The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (33 page)

Dragon Swallows Bear

At the smaller, more regional scale, the future of the Russian Far East is similarly murky.

This region is Russia’s gateway to eastern Asia. By any measure it is vast, resource-laden, and practically empty of people. It covers some 6.2 million square kilometers, about two-thirds the size of the United States and triple the area of Britain, France, and Germany combined. It is rich in oil and natural gas (especially Sakhalin Island and the Sea of Okhotsk), minerals, fish, timber, and a surprising amount of farmland. It holds one-third of Russia’s landmass but, with just 6.6 million people and falling, less than 5% of its population. Averaging barely one person per square kilometer, the Russian Far East has one of the lowest population densities on Earth.

Except for a tiny 20-kilometer border with North Korea, its main southern neighbor, following a 3,000-kilometer border along the Amur River, is the People’s Republic of China. Its three bordering provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning hold more than 100 million people. On the Chinese side of the Amur, population densities average fifteen to thirty times higher than on the Russian side. The city of Harbin alone contains more people than the entire Russian Far East.

This stark contrast does not go unnoticed by Russians. They have long feared the “yellow peril,” a perception that millions of Chinese are poised to flood across the border and swallow up this region. The fear has fomented an intense xenophobia toward Chinese immigrants, something Russian politicians and media often stoke by asserting that millions are illegally entering the country. One individual even suggested that forty million Chinese would sneak into Russia by the year 2020.
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Most migration experts estimate illegal Chinese immigration to be in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. Nor do Russians let their fearmongering get in the way of putting undocumented Chinese migrants to work, for example in the farm fields of the Amur Oblast breadbasket.
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However, the fact remains that this “yellow peril” fear is deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche, something that is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the history of this region.

Much of what is now the Russian Far East actually belonged to China until 1860. Ethnic Russians began arriving in significant numbers only in the 1930s, after Soviet planners closed the border and set about turning the region into a deeply subsidized supplier of raw materials for the centralized Soviet economy and a protective military fortress to the outside world. The Soviet arms buildup there deeply troubled China, Japan, and South Korea. Tensions with China scraped bottom in the 1960s with a series of border skirmishes, including a bloody clash for Damansky Island on the Ussuri River, in 1969.
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Attempts to link the economies of European Russia with Asian Russia never made much sense. The only real transportation link between them was (and is) the Trans-Siberian Railroad, with 9,300 kilometers separating Vladivostok from Moscow. By the 1980s the Soviet Union was ready to abandon the fortress resource colony model for the more sensible idea of opening up the Russian Far East to Asian Pacific trade. Mikhail Gorbachev gave a famous speech in Vladivostok in 1986 that called for the region’s deep subsidies from Moscow to be scrapped and Russia’s eastern flank opened up. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those subsidies did indeed go away. So also did much of the military defense spending that supported up to 40% of the jobs in this region. The place descended into deep economic malaise and people began to leave.

At its peak population in 1991, the Russian Far East contained a hair over eight million people. Today its population is 20% smaller and will likely shrink further. More detached than ever from distant European Russia, this region struggles to reconcile its dire and obvious need to glom economically on to China, South Korea, and Japan with its deep xenophobic fear of being swallowed up by China. It is the poorest, least healthy, most economically strapped region in all of Russia. Despite its oil and gas riches, electricity is spotty and expensive. A corrupt bureaucracy and perverse tax system dissuade foreign investment. Its resource-hungry neighbors China, Japan, and South Korea, while more than happy to buy raw materials from the region, hesitate to pour badly needed capital into it. Repeated plans from Moscow to develop and improve the region’s quality of life have failed. However, Russia is Heilongjiang’s largest trading partner, and as of 2008 the province had concluded more than two thousand collaborative projects there worth about USD $2.9 billion. Trade between China and Russia’s Primorsky Territory was over USD $4.1 billion in 2009.
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What does the future hold for the Russian Far East? Politically, the relationship between Beijing and Moscow is better than it has ever been; and all of the old border disputes are now settled (Damansky Island is now Zhenbao Island). Even the huge demographic contrast does not predicate a territorial takeover, a political act. But over the long run, given its geographic remoteness and thinning economic ties to the west, the pressures for the Russian Far East to integrate with eastern Asia are obvious. Its 3,000-kilometer border with China is roughly triple its physical distance from Moscow. This region has a huge natural resource base, shrinking labor pool, and dire need for capital investment. Neighboring China has a huge resource demand, bottomless labor pool, and is well on track to become the world’s biggest economy in 2050. Somehow, over the long run, these two things must converge.

