作者:Alton Frye

烏克蘭對俄羅斯战争取得令人印象深刻的軍事勝利的故事中缺少了一些東西。 這一成功的关键是一個名為和平夥伴關係 (PfP) 的計劃。 

自 1990 年以來,烏克蘭一直是積極的參與者,這一經歷對於基輔利用北約不斷擴大的支持的能力來說是不可或缺的。

PfP 的概念根源於喬治 H.W. 布什,但在克林頓和喬治·W·布什政府期間,它成為一項嚴肅的任务。支持者認為它比正式擴大北約更可取,北約擴大是一個需要擴大條約第 5 條對每個成員國領土完整的保證的過程。

PfP 選項是那些反對北約擴大的人爭論的核心。 由丹尼爾·帕特里克·莫伊尼漢 (DN.Y.) 和約翰·華納 (R-Va.) 領導的兩黨參議員小組贊成與前蘇聯衛星國積極開展安全合作,但認為讓他們成為正式聯盟成員既沒有必要也不明智。 許多其他領導人懷疑北約早期擴張是否明智,認為俄羅斯潛在的複仇主義可以通過合作而不是將聯盟的邊界延伸到莫斯科來阻止。

在重要的方面,對俄羅斯侵略的反應證明了北約擴張的支持者和反對者都是正確的。 烏克蘭與北約的密切關係早在 1991 年就開始了,並在三年後基輔加入 PfP 時呈現出更多的官方關係。

這些不僅僅是名義上的聯繫; 他們促進了烏克蘭軍隊與北約幾個軍事機構之間的實地工作安排。 幾十年來,這種關係通過各種憲章、理事會和委員會不斷發展,特別是 1997 年的獨特夥伴關係憲章。 北約-烏克蘭委員會 (NUC) 在 2009 年的附加協議的支持下監督了範圍廣泛的規劃、培訓、桌面演習以及最重要的行動合作。

20 多年來,北約聯絡處促進了烏克蘭能力的現代化及其與盟軍的互操作性。 這些努力通常是雙邊的,因此烏克蘭軍官和軍隊與鄰國建立了密切的關係。

烏克蘭協助北約在巴爾乾地區的維和行動,包括在科索沃部署重型工程部隊。 它參與了穩定阿富汗局勢的多國努力,提供了寶貴的飛越權,並派遣醫務人員和教官幫助該國苦苦掙扎的軍隊。 烏克蘭軍官是北約在伊拉克訓練任務的一部分,烏克蘭船隻多次部署以支持地中海的反恐和反海盜監視。

這種實際的 PfP 活動網絡意味著,當俄羅斯在 2022 年發動大規模入侵時,烏克蘭準備充分利用北約的支持。

烏克蘭在戰場上的成功在很大程度上也歸功於附近的北約成員國,尤其是波蘭和波羅的海國家,他们準備支持基輔。 他們和其他聯盟夥伴吸收了戰爭造成的大量難民潮,並一直強烈主張向烏克蘭提供更好的武器。

北約東擴改變了鄰里關係。 基輔在加入該聯盟的北約政府中找到了熱心支持者,作為該進程的一部分。 當然,這些國家對俄羅斯侵略的危險最為敏感。 即使他們不是北約成員,他們的興趣也在於支持烏克蘭和阻止俄羅斯未來的侵略前景。 然而,他們的成員身份極大地增強了他們在塑造聯盟戰爭態勢方面的影響力。

如果不注意俄羅斯自身與北約的關係,這種背景將是不完整的。 蘇聯的解體從根本上改變了歐洲的安全格局,因此必須設計一種新的穩定結構。 北約被證明是基石,但它真誠地尋求將俄羅斯包括在內。 1997 年,北約俄羅斯成立法案為兩國關係制定了一套建設性原則,俄羅斯也很快加入了 PfP。

在一個充滿希望的時期,當時的總統德米特里梅德韋傑夫被問及俄羅斯是否真的可能成為北約成員。 他說還沒有提出要約,但“永遠不要說永遠不會。” 俄羅斯強烈反對美國轟炸塞爾維亞,但也有重要的合作,莫斯科為對阿富汗的國際干預運輸非軍事貨物就突顯了這一點。

可悲的是,那些良性聯繫動搖了。 莫斯科認為北約在中歐的安排是敵對的,而不是防禦性的。 俄羅斯被弗拉基米爾·普京的恐懼和野心所俘虜,使自己成為了它本不需要成為的棄兒。

顾震帝整理。02/15/2023

116,148 thoughts on “国际视角(一) 《烏克蘭軍事成功背後不為人知的故事》 ”
  1. The CO2 that is extracted from the water is run through a purification process that uses activated carbon in the form of charred coconut husks, and is then ready to be stored.
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    In a scaled up system, it would be fed into geological CO2 storage. Before the water is released, its acidity is restored to normal levels, making it ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.

    “This discharged water that now has very low carbon concentrations needs to refill it, so it’s just trying to suck CO2 from anywhere, and it sucks it from the atmosphere,” says Halloran. “A simple analogy is that we’re squeezing out a sponge and putting it back.”

