Mountain View, where the volunteers had dinner and learned about the organization.

Denise Masumoto, Shorenstein APARC's manager of corporate relations, headed the 20 volunteers from APARC, who are visiting fellows doing research at Stanford for a year and represent countries including China, India, Japan and the Philippines. Masumoto said APARC became affiliated with the Bring Me A Book Program when she found the program online and thought it represented an integral part of American lifestyle and culture. She also hoped that it could "encourage the visiting fellows to volunteer in other ways in their own countries."

"It is an honor to host the students of Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center," said Bring Me A Book volunteer coordinator and community outreach manager Montez Davis. "Since many of these volunteers have families, this is the perfect way for them to experience first hand the difference you can make in the future success of a child all through volunteer work."

Bring Me A Book began with Judy Koch's mission to provide easy access to the best childrens' books and to inspire reading aloud with children. The foundation aims to provide brand-new books of the best quality to children who do not have the means to obtain them otherwise.

"We believe that every child deserves books of the same quality," said Bring Me A Book office manager Erin Smith.

Bring Me A Book is affiliated with volunteer corporations such as CISCO, Google and Starbucks, as well as other non-profit organizations. Hands-on Bay Area is a non-profit organization that aims to make volunteer work easy and accessible, organizers said.

Davis hosted the event along with Donovan Cook '66, director of development for Bring Me A Book. The pair began by giving the volunteers a brief tour around the headquarters and updating the volunteers on their latest plans.

The organizers mentioned projects including the recent distribution of Karen Ehrhardt's This Jazz Man to Oakland Public Schools like the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School and the recent openings of Bring Me A Book in places such as Hong Kong, Malawi, Mexico and the Philippines.

Coal is dirty. But coal is driving the U.S., Chinese and Indian economies. And therefore, coal is not going away. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind generate only 1 percent of the world's electricity. Do the math: Making coal burn cleaner might be the most pressing environmental problem that no one talks about.

Despite recent estimates that pollution from China's booming coal industry reaches U.S. shores in as little as five days, the green-tech investment boom that has funded the rise of biofuels has bypassed coal. Even the head of the World Coal Institute recently proclaimed the last 10 years "a lost decade" for clean coal, saying it's time to play catch-up.

Stanford's Jeremy Carl, a research fellow in the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, couldn't agree more. He spoke on the phone with Wired News to discuss China, the holy grail of clean coal and how many coal plants he'd trade for Kyoto's accomplishments.

Stanford research fellow Jeremy Carl says, "Coal is as dirty as it gets," but warns against throwing the possibly cleaned-up baby out with the dirty bathwater.

Wired News: Why'd you get into clean coal?

Jeremy Carl: I looked at the numbers. It's a question of where the big sources of emissions are and where we can attack them.

WN: Can you give us an idea of the scale of coal power? Can you put coal in context as an energy source?

Carl: Only oil makes a bigger contribution to global energy. In terms of energy in the industrial world, it's about 40 percent of electricity production.

WN: How dirty is coal?

Carl: Coal is as dirty as it gets. Coal has every element in the periodic table. And depending where in the world you get it from, "coal" can mean 100 different substances. If you sent the sort of coal you might use in a typical Indian plant to a supermodern boiler in Japan, it would shut the place down.

WN: But there's got to be good things about coal.

Carl: It's cheap. And coal doesn't have the kind of extreme risk that nuclear power has. You're not going to build a dirty bomb out of coal. And unlike other fossil fuels, it is really widely distributed, so there is less of a coal OPEC.

WN: And that distribution would seem to make resource wars less likely to break out over coal?

Carl: Yes.

WN: Is there an energy source that could replace coal?

Carl: Natural gas is the only viable replacement, and it's not clear that the natural-gas supply could scale up to replace coal.

WN: So, how can we can make coal cleaner?

Carl: The most-well-known is flue-gas desulfurization, which takes sulfur dioxide out of smoke stacks, and came out of concerns about acid rain. There are other pollution-control devices for nitrogen oxide and mercury filters.

WN: What about up-and-coming technologies like carbon capture and sequestration? Can you tell us about that?

Carl: You're taking carbon from a smokestack and pressure-injecting it into a geological formation of some sort. We actually already do this process at an industrial level. We know how this works.

WN: Seems like we're spending a lot of time on the backend scrubbing pollutants out. Should we be designing in a cleaner process on the front end?

Carl: A lot of people point to integrated gasification-combined-cycle (IGCC) plants, which gasify coal before burning it, as the holy grail because they get you a cleaner process. It gives you a more concentrated stream of carbon that you can sequester underground more cheaply. The capital cost is very high, though, and we don't have a lot of experience in designing them.