A NAFTA-like free economic zone in this part of the world seems the most obvious outcome. Indeed, there are plenty of signs that the Russian government strongly desires this direction, for example, through consistently strengthening its ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) trade bloc including regular ASEAN-Russia summits since 2005, and a pending petition for membership in the East Asia Summit. In 2012 Russia will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vladivostok. However the far-out possibility of military seizure or outright sale—as Russia did long ago with nearby Alaska—cannot be ruled out. Just as I once learned in school about the U.S. Alaska Purchase of 1867, perhaps one day schoolchildren in Beijing and Moscow will be reading about the Yuandong Purchase of 2044. If either of these things happens, the economic opening of the Russian Far East, spurred by the demand of Asian markets for its abundant natural resources, would not be far behind.

Blue Oil

Demographic models tell us that billions of new people are coming around the hot, dry southern latitudes of our planet, places water-stressed today that will be even more stressed in the future. With a few notable exceptions the water-rich North, in contrast, is expected to become even wetter. Given this obvious mismatch, might northern countries one day sell their water to southern ones?

The idea is not crazy. International bulk water sales have been popping up elsewhere, for example from Lesotho to South Africa and from Turkey to Israel. Indeed, Turkey built a $150-million water export facility at the mouth of the Manavgat River to sell water to regional buyers by tanker.
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A French company is considering an underground canal to send Rhône River water from France to Spain.

The most ambitious example of all is in China, where a massive, decades-long reengineering of its river networks to shunt water from its wet south to the parched north is now under way. This “South-to-North Water Diversion” megaproject will link together four major drainage basins and build three long canals running through the eastern, central, and western parts of the country. Its costs will include at least USD $62 billion—more than three times the cost of China’s Three Gorges Dam—the relocation of three hundred thousand people, and many negative environmental impacts. When finished, the amount of water artificially transferred from south to north each year will total more than half of all water consumption in California.
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Might another megaproject emerge to redirect water from north to south, say from Canada to the United States, or from Russia to the dry steppes of central Asia? There are certainly some precedents, and not just the one going on now in China. The last century saw the construction of many major engineering projects in the Soviet Union and North America, including two huge schemes to transfer water from one drainage basin to another: Canada’s James Bay Project for hydropower, and California’s State Water Project, a massive system of canals, reservoirs, and pumping stations to divert water from the northern to southern ends of the state.

Most audacious of all were two megaprojects designed in the 1960s but never built. Both proposed the massive use of dams, canals, and pumping stations to replumb the hydrology of the North American continent and shunt its water from north to south. They were the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), proposed by the Ralph M. Parsons engineering company in Pasadena, California (now Parsons Corporation); and the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal, proposed by a Canadian engineer named Tom Kierans.

NAWAPA was colossal in scale. It proposed redirecting north-flowing rivers headed to Alaska and northern Canada into the Rocky Mountain Trench—thus forming a giant inland sea—then pumping the water south through connections linking all of the major drainage basins of western North America and the Great Lakes. Flows in the Yukon, Peace, and other distant northern rivers could end up in the Great Lakes, California, or Mexico.

NAWAPA’s price tag and ecological damages were immense. Reviled by environmental groups and most Canadians, and with an estimated cost of $100 to $300 billion in 1960s dollars,
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this grandiose plan did better at attracting media attention than financial backing. But NAWAPA firmly planted the idea of massive north-south water transfers in the minds of generations of engineers and politicians. A half-century later, it continues to inspire revulsion, awe, and smaller spin-off project concepts.

The second immense north-south water scheme of the 1960s, the GRAND Canal, continues to have its advocates today. Its idea is to build a dike across James Bay (the large cove at the southern end of Hudson Bay, see map on p. ix), thus retaining runoff from this lowland’s many north-flowing rivers prior to their entering the ocean. The enclosed part of James Bay would become a giant freshwater lake, and its water then pumped back south again toward Lake Huron.

The GRAND Canal plan’s inventor, Tom Kierans, now in his nineties, remains its tireless proponent. He points out that the only place the project would deprive of water is Hudson Bay, a brackish sea overwhelmed by jellyfish. Every now and then the plan is resurrected by Canadian politicians.
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But with a current estimated cost of USD $175 billion—not to mention many environmental impacts and a local climate change over the region
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—its revival seems distant, at least for now.

Smaller projects in the same area, like the very recently proposed “Northern Waters Complex” concept
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(see maps on pp. viii-xi), could realistically win support sooner. This particular plan is to impound seasonal floodwater from three north-flowing rivers, temporarily inundating about eleven hundred square kilometers of land before pumping it south again. According to its proponents, the Northern Waters Complex would cost only USD $15 billion, could be finished by 2022, and would generate $2 billion annually in hydropower and perhaps another $20 billion annually in water sales. With economic incentives like these, the great sucking sound from the United States could start sounding better to many Canadians.

