Profile Q&A with Cleo by the American Society of Journalists and Authors

The American Society of Journalists and Authors profiled Cleo in the ASJA Monthly, asking her about career highlights, low points, and where to get a good pickle sandwich (or something). You can read it here.

Global Warring WINS Another (!!) Major Award :) :) :)

Global Warring has WON the Mavis Gallant Non-Fiction Book Prize :) 
The Jury said Global Warring was: "required reading for political thinkers, environmentalists, and anyone curious about how the future is rapidly unfolding." For more, click here.

Article: (Huffington Post) Cleo Paskal writes on 'Why the West Is Losing the Pacific to China, the Arab League, and Just About Everyone Else'

Cleo Paskal's latest Huffington Post blog entry is called: Why the West Is Losing the Pacific to China, the Arab League, and Just About Everyone Else. An excerpt: 

Nuku'alofa, Kingdom of Tonga. The small South Pacific country of the Kingdom of Tonga has been busy. In a two-week period around the start of September, separate military delegations from the US, New Zealand, Australia, UK,  and the UN stopped by for a visit. The French sent a frigate and a military aircraft. China sent two warships.

Why all this activity in a country of 100,000? There is real concern that the West may be losing critical influence in the Pacific, while others such as China, and even the Arab League, are dramatically extending their reach. The implications are global, and may already have affected UN Security Council voting. It wasn't always this way. The Pacific is the West's to lose.

For more, click here. 

Video: Cleo Paskal on C-Span from the National Press Club, Washington, DC

Cleo Paskal talks to C-Span's Book show about Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map. Topics include the investment by China in ice-breakers. She was interviewed at the 33rd Annual National Press Club Book Fair and Authors' Night, a fundraiser for the Eric Friedheim National Journalism Library and The SEED Foundation held Tuesday, November 9, 2010. To see the interview, click here (it won't embed :) )

Article by Andrew Krystal in the Nova Scotia Business Journal on Cleo Paskal's concept of Nationalistic Capitalism

Andrew Krystal, in his in-depth column in the Nova Scotia Business Journal, explores the implications of nationalistic capitalism. An excerpt:


According to Cleo Paskal, the author of “Global Warring”, nationalistic capitalism, as practiced by China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), allows the Chinese state to use corporations in its sphere of influence to attain long-term strategic goals, like resource acquisition. These corporations appear, on the surface, to be like any other big multi-national. But they’re not. Says Cleo Paskal: “In China, the CCP calls the shots when it comes to who does business and how. The businesses should ideally make money, but always within the context of strengthening what the CCP deems in the best interest of China, and of itself.” 


She continues: “Conversely, in the West, one of the post-Cold war challenges we face is the marked divergence of companies from national agendas. Increasingly, it seems as though businesses are caught up in short-term thinking. The privatization of critical national industries [Britain is kicking itself over the sell-off of North Sea oil, Paskal points out] contrasts markedly with the CCP approach in which China obtains assets and then uses them for national leverage.”


To read more, click here. 

Interview with Cleo Paskal -- in Russian!

No, Cleo doesn't speak Russian. She is still working on English (according to some editors). Someone was kind enough to translate. You can see it by clicking here.

Report on Cleo Paskal's talk at Concordia University in The Concordian

Renee Giblin wrote a report for The Concordian on about Cleo Paskal's talk at David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at the John Molson School of Business. Giblin concludes:


The message Paskal sent last week was clear: with a changing climate comes changing politics. With a shift in political power already afoot, nations stand to be severely affected if they neglect to evolve along with the physical environment that surrounds them.


To read more, click here.

Alan Hustak Reviews Global Warring and Profiles Cleo Paskal for The Metropolitian

Eminent writer Alan Hustak reviews Global Warring and profiles Cleo Paskal for The Metropolitian. It begins:


Everyone in the non-stop debate on climate change has an opinion, but how much consideration has been given to the potential  seismic shift  in international diplomacy  that can be attributed  to  global warming?  What happens to nation states, to the realignment of political boundaries, and to shifting corporate interests as we become even more dependent on fossil fuels, and as forests disappear, farmland is exhausted and sources of fresh water evaporate?   This month, Veteran Quebec journalist  



Cleo Paskal  raises the ante in the debate with  her book, Global Warring, which makes the  powerful argument that the map of the world as we know it  is about to be redrawn as resource rich countries try to protect their natural sources of energy  and others  aggressively  try to secure new ones.... 




To read more, click here. 