WN: We hear a lot about China's coal industry. Can you compare it with the U.S. industry, which ranks second in the world?

Carl: We mine about (1.1 billion tons) of coal per year. China was at about 1.4 billion tons seven years ago. Now they are at 2.4 billion tons. So, they essentially took the second-biggest coal industry in the whole world and replicated it in seven years. And if you look at the Chinese plans, they plan to ramp it up even more in the future.

WN: Given the obvious environmental impacts of these plants, why don't we have better answers for these problems than the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States didn't sign, and which exempted China and India from emissions restrictions)?

Carl: I'll give you a speculative, personal answer. It has to do with the politics of the type of people who were negotiating Kyoto. And the pressure put on by environmental groups that were uncomfortable with coal. There was just so much pressure on the symbolic importance of getting a deal done.

WN: What would you have rather seen?

Carl: I think there has been some really good criticism that says, "Was the U.N. really a good forum for this? Or would it have been better to have taken the 10 countries who consume 60 percent of global energy and do something with real teeth in it?" I think that would have been a much better approach.

I would have happily traded every emissions gain from Kyoto for eight clean coal plants sequestering carbon in different countries. Because then we could have a real discussion that says, "This works. Now let's see who has to bear the cost."

WN: Why would that be such a big deal?

Carl: Because right now we're having a conversation with China and India where we're trying to get China and India to build clean coal plants by saying, "Here's this thing that's never been tried before at a mass scale. You should build one." And that's not going to work.

We are pleased to announce the first article of the new academic year in our series of Shorenstein APARC Dispatches. This month's piece comes from Dr. John D. Ciorciari, one of this year's Shorenstein Fellows. Dr. Ciorciari's current research centers on the alignment policies of small states and middle powers in the Asia-Pacific region. He also has interests in international human rights law and international finance. In this piece, Dr. Ciorciari shares some comments on "Myanmar After the Saffron Revolution."

In late September, tens of thousands of Buddhist monks took to the streets of Myanmar, leading the largest uprising against the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) since 1988. A sharp and sudden hike in fuel prices sparked the protests, but to the regime's many critics, the revolt displayed the depth of popular discontent with economic mismanagement, corruption, and political repression in Myanmar. Images of unarmed monks confronting the feared tatmadaw (armed forces) won the protesters considerable moral support from abroad, as did a public appearance by Aung San Suu Kyi. Some observers anticipated that the "saffron revolution" would lead to the overthrow of the regime, as occurred during the "rose," "orange," and "tulip" revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

The tatmadaw responded swiftly and brutally, however. Troops imposed tight curfews, raided pagodas, and used clubs and tear gas to disperse protesters. In a matter of days, the armed forces killed numerous demonstrators, arrested or detained thousands more, and re-imposed control. The saffron revolution thus appears to have subsided, and the outlook is not promising for advocates of regime change or dramatic policy shifts in Myanmar.

The episode did reveal some minor cracks in the SPDC edifice. Colonel Hla Win, a longtime senior member of the junta, reportedly defected into an ethnic Karen rebel-controlled area and is seeking political asylum after defying an order to massacre a group of monks. At least one senior army official has leaked incriminating evidence to the press, and a foreign ministry official resigned at the government's "appalling" response to the protests. Prime Minister Soe Win has been hospitalized with leukemia for months. Rumors even swirled of a coup. Nevertheless, SPDC chairman Than Shwe, his deputy Maung Aye, and other cabinet members appear to have closed ranks, and the SPDC looks quite firmly entrenched.

International responses to the uprising and military response have been mixed. Western governments and activist groups quickly condemned the SPDC and pushed the regime to open dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition National League for Democracy. U.S. President George W. Bush announced tighter sanctions shortly after the crackdown began. Japan--which has favored engagement in the past--is now considering sanctions and has demanded an explanation and an apology for the shooting of a Japanese journalist.

To dampen international pressure, the SPDC allowed Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari to enter the country as a UN special envoy. Gambari has met with both Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi to convey the UN's concerns about the crackdown. The SPDC has also appointed retired general U Aung Kyi as an official interlocutor with Aung San Suu Kyi and has made gestures of conciliation to the clergy. However, the Myanmar leadership has rebuffed demands for more serious political dialogue or far-reaching policy reforms.

A degree of Chinese and Russian protection has helped shield the SPDC from international pressure. China and Russia vetoed a U.S.-sponsored UN Security Council resolution demanding that the SPDC free all political prisoners. Officials in Beijing and Moscow argued that the unrest was an "internal matter" unsuited for Security Council action. Their defense of a strong norm of sovereignty--rooted largely in their fear of similar Western attacks--provides political cover for the SPDC. Their objection to isolating Myanmar economically also makes it unlikely that a program of enhanced U.S. and European sanctions will bring the junta to its knees. As long as Myanmar's neighbors do business with the SPDC, it will probably survive.