Giant water projects cause significant environmental damage and are no longer popular in either the United States or Canada. In fact, the American trend today is to remove dams, not build them. But smaller-scale water exports can happen with pipelines, tanker ships, and bottling plants. The Great Lakes, fronted and shared by both countries, can be replenished at one end and decanted from another, for example at the Chicago Diversion. In his book
The Great Lakes Water Wars,
author Peter Annin describes how Great Lakes governors and premiers—fearing the specter of long, greedy straws coming at them from the American Southwest—are engaged in a flurry of cooperative lawmaking, hoping to barricade themselves against future water diversions out of the region.

An open question—one feared by many environmentalists—is whether Canada could in fact become obligated to sell bulk water to the United States and Mexico under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unlike oil, the much more controversial issue of water was deliberately left unaddressed during the writing and ratification of this treaty. Legal scholars point out that if even one province, say Quebec, were to start selling bulk water to the United States, it could establish legal precedent, thus committing Canadian water providers to sell to U.S. or Mexican customers as well as their own. In such a world, North America would grow accustomed to buying not only oil, but also water, from its northernmost country.

Most Canadians oppose the idea of becoming water purveyors to the United States, although their provincial governments are generally more open to the idea. Alongside environmental concerns, Canada suffers water shortages of its own. A water-rich country on paper, most of its uncommitted surplus lies in the far north, flowing over thinly populated permafrost to the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay. The south-central prairies are prone to drought, with spotty rainfall and heavy reliance on a few long, oversubscribed rivers fed by distant melting snow and glaciers. If any future megaprojects arise to divert water from northern Canada to the United States, a cut will likely go to southern Canada.

One place where we could well see the resurrection of a massive twentieth-century water-transfer idea by 2050 is in Russia. Siberia’s mighty rivers, flowing untouched to the Arctic Ocean, have long been contemplated as a potential water source for the dry steppes and deserts of central Asia. In the 1870s, tsarist engineers noted the favorable, if long, topographic gateway linking wet western Siberia with the Aral-Caspian lowland, in what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. By the 1940s the Soviet engineer M. M. Davydov had drawn up a grand plan for north-south water transfers out of western Siberia, complete with canals, pumping stations, and the creation of a giant inland lake that would have inundated the same area that is plastered in oil and gas wells today.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s the USSR studied, revised, and finalized a scaled-down version of Davydov’s plan. The idea was to tap Siberia’s mighty Ob’, Irtysh, and Yenisei rivers using a 2,544-kilometer-long canal to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea (see map on page xii). Diversion of the Aral’s feeder rivers was already careening the region toward the desiccated disaster it is today. By 1985 the canal’s route had been surveyed and the first work crews arrived in Siberia to commence the “project of the century,” known by then as “Sibaral” (short for Siberia to Aral Sea Canal).
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But then, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, abruptly halted the project in 1986, citing a need for further study of Sibaral’s environmental and economic impacts. Nothing further happened and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the project, after decades of planning, was abandoned.

Today, Sibaral continues to rear up from the grave with surprising regularity. The megaproject is more politically awkward than before because six sovereign countries—Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—are now involved instead of one. However, all five former Soviet republics want Sibaral to happen and continue to clamor for it.

Support for this in Russia is mixed. In 2002 Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging the plan’s revival, citing destabilization of Central Asia over water shortages and the specter of refugees pouring across the Russian border. Russia’s deputy minister of natural resources also wrote support for the plan.
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By 2004 Luzhkov was stumping the project in Kazakhstan; and the director of Soyuzvodproject, a government water agency, said they were assembling archived project materials from more than three hundred institutes in order to revisit and revise the old plans. Most Russian scientists are opposed to Sibaral but some note that reducing river runoff to the Arctic Ocean could slightly mitigate the anticipated weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation described earlier in this chapter.
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Modeling studies are needed to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but if correct, Sibaral could conceivably win the support of environmental groups worried more about global climate change than ecological damages in Siberia.

It remains to be seen if China’s ongoing South-to-North Water Diversion will rekindle humanity’s past passion for massive water projects. Given the enormous obstacles—financial, environmental, and political—I am skeptical that any of these north-to-south water transfer megaprojects will materialize by 2050. But of the ones described here, Sibaral is the most developed. Central Asia is getting very, very dry, and its population is growing. Unlike the North American schemes, something about this project refuses to die. Despite serious likely environmental damages, it really could happen one day.

Regardless of whatever water engineering schemes are or are not undertaken by 2050, one thing remains clear. When it comes to water, the NORCs will be the envy of the world.