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 Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 12:36 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
President Obama must say no to farmers
'Farmers were the political allies of the President, so nothing could interrupt the subsidy bonanza'
Agromenes Countryside crusader
Jan. 28/09
| Quote: | ... The indications are ominous. Agricultural exporting has long been an important factor in US economic life. Huge private companies such as ConAgra, Archer Daniels and Cargill dominate the food markets of the world. Yet, most people are unaware of the significant role that farming plays in the American balance of payments. Nor do they know how closely aligned are the politicians and the farm lobby in successive administrations. Together, they have successfully blamed the EU for protectionism, as they themselves run a much more extensive agricultural support system. A panoply of taxes and duties, subsidies and exclusions keep imports out of their markets and support their exports in ours. The Farm Bill is the apotheosis of pork-barrel politics. Well-briefed and well-breeched lobbyists descend upon Washington pressing for ever-greater handouts to the industry and ever-stronger protection from imports.
Under George W. Bush, those calls were answered more generously than ever before. In addition to the usual agricultural subsidies, and fortified by the appeal to national security, those who wanted to grow energy rather than food were richly rewarded. As a result, a huge American biofuels inudstry has burgeoned - landing subsidized oil in Europe at a price that undercut all our home production. At the same time, the US excluded much of the far cheaper ethanol and diesel exported from Brazil. Farmers from the corn belt were the political alies of the President, and nothing was allowed to interrupt the subsidy bonanza. Their votes were necessary to prop up remaining Republican electoral hopes.
We might have expected President Obama to steer a different course. His concern about climate change should have led him to recognise the unsustainability of biofuels produced in Iowa. His support for the poor in Africa should have alerted him to the damage done to indigenous agriculture by subsidy in the US and EU. That recession should have ensured that he would look to cut the wasteful, politically motivated, expenditure of his predecessor. All logic would point to radical reform - forcing reciprocal action in the EU.
Sadly, we will get none of it. Already, the new Secretary for Agriculture has been appointed. He is from Iowa - a pork-barrel state in receipt of huge amounts of agricultural subsidies. Secretary Vilsack fervently backs the biofuels industry for which President Obama was forced to declare his continued support during the election. So, the whole grisly dance could begin again. The US farmers pushing for yet more support; the administration demonising Europe; the EU demanding equal cuts across the board; British politicians, not knowing about the huge US subsidies, siding with the US; the EU forced to give way; yet more EU markets and jobs lost to the subsidised American industry. ... (-- p. 36) |
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| Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 2:21 pm Post subject: |
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Bet the house that Red China's going green.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded
Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How It Can Renew America
Hardcover
By Thomas L. Friedman
| Quote: | What China's leaders apparently realized from that tenth Five-Year Plan - their first serious foray into green policy - was that taking China from Communism to capitalism was actually easier than trying to take it from dirty capitalism to clean capitalism. Because going from Communism to state-directed capitalism, while by no means easy, involved taking the lid off a people who were yearining to be entrepreneurial, wildcatting capitalists. It involved unleashing something long suppressed in the Chinese culture - and the results of all that unleashed energy are apparent everywhere.
But going from Dirty GDPism to Green GDPism is about restraining and redirecting all that natural energy - and to do that effectively requires a system with some judicial independence, so that courts can discipline government-owned factories and power plants. It requires a freer press that can report on polluters without restraint, even if they are government-owned businesses. It requires more transparent laws and regulations, so citizen-activists know their rights and can feel free to confront polluters, no matter how powerful. And most of all, it requires growth based on sustainable energy productivity - not growth based on dirty energy productivity.
Although china's leadership underestimated how hard it would be to change the engine on their bus from a dirty combustion engine going at full throttle to a hybrid, here's what's interesting: They have not backed off. "There were more than a few signs in 2007 and 2008 that they've actually decided to double their green bets - and that is going to make the early-twenty-first century politically very interesting in China. (From Can Red China Become Green China?, p. 353) |
| Quote: | | Eleven years to fully connect one wind farm. I don't think that timetable is going to cut it in a world where every two weeks China opens new coal-fired power plants big enough to serve all the households in my hometown of Minneapolis. Yes, you say, it's relatively easy to build dirty coal plants - and you are right. It's much more difficult to build power plants that are clean and superefficient. Right now China is mainly putting up dirty ones. But soon they will be putting up wind farms, solar facilities, and nuclear plants with the same relentless efficiency. You can bet your house on it. It will take time, but they will eventually try to outgreen us. They'll have to, or they won't be able to breathe. (-- p. 393) |
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| Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:34 am Post subject: |
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Six Degrees
Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Paperback
By Mark Lynas
| Quote: | It should now be clear that the business as usual trend (which we are currently on, irrespective of Kyoto) yields a high chance of reaching four, five and even six degrees of warming by 2100. Add in all of the uncertainties, and it should be abundantly clear that a further major growth in emissions takes the world into a gambling game in which the odds are stacked against us. And the higher emissions rise, the worse the odds get. Heads - global warming wins, tails - we lose. As one wag has pointed out, this is like playing Russian roulette with a Luger rather than a revolver. One bullet, one chamber - and we're pulling the trigger.
A reality check
Many books on global warming end with some rather platitudinous sentences about renewable energy, as if the authors believe - rather like Disney's Blue Fairy - that simply wishing for something and believing in it is enough to make it come true. My feeling is that if it were that easy to move away from fossil fuels, we would have done so already, or at least be heading rapidly in the right direction. ...
... Fossil fuel energy has come to occupy a central role in almost every aspect of modern life, from transport to home heating, and accounts for 80 per cent of our energy supply. Indeed, our civilisation is defined by energy use more than by any other aspect of its nature: without massive inputs of energy, society would quickly grind to a halt, and billions would starve.
This was illustrated for me - in almost a farcical way - by the fuel protests which took place across the UK in autumn 2000, which led to petrol and diesel shortages for at most a couple of weeks, but in the process almost brought the country to its knees. ... (From Choosing Our Future, pgs. 258-259) |
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 11:35 am Post subject: |
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From Gambling Scientists:
Irish Times
Private enterprise cannot tackle world's problems.
The ideological choice is not between unbridled capitalism or an overbearing, rapacious state. Successful governance, particularly for major, global problems, needs a mixture of both.
By Tony Kinsella
Oct. 28/06
| Quote: | Next month, the embryo of our new world order - China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the U.S. - will effectively hand over a cheque for five billion euros to build a 20,000-tonne experiment at Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France. A further five billion euros will follow to operate the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) over the next 20 years.
If Iter works, we will have managed to harnass nuclear fusion, the energy source of our sun, offering abundant electricity with almost no radioactive waste, no carbon emissions, and no weapons material - and all from seawater. Scientists have been working on nuclear fusion since the 1940s. By the mid-1980s they knew they needed a bigger experimental 'tokamak" reactor and that given the costs, our world could only afford to build one of them. They finished its design in 2001.
It has taken 30 governments a mere five years to agree on the budget, the distribution of task and costs, and location.
Iter remains a scientific and engineering gamble - a 10-billion-euros bet. If it works we can look forward to abundant and sustainable electricity by the middle of the century, with significant quantities of hydrogen for fuel cells as a by-product.
It is an educated, even indispensable gamble. A wager only governments can afford. No private corporation, however wealthy, could convince its shareholders to invest two billion euros a year for 20 years in something that might or might not work. (-- p. 15) |
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