To date, divergent foreign policy priorities have conspired against a genuinely multilateral policy to drive reform in Myanmar. For China, Myanmar is a strategic gateway to the East Indian Ocean and a source of prized raw materials, as well as a political ally on issues of state sovereignty. India and Thailand have also been loath to cut off or alienate their troublesome neighbor. India has little ideological affection for the SPDC but rejects sanctions and has responded quietly to recent events in Myanmar. Indian officials view Myanmar as an important regional pivot with China and a source of natural resources. Thai policymakers, worried about refugees and instability in ethnic minority enclaves along the border, have tended to prioritize stability over reform in relations with the SPDC. Both India and Thailand derive considerable economic benefits--both legal and illicit--from an open border. In addition, they fear that using their limited leverage to attack the junta will drive it further into China's embrace.

The governments of other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have split on the issue. Indochinese states defend Myanmar's sovereignty, while the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia have been more openly critical. With a bit of diplomatic legerdemain, Singapore expressed ASEAN's grave concern to Myanmar, speaking as the Association's chair. Discourse in regional think tanks suggests that a growing number of Southeast Asian officials advocate Myanmar's suspension from ASEAN. Although suspension would push Myanmar even further into the margins of international society, it would be unlikely to unseat the SPDC. Isolation also bears obvious risks; cloning North Korea is not in any ASEAN government's interest.

Most analysts agree that China holds the key to improving the prospects for reform, development, and democracy in Myanmar. Indeed, a change in Chinese policy would increase the likelihood of tougher Indian and ASEAN stances, since a fear of encouraging close Sino-Myanmar ties helps justify their existing approaches. The possibility of embarrassment at the upcoming Olympic games provides a short-term incentive for China to press the SPDC for better governance. A longer-term incentive will be to secure the countries' shared border, which is plagued by narco-trafficking, illegal migration, and ethnic conflict. Finally, China has an incentive to build its credibility as a constructive force in Southeast Asia and beyond. Chinese officials have led a well-documented "charm offensive" in the region, both bilaterally and through multilateral institutions, to build influence. To the extent that ASEAN governments make reform in Myanmar a priority, China can show itself to be a responsible stakeholder in Southeast Asia's future.

In the near term, a coalescence of the policies of regional powers is unlikely. Moreover, strong regional pressure does not guarantee seismic policy shifts in Myanmar. The SPDC's harsh response to the protests--like its 2006 decision to move the national capital to a remote area--testifies to considerable paranoia. Still, the outside world has economic, security, and moral reasons to hold Myanmar to higher standards of governance. The pace and direction of change will depend only marginally on the severity of Western sanctions, which bite but do not cripple the regime. Western governments' ability to identify common objectives and forge cooperation with Asian partners will be more determinative. Ultimately, the development of concerted action by relevant Asian states is likely to be the rate-limiting step in the equation. The saffron revolution suggests that many domestic actors are prepared to assume risks to promote reform if Myanmar's neighbors take a tougher stand and help provide the enabling conditions for change.

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Shorenstein APARC Dispatches are regular bulletins designed exclusively for our friends and supporters. Written by center faculty and scholars, Shorenstein APARC Dispatches deliver timely, succinct analysis on current events and trends in Asia, often discussing their potential implications for business.

David L. Heymann, assistant director-general for communicable diseases and the director general's representative for polio eradication at the World Health Organization (WHO), has joined CISAC as a consulting professor.

Heymann has dedicated much of his career as a medical doctor to investigating and fighting the spread of infectious diseases and mobilizing global efforts to prevent pandemics.

"Dr. Heymann's expertise on threats to health security is a welcome addition to CISAC," Siegfried Hecker, CISAC co-director, said. "He is deeply knowledgeable about the most severe disease-related threats as well as how best to build cooperative international efforts to reduce these threats."

Prior to assuming his current position at WHO, Heymann served as executive director of WHO's Communicable Diseases Cluster, which includes programs on infectious and tropical diseases. In that position, he oversaw the response to Severe Accute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003.

Before joining WHO, Heymann worked for 13 years as a medical epidemiologist in sub-Saharan Africa, on assignment with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. While there, he participated in investigating both the first outbreak of Ebola, in Yambuku (then Zaire) in 1976, and the second outbreak, in Tandala, in 1977. He directed the international response to the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit in 1995. Heymann also spent two years as a medical officer in the WHO smallpox eradication program in India prior to 1976.

