Stephen Kotkin: prediction

Transcript context

…I’ve been told that in Siberia it gets colder as you move eastward, not just as you move northward. Is that true? And if so, how has it influenced Siberian history? Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia are dramatically different landscapes, flora and fauna, weather patterns. We think of everything east of the Urals as a coherent unit, more or less. In fact, historically, there have been three units: Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, and the Russian, then Soviet, and now again Russian Far East. They’re quite distinct, as you just mentioned, not just in the weather patterns. The rivers are really the determining factor there. The rivers are colossal in Siberia, and they set the living patterns, the landscape. They’ve shaped the history quite a bit. You know Lake Baikal? The largest freshwater lake in the world and a tremendously important water source. If you’re dependent on the Himalayas for your water, which is one way to describe Asia — that is to say, almost every important river in Asia comes from that mountain range. As those glaciers are reduced in size or potentially vanish as the snow-cap glacial areas of the Himalayas no longer feed the river systems in the same way, the Siberian river systems are, all of a sudden, supremely important as a strategic resource, not just as a basic resource. Lake Baikal becomes a way in which you could imagine that water-starved populations that are really large on the southern side of the mountains, i.e. , China, become much more interested in the water sources of Siberia, ironically, the resource we think least about. Everyone will think about coal and oil and gas and gold and you name it. You could go right through the whole periodic table for Siberia. But it’s the water, over time, that might prove to be among the most and maybe even the most important resource. That could determine the kind of future that you’re poking at for the region as a whole. If we can desalinate water at a reasonable cost, Siberia becomes much more irrelevant?…

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