Jerry Cope at the Huffington Post quotes Cleo Paskal in article on the DoD Quadrennial Defense Review

Jerry Cope, in a post highlighting the importance of climate change in the just released  U.S. Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review, mentions Global Warring and quotes Cleo Paskal. An excerpt from Cleo's quote:


In the same way our physical infrastructure isn't taking into account environmental change, our legal infrastructure is not designed to take into account environmental change. A lot of our laws, treaties and agreements assume the environment is a constant, but it is becoming a variable. 


To read more, click here.

Review of Global Warring by Martin Walker on UPI

Martin Walker, UPI Editor Emeritus and Senior Director of A. T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, wrote a great review of Global Warring for UPI that brings to the fore some of the books key points. In it he also writes:


Paskal, a Canadian who is a fellow of London's prestigious Chatham House think tank and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, has been a pioneering scholar of the new terrain where climate change confronts national security, where geopolitics, geoeconomics and global warming all collide.


To read more, click here.

Review of Global Warring by Tom Spencer in EurActiv

Tom Spencer, the former President of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights and Defence Policy, and current Executive Director of the European Centre for Public Affairs, just wrote a feature on Europe that includes a review of Global Warring. An excerpt:

Europe's foreign policy elites might like to pick up Cleo Paskal's 'Global Warring: How Environmental Economic and Political Crises will redraw the world map'. Cleo is a Canadian academic and journalist, based at Chatham House in London, married to a Dane, who spends a substantial time each year in India. She writes with the power of a journalist underpinned by the research habits of an academic.

She has for years contributed learned articles on how rising sea levels may change international borders with major implications. Her latest book arrives with the clarity and importance of the crack of doom. Her first message, that I would want every European policymaker to understand, undercuts the comfortable belief that disasters caused by environmental change happen to poor people, in poor countries far away and that our main involvement is to offer gracious aid to the under-privileged.

She shows conclusively that the reality for the developed world is closer to Katrina on steroids. Our obsession with short-term profit and technological complexity means that we are going to be there in the front line when the yoghurt hits the fan. Katrina was a man-made disaster brought about by the corruption of the relationship between the US Army Corps of Engineers and Congress ever keen to create pork-barrel employment projects, regardless of their environmental consequences.

She points out that the great heat wave of 2003 killed 30,000 people in Europe. Many of the oil and natural gas pipelines on which Europe depends run across Russian permafrost which is melting. We persist in building long-term infrastructure without regard to climate change. The French now regularly have to turn off their nuclear power stations in hot weather for lack of cooling water.

Europe is only beginning to come to terms with the amount of infrastructure re-design that will be necessary to keep its civilisation habitable. In essence her message is that climate change, as a sub-set of environmental change, has the whole of humanity wrapped in its coils.

She is equally good on the real implications for the developing world. Forced environmental migration is going to be a South-South problem, not one that can be realistically framed in terms of the West's historic responsibility. If forty million Bangladeshis flee from cataclysmic flooding in their homeland, they are going to be a problem for India and Burma. There is no way that Europe, America or Japan are going to accept that number of refugees. The same logic applies to environmental migration from Africa or the Middle East.

Cleo and I agree on the significance of climate change and the military, particularly in the context of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers which could end up with the loss of glacial summer melt water in the great rivers of Asia simultaneously destabilising Pakistan, India and China. Some issues are so big that nobody wants to talk about them.

To read more, click here.

Interview with Cleo on the Huffington Post

Jerry Cope writes in the Huffington Post about climate change and security in Copenhagen, and interviews Cleo on some specifics. Sample Q&A:

Jerry Cope: You seem to be quit clear that the concerns should be domestic as well as international.

Cleo: It's not a complete assessment and if anything contains the words climate change as opposed to environment change you know it's not a complete assessment. Climate change will feed into other environmental changes. If you are assessing climate change but not what the US Army Corps of Engineers is doing to your coastline you are not getting a complete picture.

Click here to read more...

CalicutNet Interview with Cleo

One of the questions:

Rajesh Kumar Edacheri: Do you think climate change will worsen poverty, political instability and regional conflicts?

Cleo: It can, but it is not inevitable. With thought, effort and will we can get through this. We have to.

Think of a factory on the coast of Kerala. If it continues as usual, it might first have problems with erosion affecting its foundation; then power lines down the coast might fall over, affecting its electrical supply; then the building itself may flood. And flood again. It will face problem after problem until it is too much and it collapses.

Alternatively, it can defend itself, perhaps with anti-erosion techniques; can put in its own renewable energy supply, covering the cost of installation by selling off the excess energy it generates; and then become highly profitable as it develops and sells a new water purification system.

Business usual is not going to work anymore. But we all are in a position to turn that challenge into an opportunity and to create more stability and security for ourselves, our neighbors, our communities and our countries, and the world. We have to. The cost of failure is unimaginable.

Click to read more....