Heymann spent two weeks in residence at Stanford last spring, co-hosted by CISAC and FSI, during which he delivered a a talk in FSI's Payne Lecture series. In the lecture, titled "Infectious Diseases across Borders: Public Health Security in the 21st Century," he discussed the collective responsibility to defend public health. He surveyed WHO's efforts to fight emerging and re-emerging infectious disease on every continent.

Among those efforts is a global network of scientists who monitor and collect viruses, sending samples to four WHO collaborating centers for analysis and tracking. This network detected the novel virus H5N1, known as avian flu, in 1997, a disease WHO continues to track closely.

Currently, Heymann said, the H5N1 virus is in the third of six phases in WHO's pandemic alert system, meaning that there have been cases of human infection but "no, or very infrequent, human-to-human spread."

Heymann emphasized, "It is important to prevent the disease at the source." At the same time, WHO is working to "provide universal access to vaccines," which, while not eliminating the disease, "will prevent sickness," he said.

Within weeks of 9/11, Japan dispatched ships to the Indian Ocean to provide fuel and other support to the Western forces waging the war in Afghanistan.

It was the first time since World War II that Japan sent forces abroad to support an overseas military conflict, although in a noncombat role. American policymakers hailed Japan as a loyal ally, willing to put "boots on the ground."

Come Nov. 1, however, the Japanese ships will be heading home.

American officials worry that, after taking steps to shed its postwar pacifism, Japan will now shirk its role as an ally in international security.

But these concerns are alarmist. The Japanese government, even its liberal opposition party, has shown a desire and commitment to contribute to global security.

A renewal of the law authorizing the mission in Afghanistan is now increasingly unlikely, since the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which opposes the measure, won a shocking victory in last summer's elections for the upper house of parliament. While the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is still determined to reauthorize the military role, it faces significant public opposition and a tough road in the parliament.

Some American officials and experts have issued bellicose warnings that not renewing the mission would signal a dangerous retreat from Japan's responsibilities in the world and undermine the security alliance. Others accused DPJ leader Ozawa Ichiro of being irresponsible, even "anti-American."

These remarks are clumsy and unfair. The possibility of Japan's return to a lesser security role is real enough, but its mission in Afghanistan is the wrong test of the country's reliability as an ally.

In reality, the maritime mission has become largely symbolic. As for Mr. Ozawa, if Americans would listen carefully to his arguments, they would find that he seeks to expand, not contract, Japan's global security role.

What the US sees as backtracking on global responsibility is actually something else --opposition, shared by Japan's liberal and conservative parties, to the American decision to invade Iraq. Once carefully buried behind the appearance of alliance solidarity, it is now surfacing.

Ozawa and his party have been unusually open in questioning the Iraq war, characterizing it as a war without clear international justification. According to reliable accounts, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Kazuo privately shares that view, as do others in the LDP.

US officials critical of the DPJ for avoiding a greater security role for Japan should remember that the party supported the antiterrorism law when it was passed in 2001. But they refused to support its renewal later after the Iraq war began. Over time, senior DPJ members say, the mission's original purpose got muddied with military operations in Iraq. Japanese and American officials deny that any diversion took place, but the Pentagon admits that ships engage in multiple missions and there is no way to segregate how fuel is used.

The new version of the law proposed by the LDP explicitly narrows the role of the Navy to supporting antiterrorist interdiction operations, a backhanded acknowledgment that there was no clear separation from the Iraq war.

Ozawa has long advocated a more visible security role for Japan outside its borders, calling on the government to send forces to aid the Gulf War in 1991 and pushing through legislation allowing Japanese participation in UN peacekeeping operations.

Japanese peacekeepers, however, are restricted to noncombat missions. Despite inching toward a larger security role, the government stands by an interpretation of Japan's American-authored antiwar clause in its Constitution that bars the use of force for anything other than to respond to an attack on themselves. But Ozawa has long contended that the constitutional bar should not extend to UN activities.

This month, Ozawa proposed that instead of the maritime force, Japan should send peacekeepers to Afghanistan under the auspices of the UN-authorized international security forces, and to Sudan as well.

Ironically, the ruling conservatives reject that as unconstitutional, arguing it would be an act of collective defense rather than self-defense.

"If Japan is to really be an ally of the US ..." Ozawa wrote, "it should hold its head up high and strive to give proper advice to the US." And in order to do that," he continued, "Japan had to be willing to put itself more on the line by sharing responsibility for peacekeeping, not just sending a few boats out of harm's way."

These are ideas that should be embraced, rather than denounced, by American officials.

Reprinted by permission by the Christian Science Monitor.