Re-engage! America and the World After Bush

Fun facts: How big is the US national debt? Who holds it?

When I was writing Re-engage! last year, I got to do a lot of research about issues and areas I'd never written about much before.  One was the macroeconomics of the relationship between the US and the rest of the world (for Chapter 6 of the book.)  It's amazing how much data and information you can find, quite easily, on Web these days.

So if you go to this page on the US Treasury Dept.'s "Treasury Direct" website, you can then click through to the most up-to-date information available about the total level of the US public (national) debt.  I just downloaded the PDF file of the most recent of the monthly reports posted there-- the one for February 2008.  And I learned that the total amount of US federal government debt that's held by the public on Feb. 29 was $5,259,804 million. That is, $5.26 trillion.

Here is a graph, made from 2007 White House budget numbers, that shows the trend in national debt levels over time, since 1950.

And which other countries hold the current US debt?  This page, on the U.S. Treasury's main website, is automatically updated with the latest info on who the "Major Foreign Holders" of Treasury securities are.  The latest figures there right now are for the end of December 2007.  Non-US entities-- and I am not sure if this includes "sovereign wealth funds" and other quasi-non-governmental entities and non-governmental entities, as well as central banks-- are recorded as owning a total of $2.354 trillion of our debt on December 31, 2007, up from $2.103 trn a year earlier. 

Of the December 31, 2007 holdings, the top five foreign holders were:

1. Japan: $581.2 billion ($622.9 bn in Dec. '06)
2. Chine: $477.6 billion ($396.9 bn in Dec. '06)
3. United Kingdom: $157.4 bn ($92.6 bn in Dec. '06)
4. "Oil exporters"*:  $137.9 bn ($110.2 bn in Dec. '06)
5. Brazil: $129.9 bn ($52.1 bn in Dec. '06)

*Oil exporters include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,     Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.

I guess for me, the big surprises there are the steep increases in US Debt holdings by the U.K. and Brazil.  It looks as if Brazil must have had a huge trade surplus with the US in 2007!

Reflections on the new urgency of climate change

I always find that when I have to write something I learn a lot during the process!  When I was writing Re-engage!, one of the things I learned most about was the newly pivotal role that climate issues are coming to play in world politics.  When I was writing Chapter Five of the book, which is the one on climate change, I had to do a lot of catch-up learning about the issue! 

Fortunately I had a couple of great personal resources I was able to draw on.  One was my son, Tarek Rached, who has been working on environmental engineering issues (and related policy issues) for a number of years now.  Another was a long-time friend, Ruth Greenspan Bell, who has worked on environmental policy issues for many years now-- first as a staff lawyer with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and then as a project leader with the non-government group Resources For the Future. Of course, as I state in the Preface to the book, neither of those two nor any of the other people I consulted as I completed the writing of the book to definitely a very crazy schedule can be held responsible for the way I eventually phrased things.

I also did a lot of book-based and online research on the topic.  If you go to this web-page I've created, you can find some of the resources that I found most helpful.  (Sorry, that web-page still has a few small editing glitches in it right now.  I'll try to fix them as soon as I can.) You will find other identified in the footnotes to Chapter 5 itself.

One of the most informative, useful, and just beautiful of all of these is the World Wildlife Organization's "Living Planet Report 2006", which you can find in English as a 4.5 MB PDF file here. I think the paper version of that  book would make a great gift, or a great resource for any  library!

Anyway, I had to finish the first complete draft of the book back in September 2007, but I have kept thinking a lot about the new importance of climate change in international politics ever since then. At the end of December I wrote a suitably end-of-year-ish op-ed on the topic for The Christian Science Monitor. It appeared under the title: America: Step up on climate change: Global warming is the nuclear issue of our age.

In it, I argued,

Our per capita emissions rate ... is more than twice that of the advanced economies of Japan or the European Union, more than five times that of China, and 20 times India's. Clearly, as we ask other countries to cut back their emissions, we should also be ready to credibly promise that we will be making deep reductions of our own.

America's environmental policy also matters deeply because climate change has become such a critical issue in world affairs. The world's 6 billion non-Americans, and their governments, will be carefully monitoring whether Washington participates fully in the technological and lifestyle transformation that will be required to reduce emissions in the years ahead – and whether we deal fairly with other countries as we do so.

And I concluded the piece with this:

Climate change now looks set to be the same kind of touchstone issue in global politics that nuclear weapons has been since 1945. As with nuclear weapons, the threats posed by climate change know no national boundaries. They could, in some circumstances, threaten all of human life. As with nuclear weapons, good-faith international cooperation is a must if the climate problem is to be brought under control.

The people of the rest of today's richly interconnected world will be monitoring Washington's performance carefully. How will Americans and our leaders respond?          

After the piece appeared, I wondered if perhaps my language there was too apocalyptic, and perhaps even unhelpfully so.  But every time I've returned to thinking hard about the issue I've concluded it was not-- except, perhaps, that in line with the advice I offered in Chapter 1 of the book I should not have used the language of "threats" there but rather, the language of ""challenges."

What does anyone else think about this? Was my language too apocalyptic?