    While more tests are needed to understand the full potential of the technology, Halloran admits that it doesn’t “blow direct air capture out the water in terms of the energy costs,” and there are other challenges such as having to remove impurities from the water before releasing it, as well as the potential impact on ecosystems. But, he adds, all carbon capture technologies incur high costs in building plants and infrastructure, and using seawater has one clear advantage: It has a much higher concentration of carbon than air does, “so you should be able to really reduce the capital costs involved in building the plants.”
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    Mitigating impacts
    One major concern with any system that captures carbon from seawater is the impact of the discharged water on marine ecosystems. Guy Hooper, a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, who’s working on this issue at the SeaCURE site, says that low-carbon seawater is released in such small quantities that it is unlikely to have any effect on the marine environment, because it dilutes extremely quickly.

    However, that doesn’t mean that SeaCURE is automatically safe. “To understand how a scaled-up version of SeaCURE might affect the marine environment, we have been conducting experiments to measure how marine organisms respond to low-carbon seawater,” he adds. “Initial results suggest that some marine organisms, such as plankton and mussels, may be affected when exposed to low-carbon seawater.”

    To mitigate potential impacts, the seawater can be “pre-diluted” before releasing it into the marine environment, but Hooper warns that a SeaCURE system should not be deployed near any sensitive marine habitats.

    There is rising interest in carbon capture from seawater — also known as Direct Ocean Capture or DOC — and several startups are operating in the field. Among them is Captura, a spin off from the California Institute of Technology that is working on a pilot project in Hawaii, and Amsterdam-based Brineworks, which says that its method is more cost-effective than air carbon capture.
    According to Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Edinburgh, who’s not involved with SeaCURE, although the initiative appears to be more energy efficient than current air capture pilot tests, a full-scale system will require a supply of renewable energy and permanent storage of CO2 by compressing it to become a liquid and then injecting it into porous rocks deep underground.

    He says the next challenge is for SeaCURE to scale up and “to operate for longer to prove it can capture millions of tons of CO2 each year.”

    But he believes there is huge potential in recapturing carbon from ocean water. “Total carbon in seawater is about 50 times that in the atmosphere, and carbon can be resident in seawater for tens of thousands of years, causing acidification which damages the plankton and coral reef ecosystems. Removing carbon from the ocean is a giant task, but essential if the consequences of climate change are to be controlled,” he says.

  2. UK project trials carbon capture at sea to help tackle climate change
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    The world is betting heavily on carbon capture — a term that refers to various techniques to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently.

    The practice is not free of controversy, with some arguing that carbon capture is expensive, unproven and can serve as a distraction from actually reducing carbon emissions. But it is a fast-growing reality: there are at least 628 carbon capture and storage projects in the pipeline around the world, with a 60% year-on-year increase, according to the latest report from the Global CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) Institute. The market size was just over $3.5 billion in 2024, but is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.
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    Perhaps the most ambitious — and the most expensive — type of carbon capture involves removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are just a few such facilities currently in operation worldwide. Some scientists believe that a better option would be to capture carbon from seawater rather than air, because the ocean is the planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

    In the UK, where the government in 2023 announced up to ?20 billion ($26.7 billion) in funding to support carbon capture, one such project has taken shape near the English Channel. Called SeaCURE, it aims to find out if sea carbon capture actually works, and if it can be competitive with its air counterpart.

    “The reason why sea water holds so much carbon is that when you put CO2 into the water, 99% of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that don’t exchange with the atmosphere,” says Paul Halloran, a professor of Ocean and Climate Science at the University of Exeter, who leads the SeaCURE team.

    “But it also means it’s very straightforward to take that carbon out of the water.”

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    SeaCURE started building a pilot plant about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre on the southern coast of England. Operational for the past few months, it is designed to process 3,000 liters of seawater per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of CO2 per year.

    “We wanted to test the technology in the real environment with real sea water, to identify what problems you hit,” says Halloran, adding that working at a large public aquarium helps because it already has infrastructure to extract seawater and then discharge it back into the ocean.

    The carbon that is naturally dissolved in the seawater can be easily converted to CO2 by slightly increasing the acidity of the water. To make it come out, the water is trickled over a large surface area with air blowing over it. “In that process, we can constrict over 90% of the carbon out of that water,” Halloran says.

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    Whether it’s answering work emails or drafting wedding vows, generative artificial intelligence tools have become a trusty copilot in many people’s lives. But a growing body of research shows that for every problem AI solves, hidden environmental costs are racking up.

    Each word in an AI prompt is broken down into clusters of numbers called “token IDs” and sent to massive data centers — some larger than football fields — powered by coal or natural gas plants. There, stacks of large computers generate responses through dozens of rapid calculations.

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    So, for each prompt you give AI, what’s the damage? To find out, researchers in Germany tested 14 large language model (LLM) AI systems by asking them both free-response and multiple-choice questions. Complex questions produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers.

    In addition, “smarter” LLMs with more reasoning abilities produced up to 50 times more carbon emissions than simpler systems to answer the same question, the study reported.

    “This shows us the tradeoff between energy consumption and the accuracy of model performance,” said Maximilian Dauner, a doctoral student at Hochschule Munchen University of Applied Sciences and first author of the Frontiers in Communication study published Wednesday.

    Typically, these smarter, more energy intensive LLMs have tens of billions more parameters — the biases used for processing token IDs — than smaller, more concise models.

    “You can think of it like a neural network in the brain. The more neuron connections, the more thinking you can do to answer a question,” Dauner said.
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    Complex questions require more energy in part because of the lengthy explanations many AI models are trained to provide, Dauner said. If you ask an AI chatbot to solve an algebra question for you, it may take you through the steps it took to find the answer, he said.

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